Appendix I

30-Day Shipped-to-Paid Plan

A sequence of the book’s tests. It guarantees a disciplined set of commercial experiments. It does not guarantee a customer or revenue, and any plan that does should be treated with the skepticism the book has recommended for every other claim.

The plan assumes a shipped product and weak or zero purchase evidence. Adjust the entry point using Appendix A: if you already have observed evidence for a step, do not repeat it.

Days 1 to 3: Diagnose. Complete Appendix A honestly. Write two lists: evidence the product works, and evidence the business works. No item appears on both without justification. Identify the first failure state you cannot support with observed behavior. Everything that follows targets that state.

Days 4 to 8: Buyer and paid problem. Rewrite the target customer as observable buying conditions rather than a persona. Complete Appendix B for one problem. Identify ten to fifteen reachable people who plausibly own the consequence. Do not build anything.

Days 9 to 15: Conversations that can change a belief. Use Appendix H to rank the list. Hold the top six to ten conversations, asking about current behavior and cost, not opinion. For each, complete the sentence in Appendix H before and record the result after. Stop the plan here and revise the buyer definition if fewer than three conversations produce an observable paid problem.

Days 16 to 20: Offer, price, and the skeptical case. From the conversations, define the smallest bounded outcome a buyer could evaluate and purchase. Write the offer without naming a feature unless needed. Attach a price and a commitment ask. Run Appendix E against it and fix the variable it names. Run Appendix C against any feature you are tempted to build first; build it only if it has Build Permission.

Days 21 to 27: Create the purchase moment. Return to the three to five highest-scoring buyers with the specific offer, the price, a start date, and a clear ask. Ask for a decision. Record every response in the Appendix F format, including the stated reason for every no and every deferral.

Days 28 to 30: Compare and decide. If anyone paid, run Appendix G with the payer and the near-misses and write the delta as a hypothesis. If nobody paid, code the refusals as in Chapter 21, identify the pattern, and decide which single variable to change: buyer, problem, offer, price, trust, path, or timing. Write the next thirty-day test. Do not automate anything yet.

What the plan produces. Thirty days from now you will know which failure state the business is in, who the buyer is in observable terms, what one bounded offer at one price looked like to real buyers, and what those buyers did when asked to decide. That is more commercial evidence than most shipped products have accumulated in a year. It may include a customer. Its purpose is to make sure that whether it does or not, you know why.