Gomez: CartHook's Upfront Application Friction Succeeded by Creating Exclusivity
Ruben Gamez · Episode 837 | How Do You Learn Product? and Optimizing Your Trial... · Jun 16, 2026 · at 8:35
Ruben Gomez discusses examples of friction in SaaS onboarding funnels, citing CartHook's application-based onboarding experiment.
0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“And he added this like crazy amount of friction up front by having an application that people would have to apply. And that helped reduce the amount of people that weren't a good fit, but it also had this side effect. It was like a exclusivity sort of thing, you know, that they do in like courses and things like that. And it worked really well for his product.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ruben Gamez
Gomez: Podcasting Is Probably Not an Effective Channel for Most SaaS
“And, you know, I could say I like doing podcasts, I like talking, so I'm going to do podcasts to get customers, but that's probably for most SaaS, that is not an effective channel.”
Gomez: Small companies cannot afford opportunistic generalist hiring
“You'll hear this sometimes, if you come across a really good person, then just hire them, but when you're a small company, you do tend to have very specific needs, and there is less room for that.”
Gomez: Founders launch second products as a reactive response to slow growth
“When somebody asks me, usually to me it's, I'm leaning towards you probably shouldn't do it. Most of the time it's a bad idea, and what I noticed, I don't know, This is what you've noticed, too. It's usually more of a reactive thing. They're reacting to someth…”
Over-optimizing early revenue damages long-term startup scale
“Sometimes when you overly optimized for revenue early on, you damage your chances for creating something much bigger later on.”
Gomez: Adding Educational Friction to SignWell Consistently Cuts Paid Conversions
“Anytime we've tried to do that with SignWell, Even if it's educational in that way, it's not worked. It's actually, we've had drop off, because you typically have drop off when you add friction, but the idea would be that you get more conversions from the peop…”
Gomez: Prompting Users for Business Emails Reduced SignWell Conversions by 30%
“So we tried that, and this was one of the things we're like, yeah, not that Google sign up. Let's make them type in, and then, like, say, you know, type your business. And we didn't cut them off if they tried Gmail, but we just, and we had a, like, I don't kno…”