Cognition — The first thing that comes to your mind when you see a product.

At least that’s what it means in an entrepreneurial context. After this, your startup, your product, and yourself will be viewed with a confirmation bias. In other words, no matter how much better your product gets, they’ll always have that image of the first version in their head and they unconsciously try to relate to that. Dr. Ricardo San Martin proved in his talk that this indeed is true but I’ll talk about a few things that seem quite opposite to intuition to do to ensure that your product makes a great first impression.

Go easy on the features

You may think that the best way to impress customers is to throw a bunch of cool features at them. However, the more features, the more bugs so you have to be very careful about what features to include. A good tip would be to add the least number of features you need in order to get your value proposition across. For example, if you were to make the next Snapchat, there’s no reason to start out with full fledged chat, tons of filters and a robust way to share stories. Instead, you should be focused on your customers understanding your app’s main value. So, in this case you would go for a completely bug-free smooth simple app that works extremely well in sending one time-sensitive image. That’s how Snapchat started out and gained customers, becoming successful.

Provide multiple user-friendly snapshots

Never pour all your time on just one summary or one promotional video for your startup and try to perfect it. Chances are, you’ll never be able to appeal to every user at once. It’s better to make multiple, maybe a flyer, a social media post, a graphic and a video demo and you have a much better chance at making an impeccable first impression. It’s as easy as simple probability.

Always Be Optimistic

Early-stage entrepreneurs all the time spend 100% of their time thinking about keep to get their startup afloat and how to make it gain more user traction. However, many entrepreneurs make the mistake of not thinking about their startup blowing up and therefore don’t make their products scalable. It’s a terrible way to fail if during your one chance to succeed and impress the multiple users that signed up, you can’t satisfy them because you didn’t plan for the right infrastructure.

In the end, make sure to take these with a grain of salt because all advice depends on your startup. It’s never the same for every startup but in general, keeping these tips in mind can help you big time with making the best customer impression possible!