These things are an insult to your users.
I don't care if some marketer from noom wrote a pdf about how it "increased conversion".
Just stop it. It's a horrible dark pattern.
Hey there! Wanted to chime in and let you know that we hear your concerns! I expressed the same sentiment about long surveys to George and Ed when I was considering joining their team. We're committed to making pricing, user onboarding, etc more transparent and easier for our users.
Yes, we do use onboarding survey responses to personalize our program. The programs on the payment page might look the same "regardless of your answers", but behind the scenes, we really are building customized modules based on your responses. For example, if a user mentions in the quiz that they have racing thoughts, we're working to surface relevant content earlier in the program and partnering with our professional sleep psychologists to create more modules that tailor to such needs.
Everyone on our team is constantly learning, and we do appreciate your feedback and patience! To get the app off the ground, we needed to make quick decisions in the beginning and just go with what made sense to us, but as we build out our team and incorporate more of your feedback, we're committed to doing better. I wouldn't work here if I didn't believe this was part of our mission.
The customer wants to see what your product is, what it does, how it does it specifically and succinctly, and how much it costs, front and center.
These "onboarding surveys" is a recently hyped dark pattern that uses a huge number of questions along with fake spinners, and random interstitials to trick the user into entering an email at the end, due to the cost sunk into the onboarding experience.
In marketing/sales speak, you're actually generating yourself a huge number of dud leads this way, making your true conversion numbers actually worse than what they could have been if you only signed up "serious" customers.
If you insist on using an onboarding survey, place it after the signup email, and restrict only to questions, answers to which you actually use to generate the program for the user.
Your business needs paying customers.
That being said...the parent comment does make a valid point about this potentially being a dark pattern. I think a reasonable disclosure (small txt on bottom "free trial for 14 days" or something like that) is probably a reasonable way to inform users.
You're effectively holding users (and especially their data) hostage by exploiting sunk cost fallacy, rather than letting the value of your product stand on its own weight.
Here is a recent thread on this exact topic with much more discussion about how user-hostile this is, and how it makes many assume that your primary goal is to collect data to sell rather than to help any individual with any benevolent task.
Dear websites, stop asking for ransom sign-ups https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36962502
When someone says "you're being shady" the right answer isn't "we'll look into how we can be less shady." The right answer is "oh snap, you're right. Sorry. We'll fix this asap please check back later today."
Why is pricing on the `/faqs` page and not it's own page?
Hanlon's razor doesn't apply to YC backed startups. This is shady not sloppy.
There's also a "loading" screen that doesn't do anything except spin.
You also throw in random interstitials all over the place making it even slower to onboard.
You use savvyy nocode builder and this "onboarding" looks eerily similar to their "sleep app" template: https://trysavvy.com/example/sleep-reset-assessment.
I see this playbook far too often. I'm sorry, but it sucks.
Be honest with your users. Just provide them with clear info about what your service does and how it does it, and how much it costs, off the get go.
Regarding your question, we do send the survey results to our backend, and based on that, we 1. generate a sleep report 2. assign you to one of several tracks we have. We also personalize your specific program within the track (e.g. we'll adjust your sleep restriction window based on your sleep efficiency etc).