5 tips to drastically elevate your user onboarding 🔥

After spending 7+ years at both venture-scale and bootstrapped companies, I’ve learned a ton about what makes a good (and bad) user onboarding experience.

Specifically, I've found that early-stage startups often overlook the importance of initial onboarding during the early days of building. But I’m here to draw a line in the sand and say onboarding is worth prioritizing from day one 💯.

This is especially pertinent for product-led growth companies (like most on IH), who don’t have customer success or sales to readily address concerns or objections during onboarding.

Luckily, here are five actionable lessons you can apply to your onboarding flow to help supercharge your software onboarding experience:

Lesson 1: Minimize time to value

Your user onboarding should be focused on minimizing the time it takes to provide value to the user — essentially helping them arrive at the “aha” moment of your product.

To achieve this, consider ways to deliver a meaningful, quick win in your onboarding flow — before requiring prospects to putting in too much “work”.

Examples of companies doing this well:

• SmallPDF users can convert or compress a limited number of files without an account — turning users into advocates and customers once paid use cases comes along;
• Freshline uses interactive product demos to help users self-educate and understand the value of their features, without a paywall or registration;

Lesson 2: Move unnecessary steps to post-onboarding

Consider deferring time-consuming aspects of registration (i.e. email activation, setup, downloading apps, enabling notifications) to a second step after the initial onboarding process — ideally after the customer has already realized value.

Why? Founders often conflate users as customers. But they’re not. The users who are in the process of onboarding are prospects for whom you should be putting the best foot forward and trying to impress — not giving them additional tasks to work through.

Tactics include:

• Moving email activation or confirmation to the 2/3rd time the user logs in
• Reducing the perception of up-front time investment (progress indicator, est time)
• Ensuring onboarding is action-oriented rather than informational

Lesson 3: Onboarding can begin from anywhere

Onboarding isn’t confined to your product’s registration page. In fact, it starts at the moment the prospect first interfaces with your company, whether that be an advertisement, sales email, or landing page.

This highlights the importance of having clarity on who you’re targeting, which problems you’re solving, and how your product empowers this intended user.

In this vein — make onboarding a continual experience. Onboarding also isn’t limited to a single point in time. Your product and customers will expand and evolve, so your onboarding should too.

Lesson 4: Tie onboarding to activation goals

For my startup, Supademo, a customer is considered activated if they create more than 1 demo and proceed to share it as a link or embed it.

To effectively encourage activation during onboarding, figure out what your company’s activation goals are and ensure you have sufficient prompts, breadcrumbs, or tooltips to induce users to take action towards this goal. But remember to strike a fine balance between persuading customers and nagging!!

Lesson 5: Stop sending nagging emails

Last but not least — stop sending nagging emails!! Instead of asking users to come back repeatedly, think twice about your email frequency and whether your email content actually adds value, celebrates wins, or helps solve their pain points.

Instead, try tying onboarding emails to trigger based on:

• Customer action: instead of overloading users with instructions during onboarding, send targeted guides if and when the user interacts with that feature;
• User wins: celebrate moments of success by reaffirming the benefit and sharing with the user;
• Metrics: provide a snapshot of the weekly or monthly platform activities— ideally highlighting how your product is making their lives easier or better as a result of usage;
  Getting this right will turn your email marketing into a source of value, instead of something that users instinctively mark as read — or worse, mark as junk 😬.

By incorporating some of these best practices and by avoiding common pitfalls, you can create a user onboarding experience that helps users become better at what your product enables them to do.

I encourage you to get creative with your customer onboarding! If you found this helpful or have other lessons related to onboarding, drop a comment below 🙌🏼

Where can we learn more about early-stage founder lessons?

I'm active on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Here's Supademo, the startup I'm currently building.