Most products lose the user in the first minute. The First Minute Test tells you if yours will. The first minute is when people decide if they will ever come back. They don’t need to see everything your product can do. They just need one thing: certainty. Certainty that they understand what’s happening. Certainty that they can get something useful without effort. If the basics take too long, they never form the habit. Once the habit is gone, the data, the features, the entire roadmap stops mattering. Most product teams talk about “time to value” as if it’s an abstract KPI. The First Minute Test makes it concrete. You watch a new user in their very first 60 seconds and ask three questions: 1. Can they answer their top question without thinking? In analytics, this might be: “How much traffic did I get?” In a design tool: “Can I create something right away?” If they hesitate, you’ve already lost momentum. 2. Do they trust what they see? If the interface feels unfamiliar, if the numbers feel off, or if it takes too many clicks to verify, doubt sets in. Doubt is the enemy of habit. 3. Do they feel curious to dig deeper? The first answer should spark the next question. Curiosity is how you turn first-time use into a repeated loop. At Crazy Egg, we’ve been applying this test to everything. Especially our new Web Analytics. GA4 made the basics harder, and that broke the habit for millions of users. Our goal is the opposite. Pass the First Minute Test so consistently that it becomes invisible. When someone installs Crazy Egg Web Analytics, the first screen should give them the answers they care about most. Traffic, sources, top pages, all in under 60 seconds. No setup, no guesswork, no hunting through menus. That is Effortless Answers in action. If you want to improve your product sense, start running the First Minute Test on what you build. Do it with real users. Watch where they click, what they say out loud, where they hesitate. You’ll see the truth faster than any dashboard will show you. More than onboarding, the first minute decides if people return or move on.