I’m going to share the exact six-step framework my team used to onboard and activate hundreds of thousands of new users across multiple SaaS companies.
Typically we see 30 to 40% of new users are lost within the first 7 minutes.
Which is brutal when you think about how much time, money, and energy companies spend to acquire an account, only to lose it that fast.
If you watch these accounts (I've spent hours and hours watching these accounts in user interviews and tools like FullStory), you typically see new accounts sign up, poke around for a couple minutes, then close the browser, and leave.
And if they leave before they’ve experienced any meaningful value, they don’t come back. It drives us growth nerds crazy.
I’ve spent years of my career focused on increasing activation rates and improving new user onboarding experiences. Through a ton of trial and error, failed experiments, and a few lessons learned along the way, my teams stumbled onto a framework that helped us drive 40 to 50% activation rates.
In this piece, I’m going to save you the years of trial and error and give you the framework, so you’ve got a roadmap.
Step 1: Define What Value Looks Like
Get crystal clear here. Value is a fuzzy term, so in SaaS we’ll often call this the activation moment, or the aha moment. It’s when a user first experiences the main benefit that inspired them to sign up in the first place.
This matters because if you don't clearly understand what the value is, onboarding becomes a guessing game, or worse, an opinions game, and you'll run into a few challenges.
One, you spend too much time helping a user get set up.
New users have a limited amount of time and attention when they come into your product. If you take them through too many setup steps before they see tangible value, that momentum runs out, they get frustrated, and they leave.
Two, you guess at the features and order of operations to walk them through, and onboarding becomes an endless tour of everything your product could do instead of a path focused on helping the user experience value on their terms.
When you’ve clearly defined what value is, you can guide a new user from blank account straight to their first win.
So how do you actually define “value”?
If you’re an early-stage company, go qualitative. Talk to users. The growth community loves to glorify quantitative data, but in my experience, if you’re early stage without much confidence in your model, this source is more helpful.
Ask them something like: “We’re so happy you’re a customer here. Would you mind taking us back in time and walking us through the moment you first felt like you got real value out of the product?”
Ask 10 to 20 of your first customers that question, then look for trends in the answers.
If you have confidence in your data, go confirm it quantitatively. Does reaching [this step] correlate with higher retention, and ideally higher conversion from free to paid?
Ideally you combine the two sources.
Get qualitative input from customers as a starting point. Then check the quantitative data to confirm that it correlates to retention and conversion.
Step 2: Reduce Time to Value
Once you’ve defined what that value is, start measuring, and then reducing, how long it takes a new user to experience that value for the first time.
The faster and smaller that time to value is, the higher your activation, retention, and conversion metrics tend to be on the back end.
Three steps to get started:
Audit your existing onboarding sequence. For most of us it’s filled with bottlenecks, unnecessary steps, and distractions between new user and first value. Go through the experience with fresh eyes. Pretend you’re a new account, not the power user you actually are if you work there. Write down every step, page, and workflow a new user has to complete, and ask yourself “is this absolutely necessary?”
Streamline the actions. Focus only on the actions that build momentum toward activation. Simplify the path by removing as many distractions, tutorials, redundant fields, or overlong setup steps as you possibly can.
Track it with metrics. If you haven’t already, start measuring time to value. Focus on getting that number as small as reasonably possible, and compare how long it takes your best users to activate versus your less active or at-risk-of-churning users. You’ll usually start to see a correlation.
Step 3: Use Triggers to Guide Users
Now that we’ve defined success, step three is about using effective triggers to guide users toward it.
Triggers are nudges that guide users to take an action.
They’re essential for keeping users on track, especially when they’re not sure what to do next. Triggers act almost like a GPS: they remind users where to go, what to do next, and how to get there.
A few kinds worth exploring:
In-app prompts. Progress bars, tooltips, popups. Basically anything that shows users how close they are to completing a task, keeps them motivated, or points out next steps.
Behavioral communications. Email, or SMS/push if your product is a mobile app. Things that remind users to complete incomplete actions and suggest which actions to take next.
Checklists. A list of the actions a new user might take, suggesting the next action that leads them toward that value moment.
You can leverage low-code tool options, or build these yourselves.
The key with effective triggers, regardless of type, is timing and simplicity. The trigger should appear when users are ready to act and when you know what the next step toward value is. And simplicity means not suggesting everything they could do, just enough guidance to push them forward to one clear next step.
At this point you’ve got a pretty good baseline onboarding experience.
You’ve defined what value looks like, reduced the friction and time to value, and added clarity through effective prompts and triggers.
Step 4: Personalize with Custom Recipes
The mistake most companies make is stopping here, which treats every new user exactly the same way.
But not everybody signs up for the same reasons.
Step four is about personalizing the experience to match user goals, through what I call custom recipes. IE different journeys or flows a user can take from new account to first value.
Four steps to build custom recipes:
First, understand what the different recipes could be. Learn your users’ jobs to be done, essentially their goals for signing up. Ask an open-ended question to every new account, something like: “Thanks so much for signing up today. Would you mind sharing the main reason you created an account?” Ask it open-ended so you get answers in their words, not yours.
Second, once you’ve got enough responses, review the data and categorize the answers into 4 or 5 common themes. Those are your main jobs to be done.
Third, once you’ve identified the themes, start asking every new user to self-identify, in a dropdown or self-select format: “Which of these best describes the reason you signed up?” using those same 4 or 5 themes.
Fourth, use that data to customize what actually happens inside the product. Regardless of which prompt system you’re using (onboarding tours, popups, checklists), you still want to get people to the same value goal, the same aha moment.
But the examples you use, the way you talk about the features, and maybe even the order or templates you offer will differ slightly based on the goal they self-identified.
Learn the custom goals, prompt users to self-identify, and then deliver value on their terms.
Step 5: Use Ready-Made Templates
Step five is about using ready-made templates to help users experience value even faster, instead of starting every new user with a blank slate.
This matters most for companies that need a lot of “stuff” to get going, or have a long setup process.
For example, if you’re an email product, the user can’t send an email without first uploading their contacts list. Or if you’re a video product, the user needs to upload their first file before they’re able to use the video to grow their business.
Not having your stuff ready is a blocker to experiencing value, and at a lot of companies you might not even have access to the “stuff”, or you have to go ping someone for it.
Templates solve this challenge elegantly.
To use them at your company, first identify the common use cases (you already did this work when you identified the main jobs to be done), then design pre-made templates that help people accomplish the thing they’re signing up for.
Embed those templates in the onboarding sequence, where users can apply one if they’d like, or on the website itself.
Miro is a great example here. If you sign up and say your goal is strategy and planning, they suggest strategy and planning templates to help you get going. Canva has a similar experience. And we built something very similar at Postscript to solve this same problem.
The goal isn’t to replace a user eventually uploading their own stuff and using the product their own way.
It’s to accelerate the engagement, showcase the product’s potential, and let them experience that value moment with your stuff, so they’re more likely to come back and use their own stuff later.
Step 6: Build Momentum Before Sign-Up
The sixth and final step is building product and onboarding momentum before the form submission ever happens.
There's a lot of ways to build excitement and demand before someone ever hits your signup form. Your website copy, your positioning, your proof points all play a part.
But one of the highest-leverage moves is letting people actually use the product before they ever fill out a form.
One way to do this is by embedding a lightweight version of your product on your website, so visitors can play with it and experience value right away, without filling out a form.
A large population of users just want to see the product in action before they commit to signing up. A simple embeddable or lightweight version lets them do that, and makes them more likely to convert down the road. Users who sign up after already knowing what to expect, having already seen and played with the product a little, are much more likely to keep engaging in a meaningful way.
Here’s what I’ve found works best if you’re building pre-signup momentum:
I’ve had the most success with something interactive (vs. a video or static media), whether it’s an interactive demo or a lightweight version of the tool on the website that users can actually play with.
Typically you’ll see high double-digit conversion or interaction rates (Navattic has published comprehensive benchmark data here), compared to the 2 to 4% of your traffic that will sign up for a free plan/ free trial. So it engages a much more meaningful population of your website visitors. And you don’t need the full functionality available, just enough to help users see what the value will be like.
After a few interactions, a certain amount of time, clicks, or completions, prompt them to sign up to save their progress and continue inside the tool. That way you build momentum pre-signup while still encouraging people to get inside the tool and keep building it in a real way.
You’ll find that when folks do sign up, they’re way more likely to continue that momentum, activate, and experience value in a way that leads to conversion.
Recap
That’s the six steps to improving onboarding and activation, and saving more of the new users you’re already paying to acquire:
Define value and get crystal clear on the aha moment inside your tool.
Reduce time to value as much as possible.
Guide users along the way with effective prompts and triggers.
Don’t treat all users the same. Use jobs to be done to personalize onboarding into recipes.
Start users in the middle with ready-made templates, for when they don’t have their own stuff ready.
Build as much momentum as possible on the website before a user ever signs up
Need help improving your onboarding and activation rates? I take on a small number of advising opportunities each year. Interested? Let’s chat!