Notion Invoice
Send and track PDF invoices from Notion
Notion has a growing user base in Japan, and as a consequence of that, we're seeing a lot of traffic from Japan to our product.
But, sadly, Japanese language support has been lacking. Until today.
Today we launched support for the Japanese language. More languages in the pipeline.
As our product grew, UX complexity also grew.
Our clunky onboarding was a huge stumbling block. We knew this but didn't know how bad it was until we got lots of support requests, and after looking at the % of dropped signups.
After going through it ourselves, we realised how bad it was. It took 20 steps from clicking "sign up" to the first "aha" moment (for us, that's generating the first invoice).
20 steps!
So improving onboarding became priority. It was a lot of work, especially because we're a SaaS that's built on top of another (Notion), which limits what we can streamline.
But yesterday we shipped it.
The new onboarding now takes only 4 steps. From 20 to 4! A 5x improvement.
We will get back to the data in a month's time to see whether this improves the % of users that complete the setup.
Follow me on Twitter for updates: https://twitter.com/farez
Just released a huge update for new users: onboarding now takes 3 steps, instead of 7!
A lot of users dropped off during onboarding because of the lengthy and confusing setup steps. We've now made it a lot quicker.
Still early days, but we're seeing more completion rates as a result.
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Great work, Farez! This is a huge improvement.
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Thank you, Alex!
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Great. Sometimes users just want to get started. Registration should be quick and easy. In terms of onboarding don't forget to reach out to your users - it doesn't have to stop when they signup.
Ask them how their first day with the app was. Follow up a little later. If they've stopped using the app, ask them why. If they are still using, ask them where you can improve.
By understanding what you users are enjoying (or not) you can further improve the service you provide.
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Thanks for the reminder. These follow-up questions are definitely what we need.
Any experiences on how best to configure these? Timings? Channels?
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What are your steps? How does your funnel and onboarding flow look like now?
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Well, there are 2 ways to configure our app: using a starter template or configuring it all manually.
We tried to fit both journeys onto one flow, which was a mistake. For example, even after they selected to use our starter template we were still asking them questions we already know the answer to (because they're in our template!).
So now we just get everyone to use the starter template to start with, and get them to reconfigure to use their own database later if they so wish (we're going to streamline this one next too).
We did realise beforehand that most of our users chose the starter template option. So we took the 80/20 approach and made it easy for the "80%" of users first.
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Onboarding can be the trickiest and most crucial part of a digital experience, I faced the same problem of reducing onboarding time and clicks without compromising the overall user experience, great to see problems being solved! We learn by example
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Agree. I think we spent about 40% of our time during the initial build, on figuring out onboarding.
The challenge of building an app for a platform like Notion is Notion's flexibility. So we need to strike a balance between enforcing a specific structure and yet keeping it flexible enough to fit the different ways people use Notion.
There's still a lot we can do to improve the onboarding experience.
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Agreed it’s always a work in progress, I always try to test systems and adjust based on collected data about user behavior, it sounds so easy to listen and look at feedback yet can be challenging to figure out what to make of the data
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A few days ago we launched an affiliate programme for our Lifetime Deal.
So far one affiliate has signed up. It was a natural fit as they have been traffic to us for the last few months. Announced it on Twitter too. This is all done on Gumroad.
https://notioninvoice.gumroad.com/l/LifetimeProDeal
Anyone can be an affiliate. This will suit content creators and aggregators that focus on Notion.
If you want to be an affiliate, DM me with your email address.
Everyone's doing it, so why not!
We launched a Lifetime Pro Deal, which gives customers lifetime access to Notion Invoice for $100. This was to our users and mailing lists.
Results: 4 purchases to date, total $400 in revenue.
Next: we will put this LTD on our pricing page too, and launch it on several deal marketplaces like AppSumo.
We have had several users request discounts or lifetime deals, so we are treating this as a signal that the product is solving a problem for them but not at the price they're wiling to pay.
So we will be testing alternative pricing models, including:
- Pay as You Go
- Cheaper lower tier
- More expensive upper tier
We will also test two other plans:
- Lifetime deal, as a way to raise funds.
- Free tier, as a marketing channel.
Farez
We launched Notion Invoice without a way for users to subscribe to it :). Since they have 30 days of free trial use, we had time.
Today we deployed subscriptions. Users will have 30 days of free use, and then they will have to pay to continue.
Payments are being handled by Paddle.com.
It's really worth doing a pre-launch with signups that go into a waiting list. This allowed us to have conversations with potential customers before building the product.
Once we're ready with a Beta, we already have a group of people eager and waiting to try out out product!
1 Comment
If you want to let your community translate Notion Invoice, just give localazy.com a try.
You can get in touch with me for some mutual cooperation.