Design Decisions Log

We went through 14 iterations before landing on the final flow. Early versions tried to be clever — one used a chatbot-style wizard that asked questions conversationally, but users found it slower than a traditional form. Another version let users skip everything and jump straight into an empty dashboard, but without sample data the product felt lifeless and confusing. The breakthrough came in iteration 9 when we tested the industry-template approach. Surprisingly, users didn't care if the sample data was perfectly accurate to their business — they just needed something concrete to react to. That insight saved us weeks of engineering work on the inference engine. We simplified the matching from 20 industry categories down to 6 broad templates, and nobody noticed the difference.