Three people signed up for my SaaS... and none uploaded a document.
Over the last few weeks, I noticed an interesting pattern while building DocMetrics.
Three different people signed up. Two were from the same company. None uploaded a document.
It's tempting to conclude my onboarding is broken, but I realized I don't actually know why they stopped.
They may have been evaluating the product, got distracted, didn't have a document ready, or hit onboarding friction.
Instead of guessing, I'm treating this as a hypothesis and planning to talk to more users before changing the product.
For those of you building B2B SaaS:
Have you seen users sign up but never complete the first meaningful action?
What turned out to be the real reason?
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Right call not to optimise off this yet, and worth being blunt about why: at three signups (two from one company, so really two accounts) there's no drop-off rate to read. Each of those is a case study, not a data point. Talk to them, like you said.
The one structural thing I'd flag for a document tool specifically: making the first meaningful action "upload your document" is a trust chicken-and-egg. If the file is anything sensitive, people won't hand it over before they've seen the thing do something useful, and "sign up, now give us your real data" is a big ask on faith. That's why the sample-document path someone mentioned isn't just a diagnostic, it's probably the fix: let them see the output on your data before they risk theirs.
When you do talk to them, the question that splits the causes cleanly is "did you actually have a document you were willing to upload right then" versus "you weren't sure what to do." Very different problems.
Yes, I have seen this exact thing. The fastest diagnostic is to give them a sample document path on the first screen: “try it with our sample” next to “upload yours.” If people use the sample but not their own file, the issue is trust or readiness. If they ignore both, the issue is probably positioning before onboarding.
I like that you're resisting the urge to optimize around a conclusion you haven't earned yet.
What kind of evidence would actually convince you the problem is onboarding rather than something earlier in the decision to sign up?
That's a great question.
For me, it would take more than just seeing people drop off after signing up. I'd want evidence from conversations with users.
If I consistently hear things like, "I wasn't sure what to do next," "I didn't understand what to upload," or "I expected to try it without uploading a document," I'd feel much more confident that it's an onboarding problem.
On the other hand, if people tell me they were simply curious, didn't have a proposal ready, or were just evaluating tools, then the issue is probably earlier in the journey—or not really a product problem at all.
At this stage, I'm trying to avoid optimizing based on assumptions and instead let user conversations point me to the real bottleneck.
Appreciate the context.
Would be good to continue the conversation as you learn more from those user conversations.
What's the best email to reach you on?