Find processes for people and companies with a lot of steps and pain (friction) in going through and make fast and simple

Every business process that requires multiple steps, manual handoffs, or waiting periods is an opportunity. This framework identifies workflows where friction is highest — measured in time, steps, confusion, or frustration — and replaces them with streamlined, often single-action alternatives that customers adopt with near-zero resistance.

The core insight is deceptively simple: people don't want processes, they want outcomes. Nobody wants to "sign a document" — they want a deal closed. Nobody wants to "run payroll" — they want employees paid correctly and on time. Nobody wants to "file an insurance claim" — they want money in their account after something went wrong. Every step between the user and their desired outcome is a tax on their time, patience, and goodwill. Your job is to eliminate as many of those steps as possible.

The framework operates on a specific diagnostic: map the existing process end-to-end, count the steps, identify where users stall or abandon, and then rebuild the workflow with the minimum viable number of actions. This isn't about incremental improvement — shaving 10% off a form or making a button slightly more visible. It's about structural compression. DocuSign didn't make faxing documents slightly faster. It eliminated printing, signing, scanning, and faxing entirely, replacing a multi-day, multi-device process with a single click. The step count went from roughly seven to one.

Why does this work so reliably as a business strategy? Three reasons. First, friction is measurable and therefore targetable. You can count steps, time them, and calculate abandonment rates — which means you can build a precise business case before writing a line of code. Second, the incumbents who own the existing process almost never simplify it themselves, because their revenue models, organizational structures, and compliance habits are built around the complexity. A bank that makes money on the paperwork involved in a mortgage has no incentive to eliminate that paperwork. Third, once users experience the simplified version, they almost never go back. The switching cost from simple to complex is psychologically enormous — which gives you a natural retention moat.

The framework applies across B2B and B2C, across industries, and at every company stage. The only requirement is that a painful, multi-step process exists today and that technology — software, APIs, automation, AI — can compress it into something meaningfully faster and simpler. The bigger the gap between "current state" and "possible state," the bigger the opportunity.