State of SaaS Product Onboarding • Hacker News Board

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#31

Post by veeralpatel979 » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

dayvough wrote: post #16

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

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.

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#32

Post by veeralpatel979 » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 6:24 PM UTC

aytekin wrote: post #20

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.

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

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#33

Post by danjc » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 7:07 PM UTC

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.

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#34

Post by mikesabat » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 7:14 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #28

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://twitte…

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?

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#35

Post by cm2012 » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 7:16 PM UTC

mikesabat wrote: post #34

cm2012 wrote: post #28

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://twitte…

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.

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#36

Post by jmngomes » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 7:35 PM UTC

gk1 wrote: post #13

Cenk wrote: post #7

> 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

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.

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#37

Post by social_quotient » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 8:03 PM UTC

lowdose wrote: post #25

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)

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#38

Post by markdown » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

ryanjm33 wrote: post #22

Geee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#39

Post by markdown » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #19

ai_growth wrote: post #5

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 t…

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

Re: State of SaaS Product Onboarding

#40

Post by ehfeng » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 9:29 PM UTC

cm2012 wrote: post #28

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://twitte…

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.