12 customer interviews
First-time site owners, 2–16 weeks post-launch. I asked them to narrate "what did you do after you published?"
Website builders help millions of people launch a site in minutes. But most small-business owners publish once and then go quiet — the site goes stale, results never come, and they don't renew. Momentum is an AI growth companion that turns "I'm live, now what?" into one clear next move every week.
⚠️ Independent concept & portfolio work. Product names, brand cues, and metrics are illustrative and used to demonstrate design process.
New site → silence. Owners don't know what to do after launch, see no results, and churn before renewal.
They don't need more features. They need one confident next step and proof it's working.
An AI companion that ships one prioritized, 2-minute "growth move" per week and shows its impact.
Habit + visible progress in weeks 1–4 → activation → higher first-year renewal.
Modern website builders have made getting online almost frictionless. But launching a website is a beginning, not a finish line. For a first-time small-business owner, the moment right after "Publish" is where the excitement quietly turns into overwhelm:
The result is a predictable pattern: a burst of activity at launch, then weeks of silence. No visible results means no perceived value — and for a subscription business, no perceived value shows up months later as a non-renewal.
The steepest drop is between publishing and improving. That gap is the design opportunity.
I mixed qualitative depth with quantitative breadth so the direction was defensible to both design and business stakeholders — not just a pretty hunch.
First-time site owners, 2–16 weeks post-launch. I asked them to narrate "what did you do after you published?"
Mapped publish → edit → improve → renew. Segmented by tenure to find where cohorts stalled.
Watched post-launch sessions. Owners opened the dashboard, scanned, and left without acting.
Tagged "didn't get results / not worth it" from cancellation surveys and chat transcripts.
Owners were motivated but frozen by too many equally-shouting options. They wanted a ranked to-do, not a toolbox.
Traffic takes weeks; motivation lasts days. Without an early proxy for progress, people gave up before results arrived.
"SEO," "meta description," "backlinks" caused shutdown. Plain outcomes ("get found on Google") kept them moving.
A 2-minute weekly nudge fit their real capacity far better than a "growth checklist" of 40 items.
Goal: turn her Instagram followers into orders.
Pain: "I built the site in a weekend, then had no idea what to do Monday."
Momentum win: one doable task a week she can trust.
Goal: get phone calls from his area.
Pain: no time to learn marketing; wants proof it's worth paying for.
Momentum win: visible impact tied to real leads.
Goal: show clients ongoing value each month.
Pain: repetitive optimization work across sites.
Momentum win: a shareable progress story per client.
“I spent the whole weekend building the site, hit publish — and then just sat there. Nobody tells you what comes next.”
“I don’t have time to become a marketer. Just tell me the one thing worth doing today.”
“There are twenty buttons on that dashboard. I open it, feel a bit stupid, and close it again.”
“I paid for a full year. Two months in with no visitors, I assumed it wasn’t working and let it lapse.”
Momentum lives inside the website builder dashboard. It reframes "growth" from an overwhelming toolbox into a calm, guided rhythm — and it makes progress visible long before traffic shows up.
AI scores every possible improvement by impact ÷ effort for this specific business, and surfaces just the top move.
Each move is pre-drafted (copy, keywords, layout). The owner reviews and approves — they never start from a blank page.
A Momentum Score rises the moment a move ships — an honest early proxy while real traffic builds.
"Help people find you on Google" — never "optimize meta tags." The jargon lives underneath, on demand.
AI picks the highest-leverage next move for your site.
Review a pre-filled change and approve — or tweak it.
Momentum Score jumps; the win is logged to your streak.
Weeks later, Momentum ties moves back to real traffic & leads.
Momentum only reaches out once a week, in plain language, always leading with the outcome. Restraint is the feature.
Your Monday move is ready 🌱
Hi Maya — this week’s highest-impact 2-minute move:
Help more people in Lisbon find your candles on Google.
We’ve already drafted it. You just review and approve.
Review this week’s move →1 quick win is waiting. Keep your 3-week streak alive 🔥
🎉 Your homepage now shows up for 3 local searches. That’s real progress.
Cadence caps at one nudge/week. Miss two in a row and Momentum quiets down instead of escalating.
Complete a growth move and watch the Momentum Score, streak, and projected results respond. Everything below is real, clickable UI.
The live prototype below starts at 41 (Maya's current score after 3 prior moves). The hero card shows the 72 target after completing this week's growth moves.
Nice work, Maya 👋
You're building momentum. 1 quick move today keeps your streak alive.
Momentum will surface your next best move on Monday. Come back to keep your streak alive.
Momentum connects the moves you ship back to real outcomes, so you can see what's paying off.
Prototype scope: interactions, state, and motion are functional to demonstrate the experience. Copy and data are illustrative.
Momentum extends an established SaaS design language rather than reinventing it — new patterns (growth-move cards, the Momentum ring, streaks) are documented so the design guild can adopt them.
Display
Heading
Body strong
Body — Inter, generous line-height for readability
Overline / kicker
Radii, elevation, and motion are tokenized (--radius, --shadow, --ease) so components stay consistent across the app.
Before projecting business impact, I pressure-tested the concept with real users — because a confident story means nothing if people can't actually use it.
“Wait — it actually did it for me? I just had to say yes?”
“This is the first time a website tool made me feel like I knew what I was doing.”
All figures are illustrative projections framed as hypotheses to demonstrate how I set and instrument goals — not claimed results.
Automation vs. ownership. Fully auto-applying changes boosts completion but erodes trust and learning. I chose review-and-approve — a little more friction, a lot more confidence.
Notification fatigue. One weekly move is deliberately restrained; I'd instrument sentiment early and be ruthless about pausing nudges that annoy.
A benchmark ("sites like yours") and a Priya-facing multi-site view — turning Momentum into a retention engine for agencies too.