Value-First Onboarding
Boost your product adoption and user retention with the proven 6-step “value-first” onboarding framework by Andrew Capland, former Head of Growth at Postscript and Wistia.
Andrew Capland
Former Head of Growth at Postscript and Wistia
Here’s what’s inside…
When a user signs up for your software, they’re not looking for a tour. They’re looking to solve a specific problem and to achieve a goal. If you help them with that, you’ll increase the chance they turn into active users and eventually paying customers.
But how do you develop a product experience that helps you understand their goals and deliver value quickly—especially when you have a lot of signups each month with different goals and use cases?
In this course we’ll cover proven strategies and frameworks to learn what’s valuable to your users, deliver that value in creative ways, and turn new signups into successful users.
Andrew Capland is a 2x head of growth, where he spent years building onboarding flows to activate new users. After running dozens of tests, trying all kinds of different approaches, and building the in-app experience multiple times, he’s learned a ton about how to motivate, inspire, and drive action with your new signups. Andrew turned those learnings into this 6-step "value first" framework, which he personally used to achieve 40% activation rates and onboard hundreds of thousands of new users.
When you finish this course, you can humble brag about it for weeks and you’ll also get a shareable certification.
Helpful terms
In software, the aha moment is the pivotal instance when a new user first realizes the value of your product and why they need it. It’s often accompanied by, “Oh wow. This is awesome.”
The activation event (also known as an activation metric) is the first point in your product where you deliver the value that you promised your user. The percentage of people who reach your activation event = your activation rate. This is a key metric to track and improve for user onboarding.
An adjective that describes anything living inside your product (not exclusive to mobile apps).
This is the time it takes for a new user to recognize the value of your product or service. When it comes to user onboarding, your goal should be to shrink your users’ time to value.
An onboarding approach where sales or customer success assist free users in experiencing the product’s value via chat or live call.
A single shared metric that predicts a company's long-term growth.
The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) theory is coined by Clay Christensen, innovation expert and bestselling author of Competing Against Luck. In the JTBD framework, people try out products because there is a gap between their current circumstances and final aspiration.
An in-app experience that welcomes a new user to your product and guides them to value. It’s typically made up of some combination of modals, tooltips, etc.
The concept of placing users in different groups based on use case, behavior, etc., so that they can be better targeted with relevant experiences and information. For example, new users should not get the same messaging as power users who’ve been around for a long time.
