Intercom on Onboarding

If marketing can’t describe the outcome customers are looking for, if product can’t build a signup process people understand, if customer education can’t help get to those successful outcomes, onboarding breaks down.

Great businesses are built on high customer retention. It’s not about everyone hearing about your product, it’s about everyone who does hear about your product using it successfully.

Most product owners sign up for their product just once. If you don’t continuously reimagine what it’s like to land on and start using your product, the experience goes out of date. Your product tour is out of date, your help docs are out of date, your welcome email is out of date.

It’s a common mistake for companies to launch features in products without any context. Your goal should never be “just get it launched” your goal is “get it used.”

Firstly, it’s important to realize that you can’t onboard everyone. It’s a mistake to try because you’ll end up attempting to bend your product around the needs of very disparate users.

Successful onboarding is the challenge of getting people from thinking, “What the hell is this product?” all the way to, “My god, this is a great product.”

You have to work very, very hard on every stage of your second funnel to build a really successful business, which will result in high customer retention. And that is the key to long-term success.

We’re seeing this play out all the time. To give you a simple example, would you rather have a million signups in four days, or a million active users after 16 months? This isn’t an entirely hypothetical question – the first business is Yo, and the second business is Slack.

What we quickly realized is that there are two funnels for SaaS businesses today. If the first funnel is all about attracting new users, the second funnel is all about keeping them. Remember, you can growth-hack the hell out of the first funnel, but if you want to build a truly great business, you need to solve the second one.

If you’re not continuously showing your customers how to get value out of your product, you’re not encouraging product dependency.