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by wnm 3131 days ago
update: don't let the data discourage you, though. it's actually not bad. 400/600 clicked signed up? that's fantastic!

only 40 people went through with the sign up? I would say thats just user churn because of bad onboarding.

the first thing I would do is let people sign up with just email and password, and actually let them use your product, for a free trial period.

the second thing I would focus on is getting your users to the "magical moment" of your app. Thats a term I first read in context of someone from the growth team at facebook talking about user churn and growth. for facebook, the magic moment for example, was "seeing your friends".[0]

For your app, I think, the magical moment could be the first time a user sucessfully onboards a new client through your app, and sees how easy it is to collect all the requirements etc. If they go through that, and its really much easier with your app, they can't help but start their next client project with your app as well, and upgrade to a paid plan. But to get to that moment, you probably need at least a couple of days. I would not charge users before that moment.

[0] https://blog.kissmetrics.com/alex-schultz-growth/

3 comments

> user churn because of bad onboarding

I have a stupid question regarding vocabulary, because I've seen this 'inherent' definition of 'churn' used around here more recently.

To me, when I do co-hort analyses, failure to onboard is a conversion failure. In any case - 'Customer Success' territory. 'Churn' is when the custom fails to re-up (for whatever reason).

Am I using the 'wrong words'?

You are right, failure to onboard is not churn. Churn is when the customer doesn't renew or come back after a certain initial period has passed.
You're using the right words. (Except for "co-hort" which should just be "cohort" ;)
Yeah. Sorry. I'm not going to correct it, so that your comment standing here continues making sense.

(I don't know what is wrong with me... I found myself typing 're-novate' the other day... At least that makes more sense than 'co-hort')

I love HN and all the comments here, but this one particularly is very helpful for me. Thank you!
This is great advice when I envision when to ask and how much I should charge for a saas business I’ve been struggling to get going. I hadn’t seen this before despite being a near daily reader in HN.