Breaking into GTM

Almost nobody finishes our onboarding flow. Is that an onboarding problem or a product problem?

The short answer

Look at where they stop. If people drop at the same screen every time, it is an onboarding problem and usually a specific one: a required field they do not have the answer to, a permission they cannot grant, or a step that asks for effort before showing any payoff. If they leak evenly across every step, it is a product problem, and no amount of tooltips will fix it, because they simply are not interested enough to keep going. There is a third case worth naming: people who skip the flow entirely and then use the product happily, which means the onboarding is in the way and shortening it will raise your numbers. Watch ten session recordings before you form a theory, since the answer is usually visible in the first three.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

The same ground, at another level

How activation and onboarding reads from a different seat.

People also ask

Everyone says find your aha moment. What is it actually, and how do I find ours? It is the first moment a new user gets something real out of your product, and you find it by looking at what people who stuck around did in their ... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Our activation rate is 18 percent. Is that terrible, or is that just what it is? It is below average but not alarming. Across 500 plus products the average activation rate sits around 34 percent and the median around 25, with Sa... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What should a brand new user see in the first minute after they sign up? Something that already works. The best first screens hand the user a filled-in example rather than an empty box, because a blank canvas asks a stra... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I pick one activation metric when the product supports five very different use cases? Do not force one event. Model activation in three stages instead, setup, aha and habit, and let the aha event differ by use case while setup and ha... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I cut time to value when the product genuinely needs setup work before it does anything useful? Invert the order. Instead of configure everything then use the product, give people a working demo environment with realistic sample data so they s... Doing the work 4 resources → I have a backlog of 30 activation ideas and no way to rank them. How do I decide what to build? Rank by where the drop-off is largest, not by how clever the idea is. Break the path from signup to activation into every discrete step, count how ... Doing the work 4 resources →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.

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