You asked for the keys to the kingdom. Fine. But don’t come crying to me when you realize how much work you’ve got ahead of you.

This is the checklist I use to tear apart products and figure out why they’re not sticking, not failing to launch, failing to stick. Those are different diseases with different cures, and most founders are treating the wrong one. It walks through five sections: Onboarding Friction Finders, “Aha!” Moment Clarity Tests, Engagement Loop Diagnostics, Early Churn Red Flags, and defining your product’s Minimum Viable Habit, the one recurring action that makes you indispensable instead of optional.

Every item comes with an action to actually go do (sign up for your own product with a stopwatch, run an exit survey, map your shortest path to value) and the brutal truth attached to what you’ll probably find. This isn’t a “find your passion” worksheet. It’s a diagnostic built to expose exactly where users are quietly abandoning ship, and why.

This is for founders who are past MVP and stuck wondering why growth flatlined, activation looks okay, but retention doesn’t, and nobody can say exactly why. If you’re still guessing at the answer instead of measuring it, this checklist replaces the guessing.

Print it. Go section by section with your actual product open. Be ruthless with yourself, the path from a leaky MVP to a sticky product runs through hard questions, not more features.