Optimising the Activation Flow and why it's so important to focus on it.. PT.1

Now that the new landing page is converting so much better (up from ~0.5% -> 3% still improving though) I've started to focus on optimising my onboarding and activation pipeline to start converting more users from free -> paid.

Thought I might as well document my thinking behind the changes.

What is activation?

The only goal of an onboarding flow should be to create the shortest path to the AHA moment for your users, which will lead to them to becoming an activated user and thus more likely to convert into that sweet sweet USD.

The AHA moment is that moment when your users literally says, AHA. They get the value of your product. The faster you can deliver them to that value the better. That's why one of the most important metrics I like to focus on is the TTV or (time to value).

Your goal should be to have the shortest time to value as possible. Do that and you'll have a much higher conversion rate guaranteed.

You might have a few different value props and that's ok, but your AHA moment is your most important one.

The difficult part is succinctly defining that value into a set of minimal actions. This is something you will likely get wrong at first and take some time to actually figure out, as you get closer and closer (or in that case of some of my products, further away) from PMF.

I definitely got it wrong at first.

My current definition of the AHA moment or moment of value for Rella is the moment that the user see's a REAL event, GENERATED by THEIR PRODUCT, ideally deployed and is able to use that event to power a DECISION.

This is still probably wrong and will definitely change in the future but for now based on the information I have, that should be the first aha moment for them.

For me this won't count as an activated user, as due to the nature of the product, it takes a while for a user to become activated as they need to generate a significant number of events that can power their decision making, at which point in time they'd be considered activated (this I'm still figuring out).

This is also not something I can achieve in my onboarding flow entirely again due to the above requiring time, but I can definitely push them towards it.

I wrote a whole article on this topic a few years ago so give that a read if you want: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/one-of-the-most-important-saas-metrics-thats-often-ignored-03c0c07e8f

So with that in mind...my thinking was how can I reduce the time to that moment as much as possible?

Why is this so important to focus on?

Well for two reasons:

1. You're going to see more conversions -> more paying users -> reduced churn -> compounding learning effects
2. The most important reason -> It forces you to constantly focus and ask yourself 'What value do we offer'.

Quick pitstop - Commitment

Another important feature of an onboarding flow specifically is building commitment. Getting the user to mentally 'commit' to going through the onboarding, usually through the sunk cost fallacy. You'll this quite common on flows like those myer briggs behaviour tests where they make you answer 25 minutes + of questions, only to then put your results behind a paywall. Since you've spent so much time on doing the questions, you feel like it would've been a waste to not pay the money now. In some cases like the above, building commitment CAN be deceptive, in other cases it's much more subtle.

One good example (can't remember it for the life of me) was a SaaS that had at the very start 'I'm ready to make my XYZ better' which was a button they had to click to continue. Adding this change, led to an XX% increase in onboarding completions, purely because it activates some sort of 'commitment' mechanism in the brain.

The old way:

Firstly we need to look at how we used to do it. The previous onboarding flow was quite bad for a number of reasons which just goes to show how easy it is to get it wrong at the start based on a number of wrong assumptions. I don't actually have any videos or screenshots of it (and god forbid I take the 5 minutes to git checkout and have a look) so text will have to suffice.

So the old flow used to have the following structure:

1. Details:

• First name
• last name
• Company name
• Company size

2. Integrate with Slack
3. Send the first event:

• Used to allow them to trigger their first event with a button press. People would just press this and then move onto the rest of the product and never come back. It was a pseudo activation.

4. Complete

This was bad for multiple reasons. Firstly and most glaringly obvious issue is that the AHA moment is on the third step AND it's essentially fake-able. Users could choose a template button, then hit 'send event' which would allow them to sign in and NOT activate them.

Tsk tsk tsk.

Next I had the slack integration flow second. The reasoning for this was at the time I thought this would build commitment and if the integrated, they would be more likely to then send their first real event. Well turns out I was wrong on that. But you can't learn without trying and to me that's all these changes are. - small experiments that hopefully lead to increasing that %.

I was also collecting the company size early on as well which at my stage, isn't really needed. I know who I'm targeting, and for those who I don't there's a trove of valuable information.

General rule of thumb is if it doesn't help you activate the user, remove it. For some, this piece of information my be crucial.

Afterwards, I'd dump them straight into the dashboard, blind, expecting them to just magically again start tracking more events and getting the most out of the product.

Tsk tsk tsk.
---

Well I tried adding the new flow here but I guess there is a word limit on Indiehackers update posts? Here's a video showcasing the new onboarding flow

https://vimeo.com/794442768/6607d2ce35

I'll add a comment below with the thinking behind each step and changes: