About Foresyte
Foresyte, a lifestyle planning app, aims to centralize lifestyle, financial and social planning by simplifying how people plan their finances, events, and trips, while also providing insights into how people commit to plans. Combining the likes of Mint for budgeting, Booking.com for travel, and a calendar for events, Foresyte brings it all under one roof for an enhanced experience.
🎯 The challenge
When Foresyte entered the market in 2022, they faced a common challenge associated with launching a new mobile app: user reluctance and poor adoption. (After all, less than 5% of users stick around a new app after 30 days…yikes!) Recognizing that user onboarding was a crucial first step in achieving their growth objectives, CEO Stephen Eddy and his team set out to make their experience one worth sticking around for.
🏆 The solution
Drawing from his success with Appcues at a previous company, Stephen got to work launching and iterating a user onboarding flow—adding helpful, contextual guidance at key points of user friction.
👀 How they did it
1. Focusing on specific feature capabilities
Stephen and his team created a new onboarding flow that showed users the app's value in advance. This way, when they started using it, they were already prepared and familiar with it.
2. Encouraging upgrades at just the right time
After digging into their Appcues data, Foresyte gated premium features with a Modal to launch their new freemium model.
According to Stephen, “We use an Appcues experience that shows them information for upgrading to premium and an option to either go back to the homepage by tapping a button or going to the upgrade page. It traps them into that view."
✅ Results
Foresyte was thrilled with the results. Their new onboarding experience led to a remarkable 15% boost in their onboarding success rate, reaching an impressive overall rate of 78%. This success increased user engagement throughout the customer lifecycle. Users who experienced their contextual onboarding showed more consistent and healthy product usage, too.
Stephen commented, "We saw a substantial uptake in post-onboarding user engagement because of the context those Appcues [Flows] provided during onboarding. This is crucial because if you stumble your way through the onboarding process without context, even if you hit the finish line, you're still missing a big piece of what the product is intended to do.”
The team also found that this process created a new way to gather feedback from inside the company. By continuously improving their onboarding and tracking customer activity conversions, they avoided developing unnecessary features (keeping focus on the ones users loved the most). Thanks to comprehensive analytics, they can track user engagement and maintain a strong feedback loop.
"Understanding which features are maybe being neglected or where we need to point our users, it's just so, so helpful to have all that information in one place, says Stephen."
And last, but certainly not least, the Foresyte team found that adding Appcues to their tech stack made their team more efficient As a small (but mighty!) team, Foresyte needed to make the most out of their busy schedules. Saving hundreds of hours in engineering work was not just a nice-to-have, but a prerequisite for their long-term success and growth. With Appcues, their non-technical team could concentrate on improving the product experience, while the engineering team could dedicate their time to creating new and valuable features.
Stephen shares, "[Appcues] has probably saved us hundreds if not thousands of hours since our inception as a product, and beyond that, it gives you the flexibility to continuously iterate and optimize. Just having that power to immediately make a change is game-changing for us, and it saves our engineering team a lot of headaches."
But most importantly, Foresyte has experienced remarkable growth—105% month-over-month with over 600 weekly installs. Stephen attributes this success directly to their effective implementation of Appcues.
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Our hot take
A successful user onboarding program is like the rising tide that lifts all boats. It’s not always easy to draw a direct line of attribution, but when done properly, you’ll notice an increase in engagement, product usage, and a stronger feedback loop throughout the customer lifecycle.