Looking for a Product-Market Fit (PMF) is usually a challenging path with many obstacles. As a start-up, you also struggle with a limited budget and time to find the PMF as quickly as possible to move to the growth phase. Every penny counts, especially in recent times when it is so hard to get fundraising for new businesses. You have to make good decisions and test them quickly; it is also worth optimizing your different funnels as they can substantially extend the runway, which was an inspiration to write this article.
We were recently working with a product with a proper marketing budget that allowed us to validate different options for acquiring users. We tested all social platforms and different approaches, but the numbers were still low. We acquired many users, but only a few started using the app. It turned out that the problem wasn’t in the campaigns themselves but a bit later, as users who downloaded the app converted poorly to regular users.
At that time, we had a business goal to increase the conversion drastically, so we quickly reviewed the app. One thing that was really striking was the size and complexity of the onboarding process. We immediately got to work and decided to significantly improve the onboarding process in our client's application.
Here, you have a ready-made recipe for approaching this issue in four steps based on our experience that increased the onboarding CR by 80%.
When you have a good designer, you need to only ask about design with all steps in the onboarding put together one after another in the shape of a user flow. If you don’t have such a design, you have to go through the onboarding and take screenshots of each step.
It’s essential not to miss any screen or step that the user has to do, including native modals that appear from time to time to ask about some permissions. It is also a good practice to start from the first screen in the app and take a step or two back and add screenshots from the marketing campaigns and the store. This is all the same journey for the user, so we need to have an overview of the entire flow to understand the context and user problems.
Plenty of tools, like Posthog or Mixpanel, allow you to gather quantitative user data. If you don’t have one, you need to get one. Tracking all the steps, buttons, and actions the user can perform is essential. Sometimes, you can feel as if you exaggerate a bit and try to track too much, but remember that if you lack some events, it costs time to add them later, release a new version, and feed them with data. So, from my experience, I would strongly recommend adding more events and covering the entire flow.
If you have all the needed events, you can quickly create a chart showing all the drop-offs. As you can see on the chart, a certain number of users always resign at every additional step of the funnel. However, some steps stand out. And this is where we should start focusing on. Remember, this is only quantitative data, so if you want to understand why, you need to ask your users.
In our case, the entire loss during the onboarding was almost 60%, which was huge. Over half of the acquired users, where almost everyone costs some certain amount of money, have never finished the onboarding and seen the main view of the app.
In our case, the onboarding process was really long. Using the previously prepared onboarding map; we asked ourselves what kind of goals we tried to achieve with each screen. It turned out that we tried to kill too many birds with one stone during the onboarding. We tried to:
We all agreed that this was too much. We discussed the most important thing we should lead to through the onboarding, and we decided that we should let our users feel the app's value as soon as possible. Fortunately, we had a clear vision of our 'aha' moment at that time and a clear goal of where we should lead our users. If you don’t know what your ‘aha’ moment is, just think about when the user, for the first time, feels and understands the value of using the app.