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I finally figured out why my startup's customer onboarding was broken for 6 months

I was running a small SaaS tool out of Austin for about a year and kept seeing people sign up then disappear after day one. I blamed the product or the pricing for months. Then I talked to a guy at a Capital Factory meetup who asked me how long my onboarding flow took. I said maybe 5 minutes, but when I actually timed it with real users it was over 15 minutes with 8 different steps. That's when I realized I was optimizing for features not for getting people to their first "aha" moment fast enough. Has anyone else had to completely rebuild their onboarding after realizing it was driving people away?

3 comments

3 Comments

angela_harris1mo ago

Getting rid of 8 steps in 5 minutes seems obvious in hindsight, no?

the_anthony1mo ago

8 different steps" sounds insane for a first time user. Honestly I'd have bailed halfway through that just from frustration. You were basically running an obstacle course instead of an onboarding flow.

spencer_coleman1mo ago

Swear to god I did the exact same thing with my first app back in 2017. I had this whole video tutorial series built into the signup flow because I thought people wanted to learn everything upfront. Turned out they just wanted to upload a photo and hit go, took me three months of user testing to figure that out.