How to improve user retention with a killer onboarding plan

Samuel Hulick

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Founder

of

UserOnboard
EP
69
Samuel Hulick
Samuel Hulick

Episode Summary

Today on the show we have Samuel Hulick, the person behind the infamous onboarding teardowns from UserOnboard.com

In this episode, we talked about the single biggest mistake that product companies keep repeating when it comes to user onboarding, how Samuel approaches building an onboarding experience, and the key metrics he believes are important to measure. 

We also discussed where onboarding starts & ends, Slack & Duolingo’s onboarding experience & what makes them stand out, and last but not least we chatted about the relationship between retention & onboarding through Samuel’s lens. 

Mentioned Resources

Highlights

Time

The single biggest mistake that keeps repeating when it comes to user onboarding 00:02:28
How Samuel approaches onboarding and what are the steps he takes. 00:04:05
Metrics he measures to analyze onboarding. 00:09:30
The start and end of onboarding 00:14:30
Slack & Dualingo’s onboarding 00:18:54
Retention & onboarding through Samuel’s lense. 00:24:19

Transcription

Andrew Michael  0:00  
Hey Samuel, welcome to the show.

Samuel Hulick  0:03  
Thank you very much for having me here.

Andrew Michael  0:05  
It's great for the listeners. Samuel is a UX and strategy consultant and the man behind user onboard.com. We've most likely seen one of his onboarding tear downs. Samuel also published 130 page ebook focused on user adoption. So my first question for us was, what would you say the single biggest mistake you see being repeated over and over when it comes to user onboarding?

Samuel Hulick  0:29  
Ooh, the single biggest mistake I guess if I had to generalise it to that degree, I would say that it would probably be a mistake of perspective and what people the the overall mindset that people would be using to approach the project to begin with. And as far as those are concerned, I would say, the biggest perspective. Miss calibration that I see is not focusing on the process of delivering value to your users. rigorously enough, instead of looking at onboarding as a, an area of opportunity to really cement the relationship that people are looking to start with you by helping them get to a really valuable place. A lot of times people look at onboarding as an opportunity to force people by the era through a tour of the company's favourite features or something along those lines. So I'm often approached asking, being asked questions about how to start onboarding or how to approach designing it. And my recommendation is really not to think about it from a UI level and not think about, do you include a tooltip, or an intro video or things like that, but approach it from a level of how you're going to engage with the user and walk them through which different steps and activities and which kind of workflows and where you're going to get them to a place of value, rather than what kind of different doodads inside your interface you want to show off?

Andrew Michael  1:55  
Yeah, I definitely see that as well. And it makes a lot of sense for me. just focusing on that value that people are trying to achieve. Because I think ultimately, like onboarding and signup is the most attention you're ever going to get from your users. And wasting it, showing them a bunch of features that they may never interact with or not really what they're trying to achieve at that point in time, can definitely weigh in on their psychology and their motivation as well. So absolutely, you mentioned something as well about your process. And when you get invited to sort of take a look at onboarding for a company like maybe you want to talk us through that then a little bit more in detail. So obviously, like this problem with perspective is one thing. But what would you typically do when you came in to look for a product and how you're approaching onboarding? What are your steps look like?

Samuel Hulick  2:45  
My initial step is to just go through the onboarding firsthand myself just to get a feel for it. It's surprising how often, design teams will even focus on an onboarding project but not actually go through the entire onboarding process themselves. Including going through the billing, upgrade flow and all the different steps that are involved there and things like that. So just go through and just try to get a read of all the different details that I can and look for areas that stand out to me as parts that were confusing to me and white might be confusing to other people or parts that felt like kind of an awkward request or weird timing or things along those lines. Once again, looking at that, almost, I guess from a heuristic standpoint, but then the other part that I really like to look into, and then if I had to choose, I would between only one of them, I would choose one, what I'm about to say, which is looking at the data and how the onboarding is performing. There are certainly there. I know that analytics and data has kind of a good side of its reputation and especially I guess, in the UX community or in in the design world, kind of mixed experiences for people but for me There are at least a few different reports that I really like to run that can be particularly illuminating. And just seeing how far people are making into the process, what that has to do with their conversion rates and retention rates and things along those lines, and then make some much more strategic decisions based off of what the data says there rather than just coming in and solely operating from a heuristic standpoint.

Andrew Michael  4:25  
Yeah, and Joe, maybe want to talk us through that a little bit more detail. So like when you're coming in, you want to be looking at detail. And specifically on onboarding, like what are some of the metrics that you're looking at? What are some of the reports that are most interesting to you to understand and perform how like onboarding is performing?

Samuel Hulick  4:40  
Sure. So one of the very first report that I like to look at is if we pick two points in a timeline one being when people sign up, and the other being when they first produce value for the company, in whatever sort of business value they're looking for. If that's viral growth, Probably just revenue creation, when's the first time that they, they flip over to being a contributor, a positive contributor in that regard. And then just look at that broken out over weekly cohorts, if there are enough participants to be able to reach statistical significance on a weekly basis, and just say, all right, in the 23rd week of the year, you brought in 6000 people and converted 800 of them. And you know, here's the the conversion rate for what that is. and breaking that down week over week over week, we can track where that conversion rate is trending, and try to pull that up into into a place that's going to be more financially effective and rewarding. So that's one of them. Another big one that I really like to look at is, again, looking at those two points on the timeline where people start when they sign up and where they end up when they're becoming paying users. And looking at all the required steps that are in between maybe there are some steps that you require in your onboarding and experience itself, either by going through a tour or pretending to create a new project or something like that. And then they're also just going to be necessary steps of what somebody has to do to go through the process of actually paying the money and going through the billing flow, and so on and so forth. And so I really like to see where you're losing the most people along the lines. And then I regard and use that to to laser in even more into the exact part of the workflow where the most attrition is taking place.

Andrew Michael  6:32  
Interesting, and I think like what you've just mentioned, like billing a couple of times, and I think this is maybe something to chat about, obviously, depends on the type of business that you're in. And if you're offering a free trial or freemium, or if it's just pay upfront, but in your perspective, like where do you see onboarding, starting and stopping? And I think like this has been a debate on the show before as well in terms of what onboarding actually is in entails. So maybe you Want to talk us through from your perspective, like how you see this challenge in this problem and where it starts and ends?

Samuel Hulick  7:06  
Sure, I would say I take a pretty broad view for onboarding specifically where if you release a new feature, for example, and you have somebody who's already totally up to speed with the rest of your product, there's still going to be an onboarding opportunity with that, or just any capabilities that people could be taking on or using to their advantage that they aren't, I would also highlight is onboarding opportunities. So from maybe it's overly convenient considering my chosen profession and the shingle that I hang out, but I like to think of onboarding in broad enough terms where it could be applied to essentially any situation where what somebody could be receiving value wise, is not currently being received and as a means of transfer, transferring them to a better situation to where they are taking on those capabilities. That being said, if we're looking at it from Data standpoint, you got to draw the boundary somewhere. And so for practical reasons, especially regarding reporting and, and things along those lines, I will usually say that onboarding starts when somebody creates their account, or at least the furthest back that you can go with a persistent ID and knowing what somebody did from one step to another and not just using aggregate data, like you might use for like a split test on your homepage or something like that. And then it concludes, in my opinion, when they have produced value for themselves and produce value for your company. And that goes back to what I was mentioning before as far as finding that initial date at which they started to to contribute to moving from the from being in the red to into the in the black, so to speak. Because one other aspect of this is when you are working on acquisition efforts and just generating signups. Those all come at a cost and so when people arrive at your doorstep and they click their account, let's assume that's the first step in the onboarding flow. They're coming in as in the red, so to speak, they are a sunk cost that you need to convert into something that's benefiting your business. So from that standpoint, it can be a little murky. And it depends on exactly what kind of lens we're talking. We're looking at onboarding through here. But that's kind of the Gestalt of of my, my take on it.

Andrew Michael  9:24  
Yeah, I think definitely those that work in this space in industry are trying to stretch the boundaries as much as possible. So I see that as a toolkit from chameleon, himself as well that go see they have an onboarding, suite of tools and software that help you with it. And he also sort of made the case for like onboarding, really being about helping users adopt certain features and products and because your products always evolving, like you should always be like trying to onboard users on to those different changes and like new features being added, and so forth, so rarely Like it becomes in a case of adoption, and like, how do you help customers adopt whatever it is you're trying to teach them? And I think often times like we in companies we like who owns onboarding? Is it marketing? Is it customer success? Is it product? And I think it complicated answer because it entails like so many different aspects and the lines are blurred in terms of what it actually is. It's interesting your perspective as well on it. So the one thing I wanted to ask as well, sometimes though, you have these tear downs that you did a while back as well, and some of them really, really well done. Looks at the insides of some of the fastest growing companies and how they approach onboarding. Which of these tear downs do you say like one maybe was the most popular and that people really really enjoyed and to luck in your perspective, your opinion, who do Do you think he's really doing a great job of user onboarding?

Samuel Hulick  11:04  
Oh, good questions. So So the first question is just purely from my own the POV of my business and like, which which of them perform the best is content marketing, quote unquote?

Andrew Michael  11:14  
Yes. Yeah.

Samuel Hulick  11:17  
The one that I think that did the best overall was the Apple Music one. I don't know if that's because the word Apple starts with an A, which is higher up in the dictionary for alphabetical sorting on the tear down list. Or if that was just, I mean, I know it was very widely shared. And I have certainly observed in my time in the design world that Apple products tend to create quite a commotion when discussed. So I imagine that played into it as well. The other one that comes to mind as far as ones that just did perform really well was the United Airlines app, onboarding, tear down that I did. And released, I guess, opportunistically right around the time when united was having that problem with dragging its passengers off the planes. So I guess that's another example of people kind of maybe some shopping for you to there something like that. I'm not. I'm not entirely sure. And so that so there's that. And then as far as the other question is concerned, looking at companies, I guess, featured and tear downs and which ones really seem to have the best experience. Duolingo is one that stands out to me very much and that I I most frequently recommend people take a look at to come away with some onboarding insights and things along those lines. slack was also a real standout, but Duolingo I continue, I personally continue to go back and look at that one in particular, and continue to find new insights and lessons to learn and apply even for my own work. So whoever whoever is behind that one, they they really they The now we're operating on a level of sophistication that most people do not bring to their onboarding experiences for sure.

Andrew Michael  13:07  
Yeah. So let's talk through those two examples because oh, they're definitely my two favourites as well. Being slacks and Duolingo is onboarding experience like you having taken a tear down at these two companies haven't really like analysed the ins and outs of how they onboard new users or how they get them to adopt new features. What would you say is like a couple of things that really stood out for you in these experiences that will Okay, well, this is cool. They've really got a good grasp on this onboarding.

Samuel Hulick  13:39  
It will do a lingo especially stands out to me as far as just almost philosophical takeaways or just looking at the perspective that they brought to it. One thing that's very clear throughout is that they are paying a lot of attention to delivering the value that the users are seeking first and foremost, rather than many Their onboarding or their early experience about what they want people to do, per se or or just having administrative hoops to jump through that, that were maybe didn't even need to be in there to begin with. Instead, it was very lean and mean and very focused on what people are there to do, which is to learn another language. And that came even before they asked you to create an account and in the experience that I went through, when frights straight from the homescreen, to picking a language and then diving into your very first lesson before creating an account even came up. So the idea of leading with value before you ask for value in return, that's a concept that I picked up from Ryan delk. And that has stuck with me for a long time. And I think that that is absolutely something that people can benefit by keeping in mind on a consistent basis when designing their onboarding experiences.

Andrew Michael  14:57  
Yeah, I think that is a big mistake. A lot of People make is forgetting sort of that user's psychology and moment in time and coming to your product or service and asking them to fill in a bunch of details. That's taking time and motivation away from them is definitely not a good place to start. Like, I think you've done a good job capturing attention giving to your site or to your app. But like, you've got to understand that people's time is precious, and asking them to jump through a bunch of hoops before they can get to that point in time where they see value from your product is never going to be a great experience for anybody. You mentioned as well like, slack being another one then so Duolingo like Greg points, like they really try and deliver value before they're asked to extract information from you're really trying to focus on like what you came to achieve with them. What was it about slacks that stood out to you like, what do you think they did really well in their experience?

Samuel Hulick  15:56  
Well, it's been a while so I'm not sure how reflect This isn't their current experience or anything like it but at the time, what really stood out to me I recall was just the the sense of warmth and hospitality that they conferred through the through the workflow that they put you through but but especially in the copy that they provided and the sort of tone and emotional tone that they set there. That was one thing that stood out to me and then another big thing that I recall from the slack one is that they had a little slack bot, welcome you and and sort of take over the the rest of the activation process. So you go from entering in basic information into sort of just like a wizard form overlay, pretty basic signup, practice kind of interface. And then at some point, you meet the chat bot, and then the chat bot is the one who asks you to to fill in the rest of the information like your name, and I guess maybe your role or things along those lines, and so without even really calling much attention to it, they actually get you to engage in the core activity of the product, which is using the chat interface and sending messages through the chat line and things like that. And they get you to get some reps in early and use the product to explain itself and get people up to speed. And from that standpoint, that's another major hallmark of quality that I look for in onboarding is not only can you get people to be aware of the different services that you offer, but can you get them to actually be engaging in them and doing so malicious, malicious? volitionally and, and enthusiastically ideally?

Andrew Michael  17:44  
Yeah, I think that's always like the maybe even the holy grail of onboarding is if you can actually use your own products and get them to start using the product service to realise its value and realise all the features something I think even in our job he's broken apart and talked about how We could actually use their specific features more in onboarding and explaining their value. And really trying to like get them to, for example, we have a survey tool within the app and a great way as well like to show the value around that could be really to ask a user a question like, how did you discover hot jar, once they fill it in, like, give an example. This is a great way you can use surveys, surveys can be set up in x. y&z didn't really, through an onboarding experience, really allow them to discover the value not only what the tool is, but what are the use cases where the tools and how they can be used in their own businesses to sort of understand their customers better. But yeah, I think that's definitely those two examples are the ones that stand out the most for me, and I loved slack experiences one I think one thing they also really really nailed was making the invite process seamless. So if you want to join a different channel, different community as well It was really, really easy specifically as well, if you had the company level, you have the same email. And it was an seamless experience and getting that account set up too. So I think they really do a lot of thought around. How do users join accounts? How do users get invited to accounts and like how can we make this a seamless experience? I think there might have been one of the few first introduced the idea of the magic password and then it just got widely adopted as well across the industry.

Samuel Hulick  19:28  
And even just framing it as a magic password, you know, like, that was a pretty slick thing to do. So yeah. And and very much agree to your to your point about the invitation onboarding, that's something that I wish I had brought up as part of the my memory of the slack tear down because that's absolutely crucial and something that onboarding tends to be overlooked in a lot of product design practice practices, and just from an organisational level can often kind of fall through the cracks and even more, so. Is invitation onboarding In my opinion, it's something that is not nearly often talked enough about, especially in the case of something like slack because you it's not. It's not like if one person sets up a slack instance for the company and then nobody else wants to participate that that's still useful, like, I mean, it would, it's kind of an all or nothing affair. And I remember hearing them saying that that was a key part of their strategy, especially early on was to figure out how to not just get one person to engage but how to unlock a whole team's engagement. And invitation onboarding, of course, is going to be a crucial part of that. But it's it's crucial either way, I just recently signed up for figma. And a whole number of different services that are b2b b2c, any of the above. If it if you can get more value by collaborating with people, and especially if that's a key part of your value proposition. You've got to think about that invitation on boarding experience because as as clunky as as your onboarding experience might be, at least that person going through it initially is going to have some idea of who you are as a company and have some idea of of buying already because they're, they're setting up the shop and trying to pull other people into it. But if you're just somebody who works on so and so's team, and you're getting a random email invitation, saying, click this link to create your account, or whatever, and you have no other context, and you're getting invited into a product that you've never even heard of, that's a really tough sell. So I think that you know, it's it's a scary challenge to take on, but it's something that we we as an industry, I think could could do well to promote even more than it's currently regarded. It's I think it's a really thorny design issue and, and at the same time, a really fascinating one.

Andrew Michael  21:51  
Yeah, sure. And a lot of work needs to be put into like you mentioned, especially if your tool is around collaboration and That team can extract more value. I think ultimately, as far as retention goes, having more users in an account actively using your product is always going to be like a safety gap in reducing retention or reducing churn and increasing retention, the better. Let's talk about that a little bit as well, because definitely like on the show, whenever you ask about churn and retention, like what are the top areas that companies can improve and work on? onboarding is definitely one of the number one places that people turn to and say, okay, like start at the top. It's much much easier to focus on a user who's coming into the app who's excited about your product or service, and to try and show them the value that can be distracting and get them to the point where they've created a habit out of your product, as opposed to trying to resurrect somebody who's actively made a conscious decision to churn and is trying to cancel. So from your lens equity On user onboarding when you're going into approaching the challenge or the problem, how much does the idea and the concept of retention play into your work? And how do you think about the challenge as well when going about crafting and putting together an onboarding experience?

Samuel Hulick 23:19  
Yeah, I wish more people would ask that question. I think that retention should be a major primary Top of Mind consideration for any onboarding project. If you're not approaching it from the standpoint of trying to produce more value for yourself and more produce more value for your users. You're probably just giving people a big series of next buttons to click until they can actually get into the product. So I would I would, I would actually even add a little wrinkle to what you just mentioned. I think you described onboarding as getting people into the app. So that They can perceive the value that they could be receiving, and then hopefully build up habits around engagement engaging or something along those lines. And to me, it's I the one distinction that I would draw between how I see retention being so crucially important, and times when I don't see or a definition of retention that I don't see as important, is just getting people into your product and optimising for time on site or return visits or day over day retention and things along those lines. If that's not inherently aligned with the users getting value out of your product, you're going to be a fighting an uphill battle and be I think, just optimising around the wrong metrics themselves. So what I really like to look for are instead How are people pursuing value on their own terms and how can we position our support structure be that emails, the product itself, our marketing knowledge base support, the whole deal of how we support our customers? How can we position And that to help them succeed, rather than how can we position that to addict them to what we offer? So I'm sure that's not what you meant when you were when you were saying, talking about building habits and things along those lines. And on the surface. I don't disagree with you. But at the same time, when I'm thinking about retention, I'm thinking about it in terms of the the recurrence of value being produced rather than retention in terms of people continuing to be warm bodies who are visiting the product or something like that. Does that distinction make sense to you?

Andrew Michael  25:33  
No, of course, then it's definitely not what I was referring to in saying I think obviously, like people come to your product for reason. They have a problem, you they believe you have a solution. And if your product doesn't solve it for them, they're going to turn so when talking about like onboarding and bringing users into your product and creating habits like that habit really needs to be around receiving the value. So yeah, what is it and we talked about this, we talked about this a lot, almost every episode, but every Good case I love and I recommend quite a lot is Heidi Gibson, we chatted about how GoDaddy went about this. And specifically with their onboarding experience, they were focused on a product that they were trying to introduce, which was a website builder. And what they found was, they were trying to get people to set up the website. And that was their first metric. They started looking at how many people actually managed to set up their website and put it live when you serve them well for attention, but they also realise in like, people are trying to set up a website to set up a website. If they're a hair salon, they're trying to get bookings if they're a restaurant, they're trying to get bookings if they're an online store, they're trying to drive sales. And I think they're in a fortunate position where they actually have the data on this and they know when sales bookings are made. So they're really then switch that value metric that they consider the users as active and as receiving value from the product or service to those specific cases of like calls booked or meals delivered or online sales made. And once they were able to do that, it really, really helped them to reverse engineer and look back. Okay, what were the main actions that really helped ecommerce drive sales and obviously increasing traffic was one of those and they will then say okay, the biggest traffic drivers were we noticed is when companies add social sites, social brings in traffic, and then they're sort of taking steps backwards, we're able to see okay, what are the most important things we need to be focusing on during onboarding now, to make sure that we setting our customers up for success to get to that in value so and for different products will be different and time to value will be different for a lot of companies and a lot of products? And it's also just trying to understand like, what is the real end goal that your customers trying to achieve? versus what are the little steps and maybe potentially a little wins along the way so that you want to be celebrating so one step, obviously, like is setting the website up and getting it live? Like that's a really great moment. It's a proud moment, but ultimately, they didn't come to you. To set up a website that came to get business, they came to you to get sales. So figuring that out and then reverse engineering that into us onboarding and hiking, what are the steps they need to be successful to achieve their end goal I think is very, very crucial in this step.

Samuel Hulick  28:15  
I wish I could just hit play on what you just said in play it for people instead of having to say it over and over again, I completely agree.

Andrew Michael  28:23  
Yeah. So I think simulus will like one thing ask every guest that joins the show love to get your opinion on this as well is, let's imagine a scenario now where you've joined in your company and general retention is not good at this company. And you've been asked to sort of help try to turn things around. The company is looking to try and get some quick results like wants to see action like in the first 90 days. What would you want to be doing with your time during those 90 days to try and help improve retention at this company?

Samuel Hulick  28:56  
Yes, I the first thing that comes to mind for me would be just getting an understanding of exactly how bad the retention is, I find that it is possible to to pour users in at the top of a funnel and eventually get some to show up at the other end. But retention really is sort of like when things come out in the wash and you really start to see whether you're you're providing something that is in demand or not. So if the retention was was alarmingly poor, I would probably have different takeaways. And I probably wouldn't recommend focusing on onboarding right away, or even necessarily focusing on retention unto itself right away I would be focusing on on just making sure that I was providing a service that was valued by people period, and getting really clear on who the people who are getting value out of the service are and what value how they see it on their own terms. And trying to make more of that happen rather than just trying to kind of stuff my product down where people's throats that Kavita side if I was just going in to look at it on a tactical level and just trying to bring that retention curve up a little bit, or the turn curve up to, to make the numbers better. And some of the things that I would immediately be looking at are one just getting clear on and I'm probably sound like a broken record here but just clear on what sort of value people are pursuing, not only in general in their lives when they're signing up for your product, but also what they're looking to make happen specifically in that first session when they are creating their account and beginning their hands on relationship with your product. And what are some ways to go about doing that are to run sign up surveys, you can make a initial initial, excuse me, an initial part of your onboarding workflow, can ask people at a high level what are what are the different outcomes that you're here to to achieve? So if this was a bank, which are you here to save money, Are you here to Provide checking to your business are just basic fundamental units of accomplishment that people can can arrive at through the software. I would ask people upfront which of those are most interesting to them, because that opens up a lot of different things. One is it gives you a source of passive information, where you can be seeing exactly how those numbers split out and how the different motivations represent themselves proportionally among the people who are signing up. You can also trace those all the way to the your point of conversion and when people start producing value for you, and see how if there is a difference in performance as far as the where people were at when they signed up, and how many of those people persevered make it to the point of providing value for you. Another thing that it lets you do is provide customised experience user by user. So if somebody's signing up for an app, and it's because they want to save money and for somebody else, it's because they want to give their employees checks to write or something like that. You can provide a customised personalised experience, where they don't know that it's not the onboarding experience that everybody else is getting. But it's putting them in an express link directly to the to the outcomes that they personally are seeking. Both of those I think are good strategies. Another thing that I would immediately start looking at would be lifecycle emails. I know that you had Val Geisler on and I'm sure that you to discuss that, too, to a great degree, but I would, I would just like to give my money signup support to that as well. I think that not only can lifecycle emails be really useful in bringing people back into your app and keeping individual accounts on a path to success and long term retention. But they can also be a really wonderful place to be running quick, lightweight experiments and just getting an understanding of how different terminology resonates with people when the ideal time to present Send a recommendation of some sort is and and what how the timing might be different from one recommendation to the next, and so on and so forth. So I personally, if I was just coming in cold to a company and was just going to guess where the biggest immediate gains were going to be, from an onboarding slash retention standpoint, I would assume that it's probably available in an email format first. And another nice thing with that is whatever you learn in your email experimentation, you can then use to make yourself that much more confident when you're taking on bigger in product or in app sort of changes as well. So that's where my mind immediately goes.

Andrew Michael  33:39  
Yeah, and obviously, I gravitated to onboarding, but I think that's definitely one of the areas that has the potential to have the biggest impact and the most immediate impact that you can actually feel on cohorts as they're coming in and signing up. Because the nice thing with onboarding is you can actually really start looking then retention and breaking it down like month by month, week by week. Can having the focusing go not just for like, what is long term retention look like? What is month three look like what is week to look like? What is day to look like and having these different benchmarks and then focusing on onboarding, you're able to quickly see sort of the impacts and changes that you're making a little bit more immediate to that final output metric being retention and churn that might be months away from and it's a combination of multiple input events like having that view. And yes, earlier on gives you that way to see the changes in impact earlier to

Samuel Hulick 34:34  
Yeah, not only do you get to see quicker returns on what you're doing, but also you have a much higher volume of participants because there are a lot more people around at the beginning of the onboarding experience than there are a couple months after exactly

Andrew Michael  34:49  
the effects thing as well.

Samuel Hulick  34:52  
Yep, yeah, it all cascades further down. So if you can, if you can, if you have a 10 step, conversion flow and you can Get 10% more people to step two than you were before then that will trickle down through the remaining steps as well. So, I mean, I don't know if it's corny, but I like to think of onboarding as your first opportunity to retain people. It's like you as soon as they created their account, that's your first chance to help that account not turn. So yeah, I mean, the more that you can understand what those major user accomplishments early in the relationship are, especially to just put people on the right track, you can absolutely see compounding results further down the line. It really doesn't take that long.

Andrew Michael  35:32  
Yeah. Well, very cool. Cemil thanks so much for joining the show today I really had a great time chatting is anything you want to leave the audience with anything that they should be look out for in terms of the work that you're out there and putting in Final thoughts.

Samuel Hulick  35:47  
I would just say Hang on, hang in there, everybody. This world is crazy right now. And and if you want some onboarding advice, you can go to user onboard calm but otherwise, just just stay safe and be Be Excellent.

Andrew Michael  36:01  
Well, listen, thanks so much Mo. It's been a pleasure having you today. I wish you best of luck now going forward

Samuel Hulick  36:06  
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Samuel Hulick
Samuel Hulick
About

The show

My name is Andrew Michael and I started CHURN.FM, as I was tired of hearing stories about some magical silver bullet that solved churn for company X.

In this podcast, you will hear from founders and subscription economy pros working in product, marketing, customer success, support, and operations roles across different stages of company growth, who are taking a systematic approach to increase retention and engagement within their organizations.

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