The product makes sense to me. That was the problem.

I recently caught myself explaining a product flow to someone before they had even used it.

That made me realize something uncomfortable:

I wasn't testing whether the product was intuitive.

I was testing whether the product made sense to me, because I already knew what every button meant, why each screen existed, and what the “right” next step was.

Founders carry all of that context in their heads.

New users don't.

Since then, I've been paying much more attention to what happens when someone gets zero explanation.

Where do they pause?

What do they click first?

What do they assume something does?

What do they completely ignore?

Sometimes the biggest usability problem isn't a broken feature.

It's a feature that needs the founder standing beside it.

How do you test whether a product actually makes sense to someone seeing it for the first time?