Appendix B: The Five-Day Diagnostic

If you have a product and no traffic, run this before doing anything else.

Day 1: Demand. List 20 literal phrases a stranger with your problem would type. Check each in autocomplete. Discard the ones you invented. If fewer than 10 survive, stop and reconsider the product (Chapter 1).

Day 2: Supply. For each surviving phrase, open the results and assess the weakest page on page one. Mark each query "takeable" or "not". Sort by takeable, not by volume (Chapter 4).

Day 3: Decomposition. Break your product into the smallest complete jobs it does for someone who has never heard of you. Aim for 20+. Estimate build time per job; if the average exceeds two days, redesign until it doesn't (Chapters 3, 5).

Day 4: Differentiator. Write the most interesting true sentence about what you have built. Test it: could a stranger repeat it accurately after reading it once, and verify it in one step? If not, keep working until it can (Chapters 5, 14).

Day 5: Instrumentation. Install search and behavioural analytics. Define your single activation event. Set a calendar reminder four months out and write on it: do not judge the strategy before this date (Chapters 14, 12).

Compiled 5 August 2026 from a complete seven-month dataset. Every figure is drawn from the exports listed in Appendix A and can be reproduced from them. The conclusions are drawn from a single case; the mechanisms are general, the hit rates are not.

About this book

Appendix B: The Five-Day Diagnostic is part of How to Grow Your SaaS to 100K Users Without Spending on Ads, a playbook on taking one product from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. Every claim in it is checked against the real data, including the three findings that contradicted the author.

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