Desire Paths: What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Sidewalks
November 12, 2024

Let’s take a little trip to Ohio State University (OSU). Not to the famous Horseshoe football stadium, but to the heart of campus: the oval.

Photo courtesy of Axios

Take a nice long look at those sidewalks. At all those different paths. Let it sink in, and let your OCD go nuts a little. Is the pattern (or lack thereof) driving you crazy? 

Why are there four sidewalks down in the left corner, but only 2 in the upper right? No patterns are repeated, and it just looks wild and wrong. 

Well, there’s a reason for this sidewalk design. And that reason is called “desire paths.” 

Take a look at this picture. 

Photo courtesy of Ohio State University Library

This picture was taken before any sidewalk was paved at the Ohio State University campus. The trodden-down pathways going from building to building are the foot routes students took to get from one class to another. 

When construction crews came in to build sidewalks, they poured concrete on top of these existing paths. They knew where students wanted to walk. They knew the shortest route to get from point A to point B. Those construction crews thought, “Great, the students did the work for us. They designed our pathways. This is how we're going to build our campus.”

Now let's look at a couple of fails. 

Photo courtesy of George Redgrave/Flickr

We see this all over the place. A small desire path got worn into this patch of grass because nobody wanted to walk down, take a 90-degree turn, and continue on their way. 

We want to get from point A to point B as quickly and as painlessly as possible.

This sidewalk design failed to meet the needs of pedestrians.

Here’s another—more dramatic—example. 

Photo courtesy of Reddit

The landscape architect thought they would build something unique and beautiful, only to discover users didn't want it. Walkers and bikers plowed right through the grass. 

Huge fail, right? You can see the desire path right there—the path users want to take.

So, what can entrepreneurs learn from these sidewalk triumphs and failures? 

1. A desire path is the road of least resistance to a desired outcome.

If I want to get from point A to point B, I’ll take the path with as little friction as possible. I just want to go straight from my problem to a solution.

2. User behavior won't change to adapt to poor solutions.

Just because someone built a sidewalk at a 90-degree angle doesn’t mean I’ll change my behavior. I still want to get from point A to point B as quickly and easily as possible. Failure to build what users desire will lead to a failure in usage. No one is going to paths that don’t align with their desired outcome.

Responding to Desire Paths

If I'm a civil engineer or a landscape artist, there are two ways that I can respond when I see a desire path. 

Photo courtesy of Maedelo / Wikimedia

The wrong way is to ignore it—plugging my ears and singing, “La-la-la.”

I don’t care that everyone wants to walk in a straight line through my grass. I’m just going to re-sod the path people walked over, rope it off, and hope no one ever does it again.

Spoiler alert: that plan is not going to work. The new grass will be dead in a month because people will keep doing what they’ve always done.

Photo courtesy of Kadavy

The proper way to respond is to recognize that people want to cut the corner.

The grass is dying, so I’m going to put in a new sidewalk.

A Business Perspective

In landscaping or civil engineering, it’s easy to spot a desire path—you can literally see a worn trail through the grass.

In business, it’s a little harder—but just as possible—if you know how to look for it.

The greatest chance for success comes from knowing and following customer behavior.

When OSU built those sidewalks, they didn’t guess where students would walk—they observed. They studied their customers (students) and noticed patterns emerging from their desire paths—then built upon them.

Whatever industry you're choosing to tackle, you need to know your customer behavior. 

The Lean Startup Methodology

The Lean Startup ideology helps founders get to their desired outcomes without wasting much time or energy.

Photo courtesy of about.imvu.com

Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and co-founder of IMVU, learned this the hard way. He and his team spent six months building a messaging platform with custom avatars, only to launch and discover no one wanted it. They had built their product based on assumptions, not actual user needs. When they finally started listening to customers and iterating based on feedback, IMVU found success—going from $300 a month to $50 million a year. This experience inspired Ries to champion the lean startup approach: test your assumptions, listen to customers, and adapt quickly.

Product Market Fit 

Here’s where product-market fit comes into play. To understand what your customers really desire, start by asking them two key questions: 

  • "What do you want?" (product fit) 
  • "How do you want to get it?" (market fit)

A planner at Ohio State University who wanted to pave over existing desire paths waited until a snowy day. He went up in a hot air balloon, pulled out a sketchpad, and mapped out the routes left by students’ footsteps in the snow. 

Similarly, you need to get a "bird’s-eye view" of your customers’ needs, as opposed to your own view of the situation. 

As Sean Richards aptly says, “Your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.”

Step outside your echo chamber and talk to actual buyers—not just friends or family (especially not your mom), who will likely give you only positive feedback.

You need to talk to real, paying customers. Ask them directly, “I think you have this pain; do you really? Tell me about it. What are you trying to accomplish, and what obstacles are in your way?”

These conversations reveal the true desire paths that guide product-market fit.

And if you fail to adjust to clear desire paths—like building a sidewalk at a rigid 90-degree angle despite a well-worn diagonal shortcut—you’re just setting yourself up for failure.

Uncover Customer Pain

Before diving in, you need to determine what kind of pain you’re dealing with: is it a mosquito bite or a shark bite? Is this pain so severe that people would return a cold call from an unknown entrepreneur with a no-name startup just to get it solved? Or is it the kind of inconvenience that, honestly, people can live with? In other words, do they need a painkiller or just a vitamin?

You need to fall in love with the pain, not the solution. IMVU’s team got so wrapped up in their “brilliant” solution—a cool avatar-based messaging platform—that they forgot to ask if anyone even had a problem that needed solving. 

This is, hands down, one of the biggest roadblocks we see with entrepreneurs. They’re in love with their solution, but they haven’t fallen in love with the pain. And that’s the difference between a product that sits on a shelf and one that customers can’t live without.

Intellectual Honesty

You need to be brutally honest with yourself. If you have a hypothesis—say you think the market pain is X—you must go out, ask people about it, and be willing to accept if the real pain is actually Y or Z instead.

It takes humility to admit, “I thought everyone wanted an avatar for instant messaging, but really, they’re looking for something entirely different.” That’s intellectual honesty: listening to what customers are telling you during problem and solution interviews and acting on it. It’s about adopting the mindset, “I don’t care what the truth is—I just want to find it.”

This level of honesty is critical to finding product-market fit. You can’t get so attached to the solution you’ve created in your head that you’re unwilling to change when the real truth emerges. The only way to uncover that truth is by stepping outside your assumptions—getting up in that proverbial balloon, talking to as many potential customers as possible, and rigorously validating your ideas. Those conversations will tell you if what you think is true actually holds up—or if it’s time to pivot.

 A Better Way To Build

There’s a better way to approach entrepreneurship. The typical approach goes something like this: “I’ve got an idea, I’m going to run with it, I’ll build it, and then I’ll figure out the selling part at the end.” But that’s like playing Russian Roulette. You have no idea if it’s going to work because you skipped the difficult but necessary step of validating if there’s real pain and real demand.

A better way is to constantly test your hypotheses as you go (check out our Startup Flowchart). Talk to potential customers, verify the pain you think exists, and confirm if your solution is what they actually want. The key is to work closely with customers throughout this cycle to ensure you’re creating something they genuinely need and will pay for. 

You’ll never find product-market fit if you ignore these steps. Build your business by observing what people are already demanding, then fill that need. 

That’s how you create pathways customers want to walk.