Redesigning our self-serve onboarding for customer activation

When it comes to onboarding new users in SaaS, there are many options, ranging from doing nothing all the way to providing full demos and product tours. I have personally had experience with each of these approaches, seeing the good and the bad side of any approach. Earlier this year, we at Castos decided to take a fresh look at our onboarding process to focus on user activation. We wanted to make sure that user’s getting to a point of value as quickly as possible was at the heart of all our decisions. After a thorough review, we found that there were some really important lessons to be learned. First and foremost, we wanted to create an onboarding experience that was as streamlined and easy to understand as possible to set users up to get podcasting.

We took a hard look at what kind of information and resources we could provide that would help our users get up and running with our product in the quickest and most efficient way. We also sought out ways to make the onboarding process more engaging, so that users would be more likely to stick around and become loyal customers. In the end, we were able to create an onboarding process that was not only fast and enjoyable, but something that moved all the right metrics as well — this is something that helped me grow and learn a lot!

Just a note that my takeaways and approach could be unique to the type of product, customers and value proposition we provide, so it’s not meant to be a one-size-fits-all approach to onboarding.

No Demo Content

Some products set you up packed full of demo content… think a to-do list app with items to check off as you get in to the product. I get it, you’re using and learning the product as you get onboarded. But for me, each time I just get in there and clear out all demo content to actually start using it, I’ve hardly found any value in doing this. Further, it is believed that when you allow the user to input the data themselves, they are actually invested in the content that they “own” in your product through the process and it would be better for retention and them coming back to use the product again.

Focus on key activation moments

One thing that was front and centre throughout rethinking our onboarding wizard was to focus on activation moments. To me this means the points in time when the user gets some form of value or validation that what they’re doing is on the right track.

A podcast has an RSS feed that is the mechanism whereby the episodes are distributed. Any platform can ingest that content and then distribute it to their audience. Someone like Apple Podcast or Spotify. Each distribution platform has it’s own set of requirements to make it a “valid feed” — these are things like the podcast needing a title, description, cover art, at least one category, at least one episode, etc.

So when it came to identifying our activation points, we meshed all requirements together to see what information we need to set a new podcast up for success. The main aim being that once you’re done with onboarding, you can distribute your podcast to get the word out there without getting stuck with rejections, etc.

This manifested in an onboarding wizard and checklist that we place in the dashboard to help guide you if you skipped any parts in the onboarding and wanted to come back to it later.

Use the actual product

As far as possible I would urge you to use the actual product to onboard a new user. This builds muscle memory of how to use the product and makes their second, third, etc time using it so much easier.

When looking at our user base, a low percentage of users were power users who has more than one podcast, they are not the users we were concerned with, and thus decided to use a combination of a dedicated onboarding wizard to set up the podcast itself as most users only do this once. We then follow that up with having the user use the product to upload their first episode in the actual product to build the muscle memory on the repeatable action that they would come back to do every week or month.

Onboarding Wizard

My hypothesis here was simple, remove all distractions. This was inspired by the focussed checkout style shopping carts on e-commerce, where once you are in the flow to checkout, they start removing parts of the UI that could distract you and pull you how of that flow-state.

We broke our activation parts into various steps to help the user only do one thing per step, with only the key steps needed to set them up for success. Everything can be skipped as well, with some fallbacks to smart defaults that is shown to the user on a summary screen, just before they actually create their first podcast.

With this we end in encouraging them to upload their first episode, although some users don’t have the final content ready to upload and we allow them to just explore the product in that case.

Checklists to drive activation

The exact same activation steps are also captured on a checklist that is always visible in the dashboard. This was crucial as the information could be left open during onboarding, meaning there are still gaps and we won’t be able to distribute confidently. Hence a checklist that does not disappear, or only available during an onboarding wizard, this is that constant reminder that helps you complete all the info when you are ready.

Measure everything to understand

We have done a great deal of instrumenting our product analytics to understand everything in and around how users use our products. Something that I think is key for any product team. Our new onboarding was no different and we went in to even more detail.

The good news is we were measuring the activation of all the right info being completed before, so we could track how exposing that in new ways would drive a better activation rate for users, resulting in conversion and better retention down the line.

In the 5 months before this revamp there was an average of 28.7% of users getting to this point, with the lowest month being January with only 25% of new users getting to a valid RSS feed.

Since the new onboarding, we saw an immediate increase to 62% and the months since then have had an average of 68.7% peaking at 78% in November where we are slowly but surely closing the gap.

From my perspective this was a massive success rooted in giving users a better experience and getting them set-up for success. As with anything this is not something that is ever done, and there are already ideas and experiments to see how we can improve that number even more in 2023.

Consider key personas and cohorts

One last thing I wanted to mention is how you can divide your users into different cohorts that you would expect them to fall into based on how they would be using your product. Again this might look different for various products and this does tie up higher up into your value proposition and the users you are attracting. But someone is reading something on your website and that’s the reason why they sign up for your product. It’s your job to understand this and give each user cohort their specific value as soon as possible or you’ll lose them forever.

For us this is centred around users that want to start a brand new podcast, which this whole post is about, but it could also be a user that wants to migrate an existing podcast or use our WordPress plugin to manage all of this, or someone planning to do a private podcast where traditional distribution does not matter. So knowing their context and getting a relevant onboarding path for them is what makes the biggest difference.

Conclusion

I hope this brought some value to you, weather you’re planning to revamp your onboarding or not. A lot of the product principles translate to other areas in the product lifecycle, and keeping users, their needs and the value that they derive from our product as the focus point should always be at the heart of the decisions the team make and how we stay accountable to our users.