
State of SaaS Product Onboarding - r_singh
https://userpilot.com/saas-product-onboarding/
======
Cenk
> 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

~~~
gk1
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.

~~~
jmngomes
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.

------
chrispauley
> Well, if you use something called a "sniper link", you might make your
> users' lives easier. Simply go to your inbox and run a search that displays
> your confirmation email. Then copy that link, and use that on your
> confirmation page. Then your users will be directed straight to the actual
> email. This saves them time, and improves the overall user experience.

Never heard of this before, I'm assuming it means generate a link to a search
which will show the confirmation email based on the domain of the email
address. This will likely not work for anyone using a work email unless you do
some snooping on the DNS for that domain (sorry B2B).

~~~
Geee
It seems that the term comes from here [https://growth.design/case-
studies/trello-user-onboarding/](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...](https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#search/from%3A%40trello.com+in%3Aanywhere)

~~~
ryanjm33
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.)

~~~
markdown
> 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.

~~~
Geee
It's not just gmail, but G Suite. The idea is to look up the MX records and
detect this.

------
pc86
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/103FI07J_lwXwbiqPlEMbQb3B_Um...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/103FI07J_lwXwbiqPlEMbQb3B_Umv5e9F/view)
for anyone who doesn't want to make up a fake email to get the graphic.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Also created some notes/takeaways in markdown (specifically for Joplin) --if
you use joplin works great, but you'll need to fix internal links by
downloading the infographic above and attaching it.

[https://gist.github.com/patrickcurl/2c4386ec7cea7bfd07b18858...](https://gist.github.com/patrickcurl/2c4386ec7cea7bfd07b18858cd27e8e7)

edit: I'm creating a knowledge source of all I can about SaaS to help me
organize/stay on focus when I develop my next side project.

------
kamranahmedse
A bit off-topic but I made
[https://github.com/kamranahmedse/driver.js](https://github.com/kamranahmedse/driver.js)
an MIT licensed library for onboarding your users.

------
jedimastert
Fun and slightly related, useronboard.com maintains a list of first time
onboarding experiences of various websites with great
commentary.<[https://www.useronboard.com/user-onboarding-
teardowns/>](https://www.useronboard.com/user-onboarding-teardowns/>)

~~~
pulkitsh1234
What a great resource! Thanks for sharing this, I wish we had this handy at my
previous workplace when we were redesigning/rethinking our onboarding process.
I/We wasted a lot of hours in meetings and discussions in trying to think of
things from scratch.

------
mooktakim
I know this page visually looks amazing, but it was really hard for me to read
the content. Weird layout and huge font sizes.

~~~
jcims
Yes. 75% helped. Feels like your eyes are going through that weird angle hop
obstacle on American Ninja Warrior.

~~~
OJFord
I had to go to 50%, but the title, '1000', and 'Video' are still obnoxious.

------
danjc
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.

~~~
marcus_holmes
This was my thought. The "awesome frictionless onboarding experience" may get
a lot of trial users, but we want the people who _need_ this product and will
pay for it. So making the onboarding with some friction will just weed out the
triallers. We'll get less trial users, but a higher conversion to paid.

------
ai_growth
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.

~~~
Matticus_Rex
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 tough.

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

~~~
Matticus_Rex
[https://www.glassfrog.com/](https://www.glassfrog.com/)

SaaS for the Holacracy niche.

------
thehodge
Interactive Walkthrough - That's why we were a little surprised that only 24%
of SaaS products included one.

\- We don't have one because they are a lot of work! Working on a SaaS is a
constant juggle of priorities and I don't see an Interactive Walkthrough being
that high on the list for us.

------
4ndrewl
Problem with this is that it doesn't take into account the profitability of
the SaaS. Meaningless saying that x% of SaaSs don't have feature y, when
there's no indication that implementing feature y demonstrably drives increase
profit.

------
cm2012
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://twitter.com/kevinwlordbarry/status/12222616726367109...](https://twitter.com/kevinwlordbarry/status/1222261672636710913?s=20))

~~~
mikesabat
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?

~~~
cm2012
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.

------
ycombonator
> sniper link I didn't quite understand

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

~~~
veeralpatel979
Have you heard of the email startup Superhuman
([http://superhuman.co/](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.

------
aytekin
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.

~~~
jedberg
That's a nice goal, but not realistic, especially for a lot of B2B products.
They're just too complicated to understand all the functionality right off the
bat.

Sometimes I really appreciate a good walkthrough.

------
lowdose
Does anyone keep a record of all active SaaS offerings?

~~~
social_quotient
this is not ALL but it is handy

[https://www.saas1000.com/](https://www.saas1000.com/)

[https://golden.com/list-of-software-as-a-service-
companies/1](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](https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/saas-companies-4f45) (needs an
account but is handy for research and data dumps)

~~~
lowdose
Thnx!

