How to build self-serve onboarding
At Kairn, we're building a bottom-up SaaS, so we play with the PLG -Product Led Growth- trend.
But let's be honest, no one has cracked it... So we started writing some content with our gathered discoveries. The first one I wanted to share with the IH community is on how to build self-serve onboarding - our recos, learnings and tools. And as I said, since no one has really cracked it, I would love to have your advices!
While 1-1s enable you to understand your user, self-serve might be your real channel. So no sugar coating, test it out early on. In 1-1 onboarding, features seem easily discoverable and your flow sounds perfect. Truth is no one gets it on their own, so face it
#0 - To build your onboarding first identify your activation funnel. Those are all the key steps that your user needs to perform to fall in love with your product. And see in what time frame they need to happen
#1 - Product tours are cool coz they take users around but they don’t do a great intro. Start with big screens where you explain your product value proposition. Then switch to set-up needed, and finish with product tours for interactivity
#2 - Videos are super sweet but few people actually watch them. If you add one put a big disclaimer “Don’t skip!!”. We see GIFs work great. To keep high quality GIFs we record with QuickTime and then loop with high-quality with
Zamzar
#3 - Make your onboarding skippable. Super counter-intuitive coz you want the user to understand everything but if they get stuck on a bug and can’t get out 🚨 you’re in for a bad buzz of being called a virus
#4 - Mirror to #3, add analytics to your onboarding steps. It’s SUPER important to analyse it and see where people drop so you can optimize. To track our funnel we use June.so - great templates and super easy to set
#5 - Mirror to #3 again, make your onboarding easy to relaunch. A lot of people asked us to redo the onboarding after they had skipped it and then fallen in love with the tool and they wanted to discover more
#6 - If your onboarding includes giving accessibility permissions, add a visual to show people to click on the lock to be able to change permissions. We got TONS of people who stayed stuck there...
#7 - If you need permissions, make sure your user knows why and can access your Privacy Policy, you’re great and fair but they’ll want the proof
#8 - We’re huge fans of Intercom, we do everything user related with it. BUT their tours / posts get easily blocked so if your target is techy, do your own screens. We have a mix of Ops and Product managers on Kairn and around 40% of users don’t see Intercom screens...
#9 - If your product is based on a cool shortcut or habit the user needs to get, make them do it. First people love it, feels like a little game, and second you need to start a habit to get it ...
#10 - Have an FAQ, many users will skip the onboarding, and few ask for info so they need to be able to find it. We have articles read by +300 people ! To build it we’re HUGE fans of Tango and then we host it on Intercom and have must reads easily accessible in the chat
#11 - And Last one for the road... make an FAQ article about how to become a Master at your product. When people love the product they want to say they’re expert and they’ve “won all the badges”. Yep, a bit more gamification to come here
#12 - In any ways, don’t over do, you’ll iterate so it’s fine if it ain’t shiny, you’ll get plenty of time to make it
Those are our learnings, we'd LOVE to hear yours. Onboarding is definitely one "feature" we're constantly gonna be improving so super interested in your tips.
PS - we're soon launching on Product Hunt and it would mean a world to us to receive feedback from such a strong community as the IH one, you can follow our PH adventure here 🧡.
