Onboarding

“If you ever want to know how much you're hand-waving over your company, just onboard somebody. Do it all yourself, and watch how much you go this person does some things over here, and then this thing happens.”

“The length of the onboarding process also contributes to how many people convert. Although it does add friction, it also makes the people who go through it have the sunken cost fallacy. Which causes users to at least get the free trial.”

“Don't be scared of friction. Friction sometimes produces higher intent, higher quality users.”

“You're analyzing your business. You're looking for profitable, efficient growth paths, and you think that the issue is pricing and packaging. Most of the time, it is not pricing and packaging, right? So most of the time, the reason that you have the easiest th…”

“Is it true that if we manually walk users through the product and they get it, then they use it a ton? Versus when they don't, you know, through, through the actual product experience they don't, right? That makes a real case that onboarding is a great lever.”

“The onboarding is super important because this is an opportunity for you to walk the user through their own problems. So for example, on PuffCount, my onboarding is extensive and I ask the users a lot of questions. And some people say that's annoying. I don't …”

“Moving retention is really hard, but it's usually much more a function of onboarding to the right user experience than it is about the kind of the tactical things that people try to do to improve retention.”

“Don't get greedy and try to put the rep into a position where you're expecting revenue before you should expect he or she to be enabled. Commit the time and resources and understand it's going to take this amount of time, this amount of resources to get our re…”

“This is why we always created our onboarding last. When we build, build SaaS apps is like, I'm going to build the app. What does it need to do? Here are the pages, even if it's a very simple MVP or it's a one point O. And then we would think, what steps do peo…”

“And I think what we are seeing is that if you actually gate the usage of the product, behind something that users need to do to unlock. I think that actually ends up leading to higher retention. You're exchanging lower conversion to actual product initiation, …”

“We will never rotate all the way back to the way it was, and I'm talking a little bit about, like, in-person versus digital or remote.”

“The chat itself isn't better or worse. Chat is chat essentially. Onboarding and bots were the thing. And we didn't have them and they crushed us.”

“Most of the value is created, or at least the seeds of value are created in the first 30 to 60 days. Now, if you have an implementation that takes much longer than that, that's understandable, but it's the beginning. It's the implementation and onboarding beca…”

“You would be amazed at how many big organizations, like over a hundred million in revenue, That don't have an operationalized onboarding or implementation function.”

“The way you write your copy, the way you build your onboarding, the way you do your first warm welcome, it's going to make the biggest amount of change in terms of your product success than your core product features that you're going to build for your loyal c…”

“Now, I think there are two parts of onboarding. One is mandatory, the setup. It has to be spare. I try not to make it more than three screens, but it's about how do you say what this does and provide the essential setup that your customer needs to be successfu…”

“People make a decision about whether they feel like they can build a career in your organization in the first 30 days”

“You know, you sign up for something and you see eight or 10 or maybe even 20 different pop-ups that define terms for you and ask you to learn a bunch of things, and the reality is that nobody's actually learning that many things that quickly.”

“So the real impact, in my opinion, comes from being patient and breaking down What actually the user needs to know right now to be able to find value that's relevant to them.”

“We have a very rigid onboarding. Two full weeks, including evenings. They come to our office, our HQ. Everyone gets the same onboarding and they get clear plan for the first period, clear expectations where you should be when it comes to all the different assi…”

“The new customers you have in the early stages of your product are typically more willing and forgiving customers. And you might nail the onboarding process for them, and then suddenly realize that, wait, it's not being as effective anymore. And the reason is,…”

“I think that in-person onboarding for new folks is really important, especially for everyone, for any new person or organization.”

“And if something like very logical isn't converting well, sometimes it means that you're battling against the psyche of the user and you want to take a step back and You know, think about and learn about where someone is psychologically in your space.”

“If you have some sort of self-serve element of your product, if someone can give your product a try, maybe you have a playground or a sandbox demo, if there's a freemium element to your pricing scheme, if you maybe offer things totally for free and don't even …”

“Employees of a company build onboarding for customers, but they build what they think customers want rather than what customers actually want. And that manifests in an onboarding experience that's not very helpful. So there are two patterns that I typically se…”

“I find sometimes teams working on onboarding will map onboarding to that pricing or packaging. So for example, Maybe automations to use the same example of the same feature is something that's generally premium. That if somebody uses automations, they're more …”

“And that word choice of evaluate is deliberately not on board or activate because it's about what the user needs to see that they are going to get the value that they want in using your product and in building a habit around it.”

“It's also probably the most motivated that someone is going to be about your product since they're typically starting their onboarding journey with you at a time where they're like, I need this thing really badly that you're selling. And so they're really moti…”

“I actually think if you're doing it right, sometimes conversion should actually decrease a little bit. So you might actually have fewer people getting all the way through successfully. But I think that's okay because a lot of those people were probably not the…”

“Tweaking the onboarding experience and trying to tune it in a very micro way, because the reality is like, that doesn't really move the needle that often, especially once you've got it in a pretty good foundational place. And only when you discover something r…”

“Earlier stage companies where, you know, you still haven't really approached the local maximum, but you haven't, haven't experimented with a ton of things. I mean, you can two to four X activation rates. Easily through onboarding. I think later stage companies…”

“If you're onboarding someone in person, yes, there is a little bit more of a personal aspect to it, but it's also, you skip a lot of the intricacies because you expect people will pick it up just because you're around it.”

“When we show them how to create, say an online payment form or how to create an online survey or how to make an ex more extensive kind of form that uses things like conditional logic, when they start to see the sophistication that the product actually has, Tha…”

“Once you give up free trials, you will never go back, and you will be able to have terrible onboarding, and you will be able to have all this friction behind the scenes, and you will be able to have many broken processes and things, and you will never build gr…”