Starting state
A starting state is where a user is when they begin a particular task: the situation they show up in, including what they have on hand, what they already know, and where they're positioned. Two people pursuing the same outcome can begin from very different starting states; someone wanting pancakes might arrive with mix and a bowl, while another arrives with just a phone and a credit card.
Definition
The state the user is in at the beginning of a named transition — the transition's starting endpoint, paired with resulting state.
What the starting state carries
The starting state contains conditions — the specific material circumstances within it. What the user has, what they know, what they're positioned with at the moment they show up. For a user beginning "first invoice sent" in an invoicing tool, the starting state might contain: has one billable client, knows the amount owed, has the client's email, lacks an account, lacks a template, lacks stored payment info. The state is the position the user occupies; the conditions are what holds within that position.
What the starting state doesn't carry is motivation. The user's pull toward a sought state — the energy, the directional pursuit — lives in intent, on the user side. Starting state captures the structural conditions the user occupies; intent captures what pulls them out of those conditions toward something else.
Transition-relative
Starting state is indexed to a particular named transition: the state at the beginning of that transition. The same user at the same clock-time can have different starting states for different transitions they're inside. A user partway through onboarding has one starting state for "complete onboarding" (their conditions when they first signed up) and a different starting state for "send first invoice" (their conditions at the moment that sub-pursuit begins).
This is what separates starting state from now-state. Now-state is the user's position in state-space at the present moment, without reference to any particular transition. Starting state names what the now-state was when a particular transition began.
Same intent, different starting states
Two users can share an intent — the same sought state — and arrive with different conditions in their starting states. The route between starting and resulting states will differ accordingly. A user signing up to send invoices who already has a Stripe account, an established client list, and accounting software runs a different route than a user signing up with none of those. Same intent, same resulting state, different starting conditions, different routes.
A framework that only considers the sought state gives every user the same instructions. A framework that takes the starting state seriously gives instructions appropriate to where each user actually is. This is the basis on which route plurality operates: multiple routes can satisfy the same resulting state, each anchored to a different starting state.
Starting state and starting conditions
The conditions within a starting state are general — the material circumstances the user occupies, whatever those happen to be. Starting conditions are narrower: the specific conditions a path commits to accepting at its entry surface. A user can show up in a starting state whose conditions fall outside the path's accepted starting conditions; in that case, the path doesn't serve that user, regardless of whether their sought state matches the path's resulting state. The mismatch surfaces as drop-off at whatever step first depends on a condition the user doesn't have.
Example
A user signing up for an invoicing tool to send their first invoice. Their starting state at the moment of signup might contain: has one billable client, agreed amount $2,400, knows the client's email, has never used invoicing software before, no logo file, no clear sense of what payment terms to set. A different user beginning the same transition might arrive with: ten existing clients in a spreadsheet, prior experience with QuickBooks, an established logo and brand kit, net-30 already in mind as the standard.
Both users share the sought state ("invoice sent, payment received"). Both reach the same resulting state if the path works. But the route from their respective starting states differs — the first user needs the path to absorb terms-setting and logo creation; the second user needs the path to step aside while they import what they already have. The starting state is what makes the difference visible.