Your product’s aha moment, the frictions that block it and why most founders never name it.

If you’re building a product and can’t name the one thing a new user must do to experience its value, you’re not alone. Most founders can’t, and that’s why most early-stage products quietly lose their users.

To make fast, honest product decisions, you need to find your product’s Core Value Action. And that’s a concept SA UX lead Hilde Franzsen teaches founders to build around.

Hilde is the Brand and Marketing Director at Inkblot, a Stellenbosch-based creative agency that works across brand strategy, UI/UX, web design and development, and digital marketing. She’s worked with a long list of founders and product teams, and has seen more than her share of smart people building the wrong things for the right reasons.

Here’s her workflow for finding your product’s Core Value Action — the moment users finally understand why your product exists.

Your Core Value Action (CVA) is the one specific moment when your product delivers its first unit of real value to a real human. It’s the moment the user thinks, “Oh, this is why this exists.”

Miss it, and you’re just shipping features. Name it, and every other product decision gets easier.

Before you try to define your own, look at how other products define theirs. Notice that none of these are features. They’re moments.

Each one is a specific action, performed by a real user, that produces a real outcome. Your CVA should look and feel the same.

Write it down. Not a paragraph. A sentence. The one action a new user must complete to experience your product’s core value.

If you catch yourself writing “the user completes onboarding,” that’s a process, not a value moment. If you write “the user signs up,” that’s a transaction, not a value moment. Keep going until you land on something the user would actually be glad they did.

Hilde’s test: “Ask yourself, what is the first moment your product actually matters to a real person. And if you can’t say that in one sentence, then that is the UX that needs work.”

Once you know the CVA, map everything a user has to do to get there. Be honest. Hilde calls out five frictions that kill conversions in almost every product she sees:

If any of these are standing between your user and their CVA, they’re costing you signups that never convert.

Two behavioural principles explain why users bail before reaching your CVA.

Cognitive load: the more decisions and information a user has to process, the more likely they are to drop out. Every unexplained option, every “just in case” nav item, every extra form field adds weight. Your job is to make the path to the CVA as light as possible.

Loss aversion: people feel the pain of losing something roughly twice as intensely as the pleasure of gaining something equivalent. This is why credit card walls before a free trial kill conversions — you’re asking users to risk something (their details, their time, their privacy) before they’ve received anything of value in return.

Knowing this, you can start to see why removing friction before the CVA matters so much more than adding features after it.

Every UX decision from here on should exist to get users to the CVA faster. If something in your flow isn’t moving them toward it, cut it.

The classic example is Duolingo. Their CVA is completing the first lesson. So they stripped the signup wall and the feature tour to just let users complete a first lesson, earn XP, and hit roughly 10% perceived fluency in about 15 minutes before ever being asked to register.

By the time the user hit the signup screen, they’d already experienced the value. Conversions jumped, not because the signup screen was better designed, but because the value was already real by the time they saw it.

Contrast that with Google Glass, which Hilde uses as the cautionary example. The team asked, “What can we do with this technology?” but never adequately asked how it would make someone feel in a crowd. The tech worked, but the human experience didn’t, and Google lost $895 million on it.

As Hilde puts it: “One asked what we can build. The other asked what the first moment of real value was.”

Firstly, South African founders often build with leaner teams and tighter runways than their overseas counterparts. You can’t afford to ship a product that takes five screens and three form fills before a user sees why it exists. Finding your CVA forces the kind of ruthless prioritisation that small teams actually need.

Secondly, AI has made it dangerously easy to ship without thinking. You can go from a vague idea to a deployed product in an afternoon. That means the old excuse of “we’ll figure out the flow once we’ve got something working” is gone. Something is always working now. The real question is whether anyone uses it, and the CVA is the thing that determines whether they will.

As Hilde puts it: “A beautiful product that solves the wrong problem is just expensive decoration.”

Once you’ve named your Core Value Action, every product decision gets easier.

You know what to build first and what to cut, which onboarding step is earning its place and which one is costing you users. You can stop arguing about features and start arguing about the one thing that actually matters: How fast can we get a real person to the moment where this product clicks?

It takes an hour to write. It saves you months of building the wrong thing.

Finding your Core Value Action is one habit from a much longer session. In Hilde’s full Founder Collab masterclass on From Solutioneering to UX: How to Prioritise Designing the Right Things, she walks through her complete system for:

You can access Hilde’s full playbook, plus 40+ other masterclasses from South African operators, founders and experts when you join The Founder Collab.

This workflow first appeared in our 22 April ‘26 edition on the Lekker Build website builder.

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