What's New: Tips for better user onboarding

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Effective onboarding is crucial to user conversion, engagement, and retention:

• Don't look at onboarding as just a one-time checklist. Consider a reverse trial, push for team usage upfront, and include social proof everywhere.
• Make your business blog stand out by incorporating visual content, adding a search bar, and dissecting your most popular posts.
• A high 6 figure unexpected exit. Mathew Passy was laid off, but used his experience to build a successful podcast consulting business.

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Five Steps for Better User Onboarding 🤝

by Joseph Lee

Up to 80% of users who sign up for your product end up never coming back after the first day. This means only 20% of top-of-funnel users come back to use your product in a meaningful way. It highlights the importance of first impressions during the onboarding process, which is paramount to converting, retaining, and expanding your customer base.

All aboard

Onboarding is frequently overlooked as a one-time checklist, often becoming stale as your product, messaging, and go-to-market tactics evolve.

At Supademo, we focused on hypothesizing and implementing a series of tactics to reduce friction and accelerate time-to-value. Ultimately, these tactics:

• Increased our onboarding completion rate by ~10%.
• Increased our activation rate by ~20%.
• Decreased the time it took to achieve the "A-ha!" moment" by ~39%.

Here are the actionable steps we took to improve our product onboarding.

Reverse trial directly into your highest tier plan

Instead of deciding between a free trial and a freemium model for onboarding, consider a reverse trial:

• Avoid overwhelming users by focusing on highlighting only core features upfront.
• Nudge users to try premium features based on usage or time-based triggers.
• Clearly indicate what happens at the end of the reverse trial (i.e. downgrade to freemium with limited features).

Use social proof everywhere

Communicate benefits through customers' voices, not just your own:

• Add social proof throughout your entire product onboarding flow.
• Tie specific social proof to specific pages (i.e. a team-based testimonial on the “invite your team” page).
• Link use case emails with case studies that connect directly to the one mentioned.

Force users to experience an "A-ha!" moment

When building a complex product with many bells and whistles, it can be challenging to surface key features intuitively.

Automatically enable and apply features meant to wow users, or drive virality, by default. You have limited time to impress new users!

Push for team usage

Team-based, collaborative SaaS platforms (think Slack) tend to have higher retention and lower churn. Lateral usage across the team means a wider surface area for penetration, more use cases, and higher odds of reaching an internal champion.

Encourage users to invite others during onboarding, with the goal of converting them while at peak interest.

Personalized, action-triggered onboarding emails

Instead of dripping a handful of generic email sequences to every signup, we decided to add personalization. With little effort, we get notified of our highest potential, most engaged leads, while personalizing at scale. Try sending:

• A welcome email with a personalized product tour at scale, using dynamic variables.
• Automated, plain text founder emails to drive responses and feedback.
• Emails when success metrics are met, with encouragement and clear next steps to guide deeper adoption.
• Short, two sentence feature tips weekly.

If you found this information valuable, we'd love your support for Supa Screenshot on Product Hunt!

Discuss this story.

In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🚐 Uber announces Uber Shuttle.

⛳️ Five PPC campaign red flags.

💲 Link to your product here. Our most affordable ad.

🎤 Sony Music warns tech companies over unauthorized use of its content to train AI.

🥊 The Mac vs. PC war is back on.

🧠 The psychology behind pricing.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

Improve Your Business Blog 📝

by Syed Balkhi

Businesses that blog receive a whopping 67% more leads than their non-blogging counterparts. Here's how to make your blog stand out!

Put your target audience first

Ensure you're writing with your target audience in mind. It's easy to get caught up in promoting a specific product or event, but if your content doesn't resonate with your readers, they'll likely bounce off your site without a second thought.

People want to read about things that align with their interests and goals. Regularly review your analytics and gather customer feedback. Before publishing a new post, ask yourself who it will appeal to. If you can't identify at least one group, the article might not be a good fit for your site.

Incorporate visual content

People typically remember 80% of what they see and only 20% of what they read. This is why visual content is a must for bloggers.

Infographics, videos, and images can help you explain complex topics so that they are memorable and easy to understand.

Incorporating videos into your blog posts can also work wonders for your search engine visibility. Research shows that posts with videos are 53x more likely to rank on the first page of search results!

Let visitors search for content

A search bar is a simple, yet powerful, addition to your blog. This handy feature allows your readers to quickly find the content they're looking for, eliminating the need to sift through pages of articles.

When you respect your audience's time, they're more likely to stick around and potentially become customers.

Make your content shareable

Include share buttons in your blog posts, and actively promote your content across your social media channels. You'll want to share new posts as they go live, and set up a schedule for previously published posts. The latter strategy is an excellent way to get more value from your content, since you're not abandoning it after it's published.

Gather user feedback

Reach out to your subscribers and customers through surveys, polls, and feedback forms.

When you know what people like on your site, it's easier to create more content in that same vein. When gathering feedback, ask people about their goals, pain points, and needs. The important thing to remember here is that people's opinions will change over time. Make sure you consistently ask readers to share their thoughts so you can ensure that your content is relevant to their lives.

Monitor

Improving your business blog is an ongoing process. As you implement these strategies, monitor your analytics to determine what's working and what's not.

One of the things we do is track our most popular posts so we can better understand what content resonates with our audience.

Stay flexible, keep an open mind, and don't be afraid to try new things!

Discuss this story.

Top Posts on Indie Hackers This Week 🌐

🔎 Identifying SEO keywords. Posted by Tuiddy.

💻 How we got our first 20 users. Posted by Eli.

📈 We grew our X account to 1.5K followers in six months. Posted by Julia Yu.

🛑 Stop timeboxing. Time block instead. Posted by Slava Minamoto.

🕳️ Is your startup idea a tar pit? Posted by Justin Kroeger.

🗓️ Plan your week, not your whole life. Posted by Akshay Raveendran.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

A Podcasting Pro's Unexpected Exit 🎙️

by Marc Andre

Each week, FlipMySite publishes an inspiring success story featuring a founder growing and selling an online business.

In December 2014, Mathew Passy was working for Wall Street Journal Radio when his department was shut down, and he lost his job. With more than a decade of production experience in radio and podcasts, it didn't take long for the next opportunity to find him.

Growing The Podcast Consultant

Several people that Mathew had previously worked with reached out to him about the possibility of continuing podcasts they had done at WSJ Radio. He realized he could easily do that with just a computer, so he began offering his services to people on the side.

The Podcast Consultant began in January 2015, just a month after Mathew was laid off. He took another full-time job in radio and podcast production while working to grow his business, and he went full-time after about two years.

Mathew's business grew organically, primarily through word-of-mouth. Due to the nature of podcast production, many of his clients needed ongoing work. The combination of ongoing work and referrals helped the business grow and scale steadily.

Most of Mathew's clients had business-related podcasts, so The Podcast Consultant was branded to target those clients specifically. This approach was the result of Mathew's experience and existing network, given his background at the WSJ.

Overcoming challenges

The Podcast Consultant eventually grew to a team of 24 contractors, including three who worked full-time. Growing the team was essential, but Mathew initially struggled with delegating tasks and trusting the contractors.

The team's growth helped Mathew overcome another significant challenge: Maintaining a healthy work-life balance. He decided to go full-time around the same time his kids were born, so he had to work hard to make sure he was keeping clients happy, while not missing out on valuable time with the family.

These two challenges went hand-in-hand: Learning to effectively delegate played a pivotal role in improving Mathew's work-life balance.

The unplanned exit

Mathew was not looking to sell The Podcast Consultant. In fact, he says the possibility of selling never crossed his mind. He was contacted on LinkedIn by the owners of Draft.dev, a content marketing company. They asked about acquiring The Podcast Consultant, opening up the line of communication. Although Mathew hadn't been looking to sell, the idea appealed to him.

Mathew had other things he wanted to explore, but didn't have the time while running the business. He realized that selling would free up his time for the things he wanted to try.

After a few months of discussions, negotiations, and due diligence, Mathew sold The Podcast Consultant for a high six figure sum in April 2023.

What's next

Now that Mathew has more time in his schedule, he's building PodcastTech, a platform where he can share the knowledge he's gained over the course of his 15 year career in podcast production.

Mathew's also exploring opportunities in real estate, and enjoying a new addition to the family: A puppy!

Discuss this story.

The Tweetmaster's Pick 🐦

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Joseph Lee, Darko, Syed Balkhi, and Marc Andre for contributing posts. —Channing