The map, and your first move

Time: ~30 minutes reading, then a task that fits inside your week.

You asked nine questions — users, channels, analytics, SEO, content, and "where do I start?". Good news: the last one has a known answer, and once you see the map, the other eight fall into an order. This lesson gives you the map and your first move for Kobun. Nothing else. The rest of the course works through the map one piece at a time.

The map: a funnel

Every SaaS user, everywhere, goes through the same five steps. They hear you exist (awareness), they visit your site (interest), they sign up, they reach the moment the product becomes useful to them — marketers call this activation (the first genuinely useful moment, e.g. a user publishes their first page through Kobun) — and eventually they pay.

People leak out at every step. A thousand people can hear about Kobun, thirty visit, three sign up, one activates. That leaky pipe is called the

funnel (wide at the top, narrow at the bottom), and it's the whole map. Every marketing question you listed lives at one spot on it:

• "How do I get users?" and "what channels are there?" → the awareness end.
• "How do I convert them?" → interest → signup.
• "How do I track what users do in my app?" → signup → activation.
• SEO and content marketing → awareness channels, ones that pay off slowly and then keep paying.

Two rules follow from the shape, and they're the ones beginners miss:

Rule 1 — fix the bottom before pouring into the top. Driving traffic to a landing page that doesn't convert, or collecting signups nobody activates from, wastes the scarcest thing you have. With a handful of users you can find and fix those leaks cheaply.

Rule 2 — every activity must name its stage. "I should post on X" is not a plan. "I'm posting on X to create awareness among SSG users" is. If you can't name the stage, skip the activity.

The full one-page version, including the organic-vs-paid channel map, is in the reference: The funnel and the channel map. Print it if that's your thing.

Your first move: recruit users by hand

Here's the part that feels wrong to an engineer, which is exactly why it needs saying early. At zero users, the only channel that works is talking to individual people, one at a time. Not SEO (months to work, and you need content first). Not ads (money spent learning things you can learn free). Not even a big launch (a spike into an untested funnel — see Rule 1).

This isn't a beginner's compromise; it's how nearly everyone did it. Paul Graham's "Do Things That Don't Scale" is the canonical argument — the Airbnb founders went door to door in New York. Lenny Rachitsky studied how over twenty B2B companies (Figma, Notion, Airtable…) found their first ten customers: personal networks and going where users already gather, in almost every case. And PostHog — an open-source devtool, the closest thing to Kobun's situation — got their first thousand via Hacker News and word of mouth, not ads.

Manual recruiting also quietly solves a problem you didn't list: at this stage every user is also a research subject. Ten hand-picked users who talk to you teach you more than a thousand anonymous signups.

Read this one thing

If you read nothing else this week: "Do Things That Don't Scale" — Paul Graham. Twenty minutes, and it reframes the entire "where do I start?" anxiety.

Stuck on anything, or want to argue with the funnel? Ask me — I'm your teacher for this course, and questions between lessons are part of it.