State of SaaS Product Onboarding | Hacker News Reader

State of SaaS Product Onboarding

userpilot.com

141 pointsr_singh45 comments

> You might think it's common courtesy to greet users who are new to your product. However, we found that a massive 40% of SaaS products didn't greet us with some form of welcome screen.

> That means two-fifths of the software we tested didn't acknowledge us at all. That's a lot of alienated users.

Am I the only one that doesn’t like welcome screens and closes them immediately? Just let me get to work

Agree, there’s a certain art to getting it right and most just come off as pandering.

Sort of like the testimonial sections - rarely do they feel authentic. Compliments so sweet that they taste disgusting.

It’s funny how we know testimonials are hand picked but still get influenced by them, even if they don’t feel authentic. Those star ratings must act as dopamine hits or something.

I think the only time I'm swayed anymore is if they seem to reveal an authentic self.

E.g. "I figured this was yet another half-baked project management application, but this surprised me." -- Customer #1

Makes me wonder how much of this is based on experiment data. I’ve seen teams spend weeks on well crafted, thought-out welcome messages and walkthroughs, only to find (through analytics) that most users just X out of the walkthrough right away.

This is actually something that I'm missing in this analysis: walkthroughs and greeting messages are presented as a "must have", but unlike other conclusions in the report, I didn't see any data supporting these assumptions.

> Well, if you use something called a "sniper link", you might make your users' lives easier. Simply go to your inbox and run a search that displays your confirmation email. Then copy that link, and use that on your confirmation page. Then your users will be directed straight to the actual email. This saves them time, and improves the overall user experience.

Never heard of this before, I'm assuming it means generate a link to a search which will show the confirmation email based on the domain of the email address. This will likely not work for anyone using a work email unless you do some snooping on the DNS for that domain (sorry B2B).

It seems that the term comes from here https://growth.design/case-studies/trello-user-onboarding/ and it means that you can add search parameters in the link, e.g. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3A%40trello.co...

That actually sounds like a cool SaaS business idea on it's own.

Create an API to convert email addresses like example@gmail.com to links with custom search parameters like so: hxxps://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3Aexample.com+subject%3AComplete+Registration+in%3Aanywhere

The problem with this approach is that you assume the user only has one email address signed in. They might have `/u/1/` as their personal email used on your website. This could cause more confusion than help since this isn't common practice. (Plus you are assuming gmail.)

> Plus you are assuming gmail.

There aren't any assumptions. You use this method if the user provided a gmail address. Users of other email services fall back to the default method.

It's not just gmail, but G Suite. The idea is to look up the MX records and detect this.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/103FI07J_lwXwbiqPlEMbQb3B_Um... for anyone who doesn't want to make up a fake email to get the graphic.

Thanks for this!

Also created some notes/takeaways in markdown (specifically for Joplin) --if you use joplin works great, but you'll need to fix internal links by downloading the infographic above and attaching it.

https://gist.github.com/patrickcurl/2c4386ec7cea7bfd07b18858...

edit: I'm creating a knowledge source of all I can about SaaS to help me organize/stay on focus when I develop my next side project.

A bit off-topic but I made https://github.com/kamranahmedse/driver.js an MIT licensed library for onboarding your users.

Fun and slightly related, useronboard.com maintains a list of first time onboarding experiences of various websites with great commentary.<https://www.useronboard.com/user-onboarding-teardowns/>

What a great resource! Thanks for sharing this, I wish we had this handy at my previous workplace when we were redesigning/rethinking our onboarding process. I/We wasted a lot of hours in meetings and discussions in trying to think of things from scratch.

Thank you for sharing this!

I made those teardowns, and it's awesome to see people getting use out of them. :)

I know this page visually looks amazing, but it was really hard for me to read the content. Weird layout and huge font sizes.

Yes. 75% helped. Feels like your eyes are going through that weird angle hop obstacle on American Ninja Warrior.

I had to go to 50%, but the title, '1000', and 'Video' are still obnoxious.

It was beautiful on iPad. Maybe it is designed for mobile.

In B2B, we’ve found that friction in the form of additional signup questions for a trial account helps filter out poor quality prospects. For reference most of our subscriptions are > $1000/mo - different demographic to what this article seems to have in mind.

This was my thought. The "awesome frictionless onboarding experience" may get a lot of trial users, but we want the people who need this product and will pay for it. So making the onboarding with some friction will just weed out the triallers. We'll get less trial users, but a higher conversion to paid.

It would be interesting to see video statistics broken down by the country from which the website is operated.

It could be that the percentage of sites that use videos is so low because many of the sites are from countries where English is not their first language thus it is hard for them to create videos in English.

The product I work on has the opposite problem -- our team speaks English and French (mostly US-based), but a minority of our users have either of those as a first language. Our product is in twelve languages, and most of our users seem to hate video subtitles, so everything has to be text. The product is too complex to do meaningful video without spoken or written language, which makes onboarding design incredibly tough.

Now I'm really curious about your product. Care to share a link?

https://www.glassfrog.com/

SaaS for the Holacracy niche.

Interactive Walkthrough - That's why we were a little surprised that only 24% of SaaS products included one.

- We don't have one because they are a lot of work! Working on a SaaS is a constant juggle of priorities and I don't see an Interactive Walkthrough being that high on the list for us.

I'll say the video game industry has more to teach us about onboarding than other industries will.

absolutely. not just onboarding, but in-app help/references. it is dispiriting to get kicked out to some faq site.

Have you heard of the email startup Superhuman (http://superhuman.co/)?

To use Superhuman, you need to join the waiting list and have one of their team members go through a 30 minute onboarding call with you.

Superhuman CEO Rahul Vohra has said many times that he's modeled the user experience for Superhuman after video game design. Note that this isn't the same as gamification.

He views the onboarding for Superhuman as a "tutorial" level in a game, while getting to Inbox Zero is a reward and referring other people is the equivalent of playing with other people.

Controversially, he says that he doesn't care what people want or need, but obsesses over how they feel. People don't need video games after all; they operate as entertainment.

I'd highly recommend watching a talk or two of his on YouTube if you're interested in his thoughts on the relationship between video game and product design.

Problem with this is that it doesn't take into account the profitability of the SaaS. Meaningless saying that x% of SaaSs don't have feature y, when there's no indication that implementing feature y demonstrably drives increase profit.

One interesting thing is that money invested into a good onboarding flow is money saved by saving salespeople's time. Companies with minimal onboarding flows need a very active sales force to actually close b2b customers. You need some sales regardless, especially for closing big companies, but you need less with solid onboarding.

Source: I've worked with the marketing teams of 15+ b2b SaaS companies (https://twitter.com/kevinwlordbarry/status/12222616726367109...)

Please expand on the logic here? Do you mean for low $$$ products, if users can onboard themselves they won't need to talk to sales?

Yep. Basically, business owners are super busy. They see your ad or a mention of you, Google you and sign-up in the form. But - they only become paying customers if they take the time to actually use/test your product in the trial/freemium period. Really good automated onboarding can get them to actually set the product up for their business. Otherwise you need sales reps to walk them through it which is time consuming.

Spending engineering time to save sales time is only viable at very sales-oriented but lower ACV products and even in that case, onboarding is generally focused on very core product functionality. Because sales deals have to be >$10,000 ACV to be worth it for the business, sales generally spends it time on C-suite focused features (SSO integration, security controls, auditing).

Not to negate your point: having a good onboarding helps sales, in the same way it helps customer support. But in practice, I wouldn't use that argument to measure whether or not the onboarding flow was doing it job. Nor should the sales team be able to blame the onboarding flow for low quality leads. Money invested in a good onboarding flow should pay off in onboarding/engagement.

> sniper link I didn't quite understand

Make your product so good that it doesn’t need any annoying walkthroughs, tips or checklists.

How? User testing, full story, user interviews, detailed product metrics, continuous improvements and giving your designers a lot of power.

That's a nice goal, but not realistic, especially for a lot of B2B products. They're just too complicated to understand all the functionality right off the bat.

Sometimes I really appreciate a good walkthrough.

How would this work for something like Photoshop? Or is that an edge case?

Does anyone keep a record of all active SaaS offerings?

this is not ALL but it is handy

https://www.saas1000.com/

https://golden.com/list-of-software-as-a-service-companies/1 (these guys have a restful api which can be easy to mess with to get raw data)

https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/saas-companies-4f45 (needs an account but is handy for research and data dumps)

Thnx!

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