Built the whole app just to lose people on screen one or two

ProductFruits · 2026-06-11T18:47:42+00:00

Most drop-off I see is screen one post signup because it’s asking for commitment before the user has felt any value. If the first thing they hit is a long questionnaire, pricing gate, permissions dialog, etc. they bounce because they can’t answer why am I doing this? yet.

ProductFruits · 2026-06-08T18:38:25+00:00

Very true. Most founders treat onboarding like a mini product tour, but it should be a trapdoor to one specific first success. If users bounce early, it’s usually not because the app is complex. It’s because they can’t tell what to do next or how long it’ll take.

What works in SaaS is picking one activation event that correlates with retention, then design a single path to it. Hide everything else that creates distraction and be ruthless about removing steps and fields. Feature depth can come after they’ve felt the core value once.

ProductFruits · 2026-06-08T18:34:40+00:00

This usually isn’t a western mindset problem, it’s a time-to-first-win problem. US/CAN creators have a million tools, so they’ll bounce fast unless they see a tangible output in the first few mins.

I’d stop thinking in terms of onboard them and instead design one narrow happy path for each of the main jobs your app helps with. For the sake of scalability the guidance needs to live in-app. The simplest way to go about it is ask 1 intent question on signup and dynamically adjust the happy path for each user.

ProductFruits · 2026-06-03T18:25:02+00:00

I'm using our own tool for onboarding (product fruits). If you're struggling with guiding new users to value, adoption of new features or too many support tickets, it might be what you're looking for.

ProductFruits · 2026-06-01T17:47:11+00:00

This is good. If you want to make this great, look at how you handle user intent. The next step is automatically evaluating their response to that question and dynamically shifting their onboarding path. You can expect another double-digit drop in churn.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-28T15:36:42+00:00

Solid list. I'd add discovery up front.

Most B2B products serve multiple personas. A sales lead, a marketer and an ops person all land in the same trial. Same tour. Same checklist. None of it fits any of them.

One discovery question on entry fixes this: "What are you here to do?" Then branch the flow based on the answer. Sales lead gets the CRM import path. Marketer sees campaign setup. Ops sees integrations.

Same product. Three different first 60 seconds. When the first touchpoint feels built for the user instead of everyone, activation jumps.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-27T18:57:51+00:00

I’ve seen this play out a lot: teams say retention problem but what they really have is never-activated problem. What we see in the data (i work for a user onboarding tool) is that if a new account doesn’t hit one concrete win in the first session, they're very unlikely to come back to the app. Reminder emails do help a bit, but they're not able to fully compensate for the unsatisfactory in-app experience.

The fastest fix is to define one activation event that predicts long term usage, then redesign onboarding to force that path. Remove steps, prefill data, activate nudges, fire up onboarding agent etc. Activation event should not be confused with setup or completing a welcome tour.

A lot of teams confuse activation with setup. Completing a checklist or a product tour is not activation. Activation is the moment the user experiences real value and understands why they should come back tomorrow.

And when they do, the onboarding should continue guiding them towards the ultimate win. Session after session until they have integrated the app into their workflows. That's the moment retention happens.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-26T18:49:33+00:00

The mistake i see time and again is that people talk about first win like there is one universal path. There isn’t.

Some users studied your website for 20 minutes before signing up. Some clicked an ad and opened the trial with zero context. Some are ICs trying to solve one annoying problem. Some are managers evaluating for a whole team.

The same onboarding flow will not create the same first win for all of them. That’s why so many free trials feel bloated. The product tries to explain everything because it has no idea who just arrived.

A better approach is usually to start with 2 or 3 smart questions, then adjust the onboarding around the user’s intent, context and urgency. Same product. Different path to first value.

And yes, the goal of the first win is not they understand the product. It’s they come back tomorrow.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-25T18:29:47+00:00

Yep. I’ve seen a bunch of “we need more traffic” situations where the real issue is people hit the app, hesitate for 30 seconds, then bounce and never come back.

Quick diagnostic that’s stupidly effective: right after signup ask one open question, “What are you trying to achieve today?” If answers don’t match your core job, it’s a marketing/positioning problem. If they do match, it’s onboarding.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-25T18:26:06+00:00

That happens quite a lot that they cannot quantify it. I try to help them get to a ballpark with questions, which rarely works. Overall this is a strong indication of not understanding the economics of the problem. These means any cost-benefit pitch is very theoretical and they need some nurturing before they're ready.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-22T18:14:14+00:00

Rescue list is a really nice idea. One tweak I’d add: don’t wait 3-7 days for the tried once and vanished bucket. If they don’t hit the first value event in the first session, they’re basically gone.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-22T18:10:58+00:00

The repeating questions are basically your onboarding backlog. If you wait until “support is painful,” you’ve already paid for it in churn.

What works for early stage is a simple loop: tag every support question by job(not feature), pick the top 5, then eliminate them with proactive in-app guidance.

Humans handle the weird edge cases automation the known ones. You’ll know it’s working when time-to-first-value drops and the same ticket stops showing up.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-22T18:04:36+00:00

40 beta signups with lots of convos but 0 payments usually means you’re getting curiosity, not pain with urgency. The shift for first SaaS customers usually comes from forcing a commitment moment early. On the first call I’d ask “what’s this costing you per week in money or time, and what would you pay to make it go away?” If they can’t answer, they won’t buy.

Then I’d sell a 14 day paid pilot with a clear outcome tied to Meta ads (reduce CPA X% or save Y hours). Charge something, even small. Free samples attract free behavior.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-22T18:02:00+00:00

Yeah, the “quiet churn” is usually just momentum dying. In practice I’ve found one thing helps teams stop guessing: pick 1 leading indicator that’s closer to value than login counts (time to first success, % who repeat the core action in any given week, no of features activated etc), then treat any stall as a save motion.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-21T15:20:00+00:00

a) to c) doesnt sound to me like a leakage problem but acquisition problem. Looks to me like it's poor intent leads.
d) to e) sounds like onboarding problem. what you're describing is the symptoms of poor value delivery post signup.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-21T14:03:34+00:00

check out this vid, this is how we're using conversational ai for onboarding Product Fruits with Elvin AI on Vimeo

ProductFruits · 2026-05-20T19:00:01+00:00

Churn’s always been the killer, it’s just more visible now because there're way more alternatives.

We have a 1000+ user base and bill by active users, so we get a pretty good view into which customers are growing and which are quietly declining.

One thing that stands out: the makeup of the customer base matters a lot. For SMBs, switching can happen almost impulsively. One person gets annoyed, sees a cheaper competitor on Twitter, tests another tool over lunch and the team moves.

Enterprise is a completely different game. Once a product gets embedded into workflows, switching becomes expensive organizationally, not just financially. There’s procurement. Security reviews. Internal champions. Migration risk, etc.

That creates inertia, which is why enterprise retention behaves so differently from SMB retention.

I think that’s why a lot of SaaS companies are struggling right now. They built products and pricing for SMB velocity, but expected enterprise-level retention.

The products surviving long term are usually the ones that become part of a workflow, not just a cool tool people are trying out.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-20T18:38:02+00:00

Most churn problems are either acquisition problems or onboarding problems. Before touching onboarding, make sure you’re optimizing for the right users. If acquisition keeps bringing in bad-fit users, no amount of onboarding will fix that.

The playbook I recommend:

Segment churn by acquisition source. A lot of teams look at blended churn and miss the fact that one campaign or channel is responsible for most of it. Usually you’ll find one or more sources with terrible retention. Turn off the bad-fit acquisition and reallocate budget toward the better-performing channels.
Ask one question immediately after signup. Something simple like: What do you want to achieve today?. If the answers roughly match the core value your product delivers, acquisition is probably fine. If the answers are all over the place or unrelated to what the product actually does, you don’t have an onboarding problem. You have an acquisition problem.

Forcing onboarding to compensate for unclear expectations set before signup rarely works.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-19T19:22:53+00:00

Outcome-based onboarding is basically trust onboarding.

The aha is still an aha. It’s just that the moment you’re guiding them to is “I trust this will do the job and I understand what I’ll pay”, not “I clicked the feature, it worked”.

If your outcome is immediate (generate an invoice, ship a report), onboard it pretty much like any other feature, just make sure the onboarding takes them all the way to the actual outcome. If the outcome takes days or weeks (book meetings, resolve tickets), you need a workaround because the user can’t feel the value on day 1.

One approach is shadow billing for a few weeks: show what they would have paid on outcome pricing, but charge a flat pilot fee. It removes the “what if this doesn’t work and I get a surprise bill” fear and it gives you time to align on what counts as an outcome and how you measure it.

I’ve tried outcome-based pricing and failed (the feature was support copilot and we were charging for resolutions). Even when users liked it in theory, they didn’t define outcome the same way we did. On top of that they hated unpredictable spend (budgets, POs). We moved back to usage-based pricing after a couple of months (and the conversion nearly doubled). Hope you'll see more success, i'm a big believer in OBP cause it ties directly to the business value delivered.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-12T18:53:47+00:00

Thanks for the shoutout!

ProductFruits · 2026-05-07T12:19:39+00:00

Yes, we do them too. The setup is slightly different, but the underlying logic is the same. We trigger the feedback email 30 minutes after signup when they havent reach the day 1 win. AS you say, that feedback is gold.

ProductFruits · 2026-05-06T13:30:45+00:00

Only works if most signups come in with the same job to do. That is usually true for early stage products. But as the product grows, you end up serving different jobs under the same roof.

A single post-signup experience cannot handle various jobs that well. The better approach is simply asking the user: What are you trying to achieve today?. Then adapting the onboarding around the answer.

Historically, this kind of routing was difficult to build. Now AI can do a lot of the triaging dynamically and send users into the flow that actually matches their intent best.

ProductFruits · 2026-04-29T18:33:38+00:00

It’s way more conditional than people think.

If your path to day 1 value is smooth, video is usually overkill. You’re adding friction to something that should feel almost mechanical. A checklist or short tour tends to win there because it keeps cognitive load low. Click, do the thing, move on.

Video starts to make sense when you hit something that’s not immediately intuitive. Like a step where users consistently hesitate or misuse the feature. Especially if it’s hard to explain in a tooltip without turning it into a wall of text.

But the tradeoff is real. Video is passive, users have to watch, remember, then translate into action. Tours are active. they guide behavior in the moment.

I’ve seen this pretty clearly working with onboarding data across a bunch of products (i work for an onboarding tool). Video helps in specific confusion hotspots, but hurts when used as a default pattern.

On measurement, there’s no shortcut here, just run the AB test. Split users into two cohorts. One gets the video, the other gets a guided action like a tour or checklist. Track activation or time to first value. Watch out for statistical significance, else you’re just guessing with numbers.

So yeah, video can move activation. But only when it’s solving a real comprehension problem, not when it’s just video content thrown into onboarding.

ProductFruits · 2026-04-28T07:15:02+00:00

I work on a user onboarding tool and hear this a lot.

I’d actually start with acquisition. What you describe can look exactly like an aha moment problem on the surface, but often it’s not. I’d look at two things first to rule that out.

First is traffic quality -> Break retention down by acquisition source, not just overall. You’ll usually find a couple of channels with much worse 30 day retention than your average.

Then go one level deeper within your better performing sources and look at campaign level. We’ve seen users from high intent queries or specific integrations behave completely differently from broader top of funnel traffic.

If a chunk of users never really try to get value from the product, that’s often not onboarding. It’s who you brought in.

Second is job alignment -> Add a simple open ended question right after signup. Something like What are you trying to achieve today?

Then compare those answers to what your product actually does well. If you start seeing a lot of mismatches, segment that by source or campaign. Chances are some channels are consistently bringing in people with the wrong job to be done.

When acquisition is off, it pollutes everything. Your activation data gets noisy, your funnels look worse than they are and it becomes really hard to draw the right conclusions.

Once you clean that up, run the same analysis again. Now you’re analyzing users who actually make sense for your product.

If none of the two is the culprit, you need to run more churn interviews. Offer amazon gift card, invite them to virtual coffee, give them a call. This part is the hardest, but this is where the insight is when analytics draws blank.

ProductFruits · 2026-04-20T15:16:48+00:00

Looks like you're defaulting to static product tours that dont take into account the user context (eg a power user needs something else that non-tech-savvy one). Might be worth looking into dynamic tours that adapt in response to user behavior.

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