Comment by colinmorelli | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinmorelli | Hacker News Reader

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Following on to this and hopefully making it more explicit: your goal should typically be to accelerate users towards their "magic moment" (the moment when the value of your software clicks, they get it, and they suddenly can't imagine living without it), as quickly as reasonably possible. A couple of companies that did a great job at this:

- Slack used to (they still might I just haven't created a new workspace in a while) have Slackbot message you to setup your profile so that you're literally using the software as part of onboarding.

- Aircall has you get a phone number and place a call directly from your browser, then use your phone to call that number back and have it ring in your browser.

Focus on the the path to that magic moment first, ensuring that users who do sign up have an incredible onboarding experience and understand the value.

Otherwise, you're just pouring water into a leaky funnel, and you might end up even worse off. You'll spend the same amount of time and money on support for your leads, but few of them will ever convert to dollars.

Absolutely. I've always been impressed with software that lets me get the magic moment first. E.g., online visual design programs that just let me try the tool in a sandbox. Or the way Github lets you examine and download software without ever signing in. I'm much more likely to give somebody something valuable (e.g., my contact details) if they've given me something valuable first.

You definitely need to think carefully about friction for repeat users on this kind of thing, though... definitely Slack is a peculiar case because of their mind-numbing user model that leads you to having multiple accounts. but I do consulting and as a result frequently get added to other companies Slack workspaces. The deluge of "helpful" messages from Slackbot sent repeatedly in each workspace is absolutely maddening and is one of the big reasons behind my hating Slack.

You also see a similar thing with mobile apps that have a forced tutorial/onboarding intro.

Just keep in mind that every thing that you force users to do as part of onboarding is going to be annoying, and especially for users which onboard multiple times for whatever reason. Even just mobile apps repeating their first-use tutorial when you get a new phone is enough to drive a man to drink.

Yes, this is a good point. Getting the user to their magic moment is not the only thing that matters for all customer engagement, it’s just the primary focus for new customer acquisition.

This reminds me of the phrase “don’t sell past the close.” Once you have the user, focus on keeping them not selling them further. Many services have a way of saying “I’ve used this before” to skip the tutorial, for example.

Regarding the problem of repetitive Slack onboarding messages, I recently created an email filter rule that I think should solve it for me. In Gmail filter syntax:

Matches: from:(notification@slack.com) "you have a new direct message" "from your conversation with Slackbot"

Do this: Skip Inbox

This rule might be harmful if Slack ever sends both Slackbot DMs and real-user DMs in the same email, but my guess based on emails I’ve received in the past is that Slack doesn’t do that. Before activating this rule, you can search your own email history to see if any useful emails you received in the past would have been hidden by this rule.

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