The framework behind The Behavioral Startup

The ANVERSO Models: A Behavioral Design Framework

ANVERSO is a progressive behavioral design framework created by Nacho Parietti. It gives non-technical founders and domain experts a step-by-step way to design products around how people actually behave — from understanding your users to defining your MVP. It is taught in full, with templates and exercises, in the book The Behavioral Startup.

A Actors — who invests effort and receives value
N Needs — what human needs the product fulfills
VE Value Evidence — how users recognize value
RSO Required behaviors → System → Objective behaviors

Rule Zero: The Golden Rule

Users must always get more value from a product than the effort it takes to use it.

Value > Effort is the equation that determines adoption. Every ANVERSO model exists to tip that balance further in the user's favor — by making value more evident, delivering it sooner, and removing the barriers that inflate effort.

Most products don't fail because the idea was wrong. They fail because the perceived effort of using them outweighed the perceived value — often before the user ever reached the moment where the product pays off. ANVERSO is a systematic way to find and fix that imbalance before you build.

The Models, One by One

Model A: Actors

Identifies who your product requests effort from and how they interact with it. Every product has three roles, and they are not always the same person:

  • Uses: who interacts with the product directly?
  • Pays: who provides the economic support?
  • Decides usage: who controls whether it gets used?

The most common blind spot in product design is building value for the user while forgetting the payer or the decision-maker — each of whom needs different evidence of value.

Model N: Needs

Categorizes the needs your product can fulfill for each actor, using ERG Theory from motivational psychology:

  • Existence: survival, stability, saving time, money, or effort
  • Relationship: social connection, belonging, and status
  • Growth: self-improvement, learning, and impact

Products don't solve feature gaps — they solve human needs. The strongest products address more than one need layer for each actor.

Model VE: Value Evidence

Identifies how users recognize that value has been delivered. The principle: if users can't see, hear, or feel the value, it doesn't exist for them.

  • Design "target behaviors" that make value explicit
  • Consider the timing of value recognition — perceived value decays hyperbolically with delay (time discounting)
  • Create immediate value signals even when the real payoff is long-term

Model RSO: Behavioral Funnels

Maps the journey from initial contact to achieving target behaviors. Your product isn't a set of screens — it's a sequence of behaviors.

  • Chart the required behaviors that lead to objective behaviors
  • Identify the barriers preventing funnel progression — missing triggers, insufficient ability, or weak motivation, building on the Fogg Behavior Model
  • Design features that address each specific barrier, rather than adding features and hoping

The Behavioral Design Sprint

The ANVERSO models come together in the Behavioral Design Sprint: a collaborative process that brings diverse experts and stakeholders together to work through the models applied to one product. It rests on three components:

A full sprint takes 2–4 weeks for the initial analysis and design phase, and its output is a behavioral MVP definition: what to build, for whom, and which behaviors it must produce.

How ANVERSO Relates to Other Frameworks

Hooked (Nir Eyal) teaches you to build habit loops. ANVERSO covers the entire product design journey — actors, needs, value evidence, and behavioral funnels — of which habit formation is one part.

Sprint (Jake Knapp) gives you a 5-day process to prototype and test fast. ANVERSO tells you what to prototype by understanding behavior first.

Lean Startup (Eric Ries) validates demand through build-measure-learn cycles. ANVERSO adds the behavioral layer: which behaviors to design for, and why users will actually adopt.

Academic frameworks (COM-B, EAST) are rigorous but hard to apply without a research team. ANVERSO packages the same behavioral science into models a founder can use directly.

Who Created ANVERSO

Nacho Parietti (Ignacio Parietti) is a behavioral designer who has guided 30+ products from concept to market — across games, healthcare platforms, universities including Cornell and CU, and startups in multiple industries. He created the ANVERSO Models after repeatedly meeting brilliant domain experts who had deep insights but no methodology to turn them into products people actually use. He writes about behavioral design on Medium and at Behavioral Design Models.

Learn the Full Methodology

The Behavioral Startup walks you through each ANVERSO model with templates, real examples, and exercises you can apply to your own project the same week you read it. ★★★★★ 5.0 on Amazon · English & Spanish.

Get the Book — $5.99

Also in print ($13.99), at Barnes & Noble and Blackwell's.