Add Friction to Your Onboarding | Hacker News Reader

Add Friction to Your Onboarding

wraptext.equals.com

73 pointsFragrantRiver29 comments

The article mentions retention rate down 30% but makes no mention of conversion rate. Was it up by the same amount? Was it up by more? Did the MRR change? There's not enough information here to make any kind of conclusion.

They also seemed to give up very quickly on the low-friction version. Maybe they could have iterated to reduce time-to-value, by pre-populating some example dummy data or something.

The article's point doesn't seem right.

It's measuring a random quantity in the bigger picture.

Retention percent doesn't matter as much as number of users retained, which leads to total revenue. But then you have to factor in the cost of acquisition. And the cost of infra to serve non-paying users.

My take on it: they took a multivariate analysis, plugged in the details of their business model, came up with a result, and then publish it as if it's advice applicable for all kinds of companies.

One thing early stage business can do to increase success is have a process where the undesirable are filtered out early.

When a business is new, you don't want every client, you need the "right" type of client. The ones who don't fit (yet) can be a huge drag. After a more general PMF they're ok.

I think the article had this generalization but went too specific (for their case) and then lacked numbers.

>One thing early stage business can do to increase success is have a process where the undesirable are filtered out early.

This is why I always put typos in my spam emails, and make sure to always mention that Javascript is a good programming language at least once in all of my HN comments.

Tbh even if their right the confounding variable that they are maximizing revenue over customer satisfaction is likely to be problematic.

There are very few businesses that get away with this, of those - they are mostly entrenched monopolies that can get away with anything that doesn't cause regulatory reaction.

If you make me enter a credit card in during a trial, I am going somewhere else. Amount of effort isn’t worth it. I have to log on to Ramp and request a virtual card and explain to finance why I need a new virtual card for a service I haven’t even trialed/demoed. Yeah no thanks.

Irony is that equals product would probably be useful for our org since we use salesforce and snowflake heavily.

The bigger picture is that if the people you want to be paying for your software is "enterprise" and your product is at all applicable for individual use just give it away for individual use. You'll get way more sign-ups, word of mouth, evangelicals already in the companies you're trying to sell to, and fodder for testing out new features live before pushing it to the customers who will be way more mad if it has bugs.

If you want true stickiness via sunk cost, selling to someone who is already using your product and doesn't want to learn a different thing when deciding what the team will use is it.

Thats what a credit card before trial discourages. Enterprise users aren't going to put their personal credit card in for a trial. And with we do have a corporate card, its only for T&E and not for software and services Those are billed to finance controlled card which recently being managed through virtual cards service like Ramp or Brex.

As a hobbyist, I love companies like this. My employer is one of them, and I can see first-hand that it works exceptionally well.

It can also be pretty damn good for recruiting down the line!

Same having to enter in a CC for a trial is a major deterrent for me as well because I also have to remember to cancel it if I don't like the service.

>"Your goal is for people to get their first moments of value from your product, commonly known as “activation”. All the talk about eliminating friction and removing steps is totally detached from this goal." This is the gist I Guess. Remove as much friction as possible without compromising the "moments of value".

This feels a lot like content marketing instead of anything of value. It's really vague on details and numbers. It could not be about friction. It could easily be a blank spreadsheet does poorly compared to one with sample data loaded in.

Credit card vs none. Is that better retention or just eliminating those that would have never paid so retention looks higher?

Just seems like fluff with a clickbait title.

This advice is absolutely on the spot for B2B Saas businesses. For B2C? not really.

That line graph is bad and it should feel bad.

I have come to appreciate downloadable apps that work out of the box. This immediate gratification lowers friction because users can walk away if it’s not right for them. Don’t waste your user’s time.

I made a decision early on with my electron app (Label LIVE, to design and print labels from excel/CSV) to make it fully functional on first start. The only catch is the print has a randomly placed watermark. If it works for the user, they can signup for a free trial to remove the watermark for 14 days. If after two weeks they have found value in the product they can purchase a perpetual or subscription license.

We have always taught that friction is filtering, and that filtering should be used wisely.

i'm doubtful of this being causation. But, if it is, isn't this basically a clickbait-y way of saying you are trying to create "sunk cost"?

I wish the writer would let us know if the total number of activations went up or down.

It took effort to omit that information, so the omission is probably covering over data that doesn't support the article.

Total number of activations went down.

We aren't trying to hide anything, just tried to share a single number.

...or maybe instead of friction (it gives you burns) let's add engagement triggers. Clickbait title.

Sure, dumbification of software has to stop somewhere. Emacs is not easy to learn and it takes quite a while to see the point of all the complexity and flexibility over just using Notepad. But, at the end of the day, it can still hold its own over modern IDEs for many tasks. Notepad has its uses, but I am not going to pay $999/seat for Notepad. To convince me to pay, you need to explain to me everything I am getting and give me enough skills to have an initial idea of how I can map my unique needs to what is being offered. That's going to take some time.

Minimal viable friction is a good sweet spot to work on the balance of.

I just want a tool. Just let me use it. Thanks!

Yeah. I get I’m not the standard user or anything, but I absolutely hate needing to click through onboarding hell. I’d much prefer to explore for myself.

The author’s point is that their spreadsheet tool /needs/ a data source to actually be usable. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me?

I wish I could upvote this post more than once. Some good, clear thinking.

That 2nd graph is awful. You’re comparing the 8week retention of two groups with a single line graph?

There’s not even 8 points on that line.

Article is disingenuous. They say retention is down 30%, but we don't know how many signups there were.

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