This course will give you the growth skills, knowledge, processes, and frameworks to confidently build and grow a product-led business.
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Wes Bush:
Now, Ramli is just going to kick it off and go through a couple housekeeping items just to refresh your memory around all things Miro, and go through what we're going to cover today in greater details. So Ramli, take it away.
Ramli John:
Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Wes, and thanks for everybody who participated. Oh, Google Classroom, that's easy, Loom. All right, I'm going to go through some of this. Superhuman, interesting. I know superhuman is interesting because they do have a human onboarding experience.
Ramli John:
So, just as a recap for Miro, I know it's been a while that we used Miro. The last two sessions we had two guest speakers, guest instructors, that walks us through their site. So, I mean, if you ever get lost click on my screen, it's a little icon there, or Wes when he's speaking, so that you don't get lost. I've seen people clicking on it. And as well as for other people, if you find their cursors are getting annoying, for example, if I click this right now, I just want to make sure... Look at all those little cursors, Joseph King, guest artist, Sarah. So, you can just turn this off.
Ramli John:
I mean, if you do have any questions just drop it in the comments. I see Nate's asking how to get the PLG search channel, I'll get you in there, Nate, and everybody else. Today's objective is really to help you gain clarity on onboarding. Which onboarding steps is needed to be eliminated or delayed to create a quick time to value within your product. Right now, week five, we've already gone through designing your Product-Led Strategy, defining end-user success, your monetization strategy. Today we're going to be helping you, what I once again said, is to help define that quick time to value for your product. And then next week, super excited, we're going to talk about how to get buy-in about Product-Led Growth. We have a guest instructor, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a very bit.
Ramli John:
But before I do let me share... Oh, somebody's got audible in stock here. So, there's the agenda today. Welcome. Yeah, we've been doing that, we're going to review the bowling alley framework really quick with Wes. We're going to map out Canvas Onboarding. We're going to go through this framework that you probably have seen with the Product-Led Growth book that Wes covers in chapter 13, but you can also check that out later. We'll share that detail side.
Ramli John:
We're going to also map out and evaluate one of the program participants onboarding, and we're going to review it together. So, this is like a live review, but if anybody wants to review after, Wes and I, or myself, would love to review it so this is not just, "Oh, well Facelip's getting special treatment." We're going to go through anybody who wants a review will get one, just like that meme with Oprah, you get a review, you get to review, everybody gets a review for the onboarding, whatever you want. And then we're just going to do a little recap with that.
Ramli John:
I just want to make sure everybody's here. If you're excited, give me a thumbs-up, give me a high five. I just want to make sure you're here, I'm getting some thumbs up here. I'm getting a exclamation mark. Yes, I'm seeing some people even thumbs up in real person. Thank you. Laura said, "Excited. Thank you, you rock." You guys are so great. This is why we do what we do with all of you.
Ramli John:
Before we get started I just want to be clear on why user onboarding is so important for Product-Led Growth strategy. I just want to know what you think about that, if you can just drop it in the comments. Why is user onboarding the crux of Product-Led Growth strategy? And don't say, "It's because Wes said so, it's because Ramli said so." For you, why is user onboarding so important?
Ramli John:
Lisa, please. Why is user onboarding so important? This is so critical. Joseph said, "Help guide the users through the value as quickly as possible." Peach said, "Can we do first impression?" That's what Trisha said. So, user's first impression. Aaron said, "Need to have a great introduction." "Help users recognize the value early time to value. It gets people to the products." Says Ramli. Oh, Jeff.
Ramli John:
Laura says "Shorten the time to value. It's the face of your product so they can get most out of it." Thank you. If it's not great, the user onboarding, they'll not come back. Capture the real... Thank you for all of you shared their first impression, we're seeing a lot of first impression. But what Wes I find is it's so critical for user onboarding, for the very reason that if Product-Led Growth was a video game, the big boss at the end of it is time. Time really is, this is a gift from Judge Judy, if you know who she is. She's just a judge who's very feisty.
Ramli John:
And it really is time. I saw time to value here over and over again. Thinking about in a self-serve motion, people are... Somebody says, Scott Belsky, he is the chief product officer at Adobe said, "In the first 15 seconds all users are lazy, vain, and selfish." The first 15 second all users are lazy, vain and selfish. And it really is true, when you sign up for an app, think about the last time you signed up for an app.
Ramli John:
What was the first thing that came to your mind? "What is in it for me?" It's all about me. Just admit it, when we sign up for an app we're selfish, we're thinking about ourselves. And it's true for the app too, is that if, if they don't capture that, I saw first impression and Erin said, "I would play the POG" it's in the works. But if you don't capture people within that first 15 seconds, people are easy come easy go. In a sale side motion, you sign them up for a year contract and they're there for a year. It doesn't matter.
Ramli John:
But for Product-Led businesses, they're easy come easy go. If we don't get their interest right away, then they won't. I mean, now that we know a little bit about why it's so important, I'm going to talk all the I'm going to pass it off to Wes who will just share a little bit about this framework, this process that he's created for the book that we'll briefly just going to go through it. I'm sure you're familiar with it. And then we're going to walk through Canva for an example of this and we're going to do it collaboratively and I promise you it'll be fun. Pass it off to Wes.
Wes Bush:
Awesome. So I won't go too in depth the bowling alley framework, since I'm sure a lot of you have read the book as well as heard about this in this week's lesson. So just by show of type in yes if you played bowling before and no, if you have not played bowling before, all right. I'm seeing lots of yeses. Some why's that counts as yet. Probably, yeppers. Okay. On a league. All right. Sarah Miller is the best out of all of us.
Wes Bush:
I'm terrible at bowling, but okay, good. So most people have, if you haven't, that's totally fine too. But essentially when you're just starting out to bowl, most people will say, "You know what? Here's what you got to do. If you want to like have a chance at competing with your friends or your family is you want to get as many pins down as possible."
Wes Bush:
That's what they'll tell you. And one of the easiest ways to start to do that when you're just starting out is you look at that middle line and you try and line up the ball with that line. Because when you hit, you know, the amount of pins in the middle, your chances, your odds of getting the most knocked down is very high. And so whenever we think of a first strike in bowling, it's like, okay, great. That's the purpose of the game. That's what we're going to optimize for.
Wes Bush:
But it took me a while to realize that your product has that same relationship. And it's really important for you to understand is like that first time let's say you play bowling or that first time someone comes to your product. The chances of them, whenever they sign up for your product is for them to just go into the gutter. They get lost in your product. In the minutia. There are so many things you can do within your product, which is cool.
Wes Bush:
But at the same time, it can also be overwhelming for someone to realize like, oh my goodness, especially if you're selling like a B2B product, some of us just have complex products. And that's just the way it is because it's a complex thing that this solves. And so whenever we think about how to really create a quick time to value, there's two things we're going to encourage you to do.
Wes Bush:
So the first one is get crystal clear on what is that first strike. So in week two, we kind of did that user research and really try to understand what is end user success. But first strike is a subset of that. So if we think about drift, for instance, when you get a hundred conversations or something like that, that they call that like a product qualified lead.
Wes Bush:
But a first strike could even be that first conversation that someone has with a prospect or someone on their website. So it can be like a smaller subset of that. But when we think about the straight line onboarding experience, what that really is, is the absolute necessary steps that it takes for someone to get there.
Wes Bush:
And so we're going to go through a couple of examples too, today as a group, to kind of walk you through this whole process. But the goal is by the end of this week, you're going to be able to do this for your own product. Even if your sales-led and are thinking about, how do I even approach this for this onboarding approach? So hand it back to you Ramli, but this is going to be fun and super applicable. If you want to increase your time to value or decrease, there we go.
Ramli John:
Awesome. Well, thank you Wes. And I'm just going to go through very quickly once again, just so we can get into the example with Canva. The four steps to designing your straight line onboarding. There's a worksheet after this that we will provide. If some of you might've already got it from the on-demand sessions, but the very first step what Wes was talking about is like really figuring out that end-user success.
Ramli John:
And often this is skipped. Like whenever we talk to people, improving the onboarding, what's the first thing people usually come up with is let's just put a product tour. Product tour equals better onboarding. But if you don't know what that, that your destination is, then you won't know the path to get there. So, I mean, that's really, really critical. Just what Wes talked about is if you don't know what that first strike is, then we won't know what success looks like for users and guide them there.
Ramli John:
Next step is to map out that user journey. We have an example here with Trello that we mapped it out with, but today we're going to be using Mira. I've already mapped out with Canva's experience and we're just going to review it, which is step three. This is the fun part like this. This is where you put on your thinking cap or they got your user data, or even your qualitative interviews and figure out three things.
Ramli John:
I get to take a look at. Are you going to mark each step by green, yellow, or red. Green means this is absolutely necessary. It's mission critical for it to get users to that first strike. Yellow means, well, this is a nice to have let's push it after that first experience, that first strike. And red is this is absolutely something we can get rid of. For an example I can think of is with stock.
Ramli John:
Example connecting Google drive and other third party apps could be something that you help educate users after they've already experienced that first strike or that first value moment. And the very fourth step, which we highly suggest that well, which it gets even more fun is you want to share this, your straight-line onboarding. Once you have all the green ones that are marked mission critical to share it with other teams.
Ramli John:
Talk to your sales, customer success, with marketing, with product and say, "Hey, is there something we cut out that we shouldn't have? Did we gut this too far? That it's now too, too deep? Or are there ones that we should cut even deeper?" And this is where the discussion comes in where it becomes more collaborative. I've said this before and Wes said this.
Ramli John:
You can build a, to build a Product-Led business, takes a village and improving onboarding. Really does take a team effort versus a solo mission. I mean, I just want to briefly go through that before I go and dig deep into Canva. I just want to ask what kind of questions do you have? Feel free to drop it here.
Ramli John:
[inaudible 00:12:43] asked, thank you for asking or ask "Are some of these steps self-serving for us as a company, but don't add value to the user?" I love that. That's another one. That's a red flag is yeah, maybe sales wants that phone number and they want it. They want to be able to just pick up the call right after they sign up. But is it just for your benefit or will you actually use that to add value to the user?
Ramli John:
Which we'll talk more a little bit about that. Any other questions, thoughts, violent reactions, so to speak with around this, if not, just give me a thumbs up or a Y in the comments so that I can know that people are still Devin said, "Plus one" thumbs up or pass or Y. All right, we're getting some Ys, we're getting some thumbs up, [inaudible 00:13:33] value to user to the value of the company. Alan said, Charlotte can onboarding, or there's a question.
Ramli John:
"Can onboarding ever have too few steps to value?" Great question, Amanda. Yes. A hundred percent. There could be. You can have too few steps that people don't learn anything. I mean, an example, I observed example I can think of is, imagine like I can cut down time to value for any product to one second. I'll set up a button and it'll automatically bring them in automate all the process to bring them to time, to bring them the experience of the value.
Ramli John:
For example, with Canva, click this button and we'll create a design for you and you can download it. Time to value is two seconds, but did the user learn anything? No. So the point is you don't want a short, like a very, very short time to value that users learn. I think there's a balance that users do need to get something.
Ramli John:
I answered maybe not the scope for discussion, but would love to hear your thoughts, how to let people know that your product is more than the initial onboarding. Good question. I discuss that in the upcoming book, which I'll share the digital copy to you. Sorry for the plug but, we are buying the book for free to everybody in the program.
Ramli John:
So this is not like, oh, go buy the book because we want to upsell some stuff to you. We will get you the book. Why don't product onboarding build processes based around time, such as immediate, one day? We'll talk more about that. Paul, how about AB testing with different approaches Austin? We'll also talk about that. That would be great. All right Erin, thank you, right? Yeah.
Ramli John:
So like I said, we will get Product-Led Onboarding™ book in everybody's hands. Maybe even before it goes live on June 8th. So for instance, I have one topic to discuss. Should we allow users to skip onboarding steps? We'll get there. That's a good question. Should we allow Fraser? Aaron said, "Great question." We'll get there. All right.
Ramli John:
I just want to recap once again, is everybody ready to just give me a Y or a thumbs up? Those were some great questions, thank you, Mandel, Paul thank you everybody. Again. I got some thumbs up from folks here as well. All right. Let's jump into Canva.
Ramli John:
Like I said, I already mapped out their experience. This is what you would do. You can use this with Nero, but Wes will show how to do this with Trello, but I've taken what I suggest would be to take screenshots of every single screen, a user needs to get to the first strike. This case I take the first screen of, of my bad.
Ramli John:
I take the first screen of Canva here. And we can see here it says great, it's loading, design, collaborate and share design collaborate and share. So the question, first question I have, if I was consulting for Canva is what is Canva's first Strike and just drop it in comments what you think canvas first strike is.
Ramli John:
What is canvas first, a moment of value for users? Like what does success look like for users so that we know we're driving people there? Anna said, "Making a poster." Ben said, "Creating the poster." Monica said, "Download the design." Sarah said ,"Templates." Seeing what you can create, create a doc, find a template, find shared canvas to build, great question. And the true answer comes from your users.
Ramli John:
That's the right answer. So I would talk to Canva's users, but I would pursue it's beyond just building design, right? If you're building a design for Canva, if you're looking to download it and use it to print a poster or to set up a Facebook ad. So Jeff said, "Honestly, hard to tell with this page." Monica as a power user. So I mean, I would say it was downloading the design cause then you're going to use it for your Facebook ad for your poster, for your Instagram.
Ramli John:
So that's what I would go for it so that now we know that what we suggest people do is to write down every step, every click in a post-it note, if you can, or if you're going to use Trello or Notion a card. In this case, the first thing a user would do to get to the first strike will be to click sign up. That's easy enough.
Ramli John:
So once they click on that, they'll see this screen, it says, get started with Canva and sign up with Google, sign up with Facebook and then like sign up. So, I mean, some people don't like this, but I kind of like it because some people will want to just connect a Google account or Facebook account to get in.
Ramli John:
They don't have to set a password or email, which is a lot of friction for people who might be using this for Facebook ads. So it really depends on your users. For me, I don't like connecting my Google or Facebook accounts because I don't know what Canva's going to use with my data, right? So, I mean, that's what I would do would be to sign up with email, but I'm going to let you decide for your user what is best for if that makes more sense.
Ramli John:
So I'm going to put a post-it note, click sign up with email. So then the signup is three steps, three fields, and one button, click enter, email and their name and the password click get started. This is where it gets interesting for a lot of your apps, because you want to put every single field. Every single button click will be a post-it note or a card. And that gets interesting because now you'll be like, why are we asking 17, 20 fields to get people to sign up?
Ramli John:
And you might not, you might need it. You might actually need it. So, I mean, then your team can break down field by field. Is this mission critical for our users to achieve the first strike? This is something that we can ask later. Can we delete this? Is this the yellow, or is this a red? Is this absolutely. We don't really need it, it's just like, oh, we're just asking you just to make us. I'm not sure, but to make us feel good or something like that.
Ramli John:
Hannah said, "Any research I can share with you X about removing confirm password?" Basically, as I said, we can just have this discussion. I said, we have to have it. It's part of the process and Hannah can you confirm what that means? Is this like confirming your email? You actually have to go back to your email address to do.
Hannah:
Like typing the email too. So typing the email twice, basically I shared this process and designers like, Nope, absolutely not in the discussion. I said it's part of the process. So we have to have a discussion about it. I've looked up a lot of different things, but any suggestions you have on pushing that conversation would be great.
Ramli John:
Yeah. I mean, I can, I have, we have some data, like every field you add, like decreases your conversion by X percent. Like I have it from Conversion XL. And I think that's one thing that I would, I would frame it as an experiment. I would be like, "Hey, I just want to run an experiment. We'll see if we remove this confirmation email, will we actually see an increase in completion?"
Ramli John:
And I think framing it that way I find based on discussion would be a way to put it. It might require it, sorry. It might require some engineering resources, but typically framing that conversation is the way to be. But I will. If somebody asks you to write down a note for me to share those feelings. Thanks for that question, Ferris. And what are some thoughts about not making someone register right away? Good point, Farrah, I will get there. That's a really good point.
Ramli John:
You know, actually, this is what Canva does and I'll, I'll share that a bit later. You can go and ask for validation by email, please. Anecdotally, we remove the confirm your password field and an increase signups. So Frazier has some data how to, how to maybe Frazier, if you could share that data, Removing it.
Frazier:
It's loose data, but N equals one. But yeah, it worked For us.
Hannah:
Yeah, because their reasoning is, well, that's going to and like, they're not going to remember their password. It's more friction. So like great, good to hear you've done the research, thank you Frazier.
Frazier:
Yeah, you can, you can track the password reset, but people are so used to jumping in doing good file, putting in a garbage password. Right. Then if they engage with the product, they'll just reset their password. That was our experience.
Hannah:
Awesome. Thank you.
Wes Bush:
Have you brought this up in a T because like, this is one of the underlying parts of it. Probably why I love this workshop the most is because when you do it with your team at the end, so you'd like map out your straight-line onboarding experience, and you have these discussions. There should be good friction between team members, whether it's a sales team, the marketing team, the product team, as well as engineering team.
Wes Bush:
I, the one thing I'd recommend though, is make sure you do have one head from every single team go through it with you because you're going to get a lot more of that friction, even from a development perspective, like we need to have this, but it's interesting how many times we come back to like, well, why was that done? That it's like, because we, we built it out that way in like a whole lot of thoughts. So this is really going to be a prominent thing that a lot of you are going to go through, which is fun.
Ramli John:
And people are Deanna shared a link. Sam said, "Look your competitors." But also one thing we found is like I said, at the end, submit your app for review from myself or Wes. And often it takes a third party expert to say, "Hey, this is not, this is not working for a company. We, that we sent." Wes sent a video to this company. And, and the person was like, I've been trying to remove this field. And when Wes sent that video, everybody said, "Okay, let's do it."
Ramli John:
So submit your app after for a review. And I, we will shoot a video to just, maybe you can share with your whole team. Essentially. There's an interesting question from Janelle or on properly segmenting finding that balance would asking fields and it goes back and we'll get to an example here with Canva where the question is. All right, actually I wrote this in the book. I call it the DAD Test.
Ramli John:
I called it DAD Test where there's three things I at, if you're going to remove a field or not, it stands for that, which the D stands for does it direct users or personalize that experience? If this field directs users and it personalizes, it directs users to the next step in the onboarding, then I would not remove that. Most likely.
Ramli John:
The second in the DAD Test is, does it add to the experience? And we'll get to an example with Canva here. If you can personalize experience with that particular field, then I would, I would likely keep it in there.
Ramli John:
And the last thing in the DAD Test is that does it delight users? Like if, if adding that field brings them to somewhere where they get some delight, I have an example in the book, which I'll share after where with wave, when you fill out, when you upload your logo, what they do is they show you what your invoice can look like, by using your brand colors.
Ramli John:
And that just adds so much delight. The director of growth there that I talked to is like their user interviews were super amazed. They were like, this is what it looks like. I've been using Excel sheet with my invoices. And this is just amazing. So, I mean, that's a delight point that like, sure, why are you asking for a logo for, from users to sign up?
Ramli John:
But is it because you're delighting them. So just those three things, does it direct people to the next step? Does it add to the experience and does it delight users, which you don't have to remember? That is definitely in the book.
Ramli John:
I'm going to keep going for the sake of time. I know there's a lot of comments. Thank you so much. This is part of this process. This is question. Just feel free to interrupt us, but talking about personalizing the experience, this question here is what will you be using Canva for?
Ramli John:
And it's that standard. We'll use it to recommend a design templates, especially for you. And it asks for has a few options here. Are you a teacher? Are you student, are you personal small business, large company, nonprofit charity.
Ramli John:
So my question here, and Deepah, this is Canva. We'll, what we're going through. The question I have for you here. What will you be using Canva for? Let's evaluate this together. And just in the comments, if you think this is like a step that is not necessary and we should remove it, type R for red.
Ramli John:
... Not necessary and we should remove it. Type R for red, chop it. R for red. Y for yellow if you think this is something that we can delete after the first strike, and type G if you think this is a must mission critical step. All right. So I'm getting a bunch of Ys. Interesting. Laura, Amanda, Aaron, Matthew, Farrah, Nadeem. Ooh, David says, "This needs to get chopped. Huh!" Joseph said "Green." Sam. Oh Sam, "It depends." Your answer is always, "It depends," but what does it depend on? What do you do with it? Megan says, "Yellow." "A tough call," Fraser. Lisa said red, Tamara said red. Wes, just chime in here. What are you... That's a really interesting vote against almost a bunch of Ys and a bunch of reds here.
Wes Bush:
Totally. I think this one's really interesting because it's like, okay, if you can actually go up to the top and zoom in on the actual step, it asks you, what will you be using Canva for? Now, the interesting question I would like pose to Canva is what are you going to be using this information for? It's kind of going back to it and I'll give you another example too and how it's been used in different use case. So when I first signed up for Notion data, I was like, oh my goodness, there's a lot of steps in this onboarding and one of them was just like this. They asked me, "What department are you in?" I just felt I'm in like product and didn't think much of it right then. But then when I got into the product, since it's sort of a Wiki tool, I was able to immediately see all this product stuff and I was like, "This is so cool," and when I see it, I'm learning about the product Notion as well as learning something cool, which is, hey, they totally use this information.
Wes Bush:
So I think I I'm going to lean in on Sam's call and you nailed it. It depends on what you do with it. If you do something with it, this could be a must have step because you realize that whenever people go into that first installation of the product, they're hooked. They love it. They really get to experience it but if you don't do anything with it, then yeah, I would definitely chop it. I'm on team chop.
Ramli John:
Oh, team chop. Chop, chop. Is there anybody from team yellow? Team delayed after the first strike that would like to just share why? Feel free to just drop it in the comments or just feel free to unmute yourself. I don't want to call it a be out because as an introvert myself, when teachers call me out, I just don't feel good. They call it a good about that. But team chops-
Monica:
I would probably implement it later and I think there's a lot of value on these type of questions for us looking at the data and improving the software, the product based on what we're getting. The question is not that bad because they do say what the user is going to get out of answering that question. So often, I get asked, "What's your role?" And they don't tell me what they're going to do with that one. So this one creates value both for the user and as well as organization. So it's not that bad.
Ramli John:
That's a good point about the microcopy is that they tell you, they do tell you what they're going to use it for and people want... I don't know about you, but I would want recommended design and templates based on what I choose here. But it's interesting here. Monica said this could be skippable. That's a good point. I'll get back to this because we'll see a little bit of foreshadowing. They do use it. In my opinion for me, they use it well. They do use it really, really well to get people to the first strike a lot faster than if they didn't ask this. So let's move on after I do this, what will be... Oh, Sam, sorry. Spoiler-
Wes Bush:
I was going to say that, Sam.
Ramli John:
Sorry, y'all. A spoiler alert, they actually do this. Use this really, really well and I love questions like this. A lot of the best experiences, I have asked that. So after I select I'm going to... I selected small business for that one and then I went forward. So after you do that, and this is another interesting one because who are the sales, or business dev people or growth or conversion people here? It says here, "Try Canva for free." So there are actually a freemium to free trial product, where there are a hybrid approach to the Product-Led model. More productivity, more power, try our most loved features for free for 30 days. Try for free here. I'm going to click and I'm seeing some people zoom in.
Ramli John:
Here's five features you'll get, if you try it Canva Pro for free for 30 days. I personally clicked maybe later. I don't know about you, but let's get back here and evaluate this. Let's see. Is this a red? Is this chop chop or yellow? Is this something that you delay or is this G? Is something mission critical? I'm seeing a lot of red-
JD:
Yeah, I think in this one.
Ramli John:
JD Ag?
JD:
Yeah, think I this one really depends on the type of PLG model in what sense did you put this because then are you going to ask for the credit card? If you're not going to ask for the credit card, why would you put this? When they select the type, just started on because if you're not going to ask me for the credit card, why will you put another friction? Tell me that it's for free and it's pro and this is what I'm getting to show me the product? But if you're going to ask for the credit card, then maybe this is good because you're getting all these news. We're not going to charge for 30 days, but I'm going to ask for your credit card.
Ramli John:
True. That's a good point. I like that. Any other comments feel free to unmute yourself before I pass it off to Wes because everything will be tainted after he says something. Anybody? I hear somebody unmute themselves.
Paul:
Yeah. I disagree with JD because I think that in this kind of instance, I hate Canva. I'm just going to put it out. I don't like it, but [crosstalk 00:32:21] I think that if you want to experience a platform in its entirety, for me personally, I do want to be able to access it without giving you my credit card details, because I feel like then I'm being sold to, and then I've got to kind of remember to come back in and unsign and take my details out and all that and I just feel like that tricks me. It's almost like those internet marketers that try and give you their lead funnel and they're like, "Give me your details now." and I'm like, no, I don't want to do that. I want to test your product and if I want to then pay for it after 30 days switch me off and then say, "Look, you have to know you caught the..." I think that's always the best approach, but that's just personal.
Ramli John:
I love it. Battle out. I'll give you guys gloves, but I'll pass it off. Wes, what do you... Oh, I hear another beep... Oh, JD is coming. Are you coming back?
JD:
No, I'm just saying that I don't prefer one or the other or just say both. I'm just saying that friction, it depends on what they want to do later. I am on your team, Paul. I say when they ask me for the credit card following 30 days later, even some do this boxing where they actually charge you, they don't even remind me. It's just like pass the charge and barely you know, but I agree with you. I wouldn't ask for the credit card, but I wouldn't put that. If I would've put a credit card, I wouldn't put that image. I would just... Once I pick what I'm here for, what I'm going to use Canva for it, just start it on. Let me use it.
Paul:
So are you saying then if they don't have this, what they should do is just give you access to it all for 30 days as you sign up and then just not talk about it? Is that what you're saying?
JD:
Great. If you're not going to ask me for the credit card and you're going to end up letting me use it, why are you going to tell me the 30 days you're going to close it? Just let me use it straight forward. No friction, which makes better for me and then five days before the 30 days you are like, "Do you still like it?" In five days, the pre trial ends. You give me 25 days of value, which I might think it's freemium forever and then five days before that, you're like, "Well, if I turn it off, would you kill me?" And if you say yes, then you're going to put the credit card. I will put all the friction at the moment of payment and the least amount of friction anywhere else. I learned that from a customer about the e-commerce website. I just like put all the friction at the moment of payment, reduce all the friction anywhere else.
Ramli John:
Interesting. That makes that an interesting point. They're right now using a Product-Led model, freemium to free trial, but I'm hearing they should have went reverse and went 30-day free trial to a freemium after they don't convert. So really, really fast. Wes, your turn.
Wes Bush:
Well, I don't think there's like any right or wrong answer particularly here. It's like also looking at what performs best. I know just thinking about Canva product, I imagine they have a lot of people who are first time users signing up. They just have one particular need in their minds, as far as like what they need to use the product for and then once they create the graphic, they're probably not going to check in until maybe the next time that comes up. So I think they're using this as more like a hook, like a trigger to bring them back at the end of the day to create more graphics.
Wes Bush:
Is it a bit forceful? Yes, definitely. I typically wouldn't go ahead with it right off the bat because it's interesting, but they do have a very powerful freemium model. The maybe later is a really nice way of putting that call to action, because you're not saying no, but you're saying, "Well, might check it out later." And I think once we go through this full Canva, you'll see another example that I feel like is in actually the user's best interest for sure.
Ramli John:
Interesting.
JD:
One question, Wes, because we have a similar thing where you pick an option now, if you change the wording there, when it feels that that's where you actually... It's almost like, it feels like you're buying it without buying. Wouldn't that make it good enough? Because you identify the persona and they click it and you're going to give it the product. Wouldn't that make the trick?
Wes Bush:
So just have everything like that, but without the credit card kind of deal?
JD:
Correct.
Wes Bush:
Yeah, you could do that. It's just like, you're still an opt-in. For instance, the freemium model is an opt-in model, where you definitely have to pull your credit card once you want to pay for something and then the free trial is another opt-in. So it's interesting. Typically, you would want to almost have one opt-in model, which is your freemium model, which is easy to get started and then your opt out model is something a bit more that hooks people a bit more. But yeah, it is an interesting one. We can definitely one of the things I know, Ramli and I interviewed who's now the head of growth at Canva, be interesting. Maybe we'll try and get one of the guys [crosstalk 00:37:29] from the head of growth at Canva to come on here next time because I think this is a really interesting way and I'm curious to see what is the overall result of what would work best. Ramli, keep going.
Ramli John:
Yeah, thank you so much. Before I move on, I think the other factor we are not considering is... trying to point this out is Canva owns a bunch of search keywords and they own this space. They can do what the heck they want, essentially. They can do this because they're the big fish in the pond and if you're not them, this might not be the way to go because maybe now, they're not optimizing for first strikes. They're not optimizing for revenue, which is a totally different game than Victoria said, category king. You're right. I'm going to keep moving on.
Ramli John:
There's just one other thing that is interesting and thank you so much for everybody who's chiming in, but the next step after you said, maybe later, and this is a controversial one again, is they ask you who's on your team? They ask you, "Set up a free team and discover features to help you save time and get things done." For a lot of you, it requires that team, multiple people using it to get value there and parts of where you're saying skip.
Ramli John:
Benefits of the team acts as your team's shared designs, keep your brand consistent, provide value, send invites, asking for email address and all right, I will kind of program all of you to say, "Red, yellow. Y, Y, Y, skip Y. Yes, of course, skip. Just want to get there already," Nadeem. Thomas said, R, G... Oh, interesting. Somebody said green. If you want to share Y, G... Oh, also Monica. Monica said G. Interesting, hot take. I'm curious for the people who said green here, why that is. "If I chose Breslin, why would they ask me this?" Darlene made a good point. I'm curious what people think. A lot of people are saying yes and chop or delay, but any thoughts around this for people who said that this is... Chats interesting for us most important retention metric is users we include that invite in the user onboarding. Any thoughts about this, Wes?
Wes Bush:
Yeah. So I think when you look at it from an individual user perspective, it probably doesn't make too much sense. But given that you did select you are a small business and it's optimizing for that, I remember actually one of the companies that are helping out a couple of years ago, it was a landing page tool and they introduced this step. It was the same discussion where we're like, oh, this is adding quite a bit of friction. Should we even have it? But then we started looking at their retention statistics and their retention whenever they added this step actually went up quite a bit. Now with that particular product, it made a lot of sense because to create a landing page, you probably want to have someone who's more of a designer to go through and create those elements and put them in there. So you don't have to always go back and forth with them. You want someone to maybe from the demand gen team to setup the form and all those things.
Wes Bush:
So it did make sense. The product did lean into that and I can definitely think of maybe the Predictive Index folks too, as far as that goes, where you have a product where when you add more people to that product, it becomes more valuable. So if that's the case and it is going to help your long-term retention, I see it as a win and you should definitely lean into it and keep it, although it is adding initial friction, but it does set the trigger for people to come back on the team as well and create a better outcome at the end of the day.
Ramli John:
100%, I love you point. If it's going to improve attention, then check it out. I'm on there if there's easier. Copying and pasting email addresses is such a pain. It has one field per email address. Is like, "Come on, bro." If you're going to make it easier for us email, another email, another email. So that it's a lot easier for users. Erin said, I will say that the steps are quite annoying when you see a third content right behind it. We'll get there, exactly a psychology principle that Wes talks a lot about with a blurred background. There's like that... What was that-
Wes Bush:
Promised land effect.
Ramli John:
Promise land effect when you do this. Can you share a little bit about the promise-
Wes Bush:
Yeah. So basically, what they're trying to do here is the promised land is like you see the better life behind the screen. So in this case, that's exactly what they're trying to... The promise here is like, hey, you're almost done-
Ramli John:
Almost there.
Wes Bush:
If you just keep completing these steps, you're going to be able to eventually get into this product and see it for yourself. So it is a really powerful psychology. I kind of stepped into a way to get people to motivate them to complete the steps. So I know why they're doing it, but it is interesting that some of you said, it looks pretty messy because it can backfire if you're like, oh God, I don't want that promise land.
Ramli John:
That's a good point. Thank you for sharing that.
JD:
Two quick questions, Wes. So you put the number of steps because here it has this kid, but nothing tells you, so it could be like 20 more steps. And you're like, what the hell did I got into? It could be like the last step and you're like, oh, this is almost done. I put the emails when I'm done. That's one question. The second one is on the initial, when you asked for the password first, if you actually had like an SSL where they login with the company email or something, could you just pre fill or get the address of the rest of the team and just say, hey, bring up those names and say, from these people, who's going to collaborate with you and then this is putting the emails to be more like picking?
Ramli John:
I can think that, Wes. First question, yes. One miss here for everybody tuning in, try to take advantage of progress bars. To JD's point, it's the step two of 20. What the heck did I get into? If you just step two or three, I'm like, oh, I'm almost there. There's something called the Zeigarnik effect, which is I psychology principle where if you already see, oh, it's two out of three, there's that tension in your mind for a lot of people. I'm almost there. I'm just one step away. So that's one thing that is a pro and also to your point, JD, I think if you connected your Gmail or your email, it might've been different. I'm not entirely sure. I don't like connecting my Google accounts to two pages.
Ramli John:
So thank you for those questions. If there's anything else, well, I got to move on. Thank you so much for your comments but that interesting learning around this. Once you're in, ah, here's, where the magic comes in is when they ask you early on, what are you going to use Canva for today? I said small business. This page is customized based on that and they customize... Look at the copy and this is why I love this. Popular for small business and guess what happens if you select teacher or personal or something else. That copy would change but also that options there would change. They have data that shows if you're a small business, you'll probably here to get an Instagram posts. You're probably here to get a logo. You're probably here to get a Facebook post and this is one of the reasons why I think...
Ramli John:
Early on, good point to what Wes said, if you're not going to use it, what are you here for? Are you a teacher? Are you a small business owner? Are you a marketer? If you just ask that so that the sales team can give you a call. "Hey, what's up marketer? What's up business owner?" Sure, you can use that but customized experience based on that question is super powerful. And now I know I'm going to use, click on Instagram posts and get them there. Aaron says, "This feels redundant. I see design anything with a search box." Anna says, "Yeah, I know some people..." We can talk about UX here. We'll probably would have flipped this around why are they asking for a search box when they already have some suggestions here? Matt here says, "Only a few steps can be nice with indicators because hey, we're nearly ready here. Maybe that question should be ready right before the engagement." A really good point.
Ramli John:
You're right. I think right after they ask, "What are you here for? Are you a small business owner?" They should have showed this right away because it's fresh on my mind. Once again, one of my favorite questions for a lot of onboarding experience is, what are you here to do today? And based on that, it's customized their experience and bubble up templates or things like that right at the get-go. Any comments, violent reactions from the stage? Wes, do you disagree with me? Do you have a violent reaction to what I just said?
Wes Bush:
No, this is exactly what I was mentioning as far as utilizing whatever information are you using to create a better experience sense. I imagine if you just signed up, because someone had told you about Canva and he didn't really have a graphic in minds that you wanted to create, this is a great way where it's like they probably looked at and said, "You know what? Out of all the business owners, 60% of them start with the Instagram post." So they kind of know that from a data perspective and the odds and likelihood that that's you could be quite high. So it was a great way to help people make this first choice and create their first graphic.
Ramli John:
That's the point. It doesn't work for everybody. Fraser made a comment here that it feels like you're boxing people in and that could be true, and this is my opinion. This is something that you need to A/B test, but anything that you can bubble up and direct people to the next step is very critical. They have said they could also show you choosing the buyer persona, the exact effect it has on their choices. Thank you for your comments. I appreciate it. We can discuss more about it later. Is Canva using Onboarding tool? Appcues? We'll talk a little bit more about that, but let me move on.
Ramli John:
So after you get in, they, they do a product tour. Let's talk about product tour. Here it says, choose a template here or drag a template into the Canva. The second step is... And it says two out of four so they are counting it down, editing. It says here to edit element, click on it. A toolbar will appear above. The third step here is add photos and videos right here, upload and then the very last step here out of four, four out of four is publishing. Download shared media, order professional prints and more.
Ramli John:
Now Fraser said 95% of users shut down product too is a good point. The question I have is, is this effective? Is this something that you would chop. It would keep R, Y, G? Red for chop, Y for delay, G for keep mission critical. Luke has already said, "G, I prefer do steps instead of next steps." Okay, interesting. Yeah, G, I like short tours to get started. A lot of people are saying, wait for them to take the first step before showing the next Y okay. I came here to make something. Let's make something. All right. That's a good point. I like tours. They can dismiss, but easy to recall, but when you're ready, you can keep going. This is the point of all the tours, it's people have different opinions. Wes, I want to get your take on this and for anybody else, feel free to chime in.
Wes Bush:
Yeah. So like this particular tour is interesting. It's the four steps and the steps that's going through, technically you'd have to do them anyways. So one thing I like about this one that I think it's effective is because you're going through exactly the steps you need to go through and it's not forceful at the end of the day if you want to skip it. You can but you do have to realize that in order to kind of go through this, you'd have to complete the same steps anyways. So I don't find it really overpowering. I think where product tours become a bit too much and where my hate for them sometimes is when it's just simply walking you through the entire product and it's not taking you anywhere, whereas this is just guiding you through every piece you need to do to get to that first strike. So I think for that, I'd say let's keep it and it is going to help people complete more of these graphics. So that's a win.
Ramli John:
Interesting-
Frazier:
Wes, a quick question if I put my ask you, since we're using power tours as well at Facebook, do you have any experience when the product tours data wise is successful? You can see the different steps, see the drop offs of the users. I'm pretty sure you just said like 95% of the users are dropping off of the product tour. I'm figuring out when the product tour is successful for us but I'm kind of having difficulties to see what kind of data I have to look into.
Ramli John:
I can answer that question. The why a lot of product tours, completion rate is so low is because we don't ask people if they want a product tour, first of all. One of the most powerful thing we can do is ask users upfront, "Do you want a product tour?" We've seen that with Deputy, this tour that toured, I can share I look after is they ask you straight up, "If you want a product tour click here, if not, then you can always click here. Do you want to watch a video from our CEO walking you through this? Click here."
Ramli John:
Giving that option right at the get-go is super, super powerful and I bet you, the data will show that if they opt in with a lot of things, when people opt in, they're more likely to complete it instead of, "Hey, do this product." Imagine in real life, you're at a store and somebody grabbed her hand and started touring you around the store without your permission. I don't know about you, bro but I'll be pretty upset. I'll be super upset and be like, "Let go of my hand. I don't need this tour." So, just based on my experiences, it's something that you can... I know somebody asked earlier what tools. You can use Appcues, UserGuide, and Userflow. You can...
Ramli John:
Somebody asked earlier what tools you can use, app queues, user guide and user flow. You can set up that prompt at the get go, and just be like, do you want us to walk you through this, because there will be some users who prefer it. Some users who hate it and they would be turned off and leave at the get go.
Frazier:
I would argue that the bigger question about productors is why do you need one in the first place? What is it that's so unusable about your interface that you have to hand-hold somebody around it. I would recommend questioning whether your investment and time of setting up a product order shouldn't actually be spent on the UX and usability to see how do we get rid of the product or, and make it just super intuitive.
Wes Bush:
Totally. And I think the best case scenario for most products is these are experiences, their interface is so amazing. You don't need a productor one bit. I'm with you on that. I think sometimes it's like these tools in this market has been created because it's really sometimes hard and difficult and timely to make sure and really test out if we took people through this flow, would that be more effective from a tension perspective or getting more people to that first strike?
Wes Bush:
So I see why it's been created, but you're totally right. Fraser. That's a really good observation. And yeah, the best case scenario is the product is so easy to use that people just understands intuitively what they need to do. But I think having something like this that isn't too forceful in this example can be really, really effective for people to just go through. Since, I mean, this audience is a bit biased since we're all in tech or most of us are in tech. So we're really good with technology. So we're going to be like far on the right for answering this question. But I think for a lot of other people in industries where that's not the case, it could be totally different, they're like, "I love it." So that's a good thing.
Frazier:
If I can jump into just the one exception I think to this rule is you will have features which are buried because of the way your interface exists. And you do want to highlight them that's different than a product tours and make it contextual to say, did you realize that you also have this other feature, which is not as obvious. But I see a lot of product tours that will say things like, "Click on the save button to save your work." Like, oh, great. Yeah, thanks. I hadn't figured that out, mate. So if you can avoid that, but very powerful when it comes to helping people once they've been in the house and they've made themselves comfortable, then using it further down the road to highlight aspects of the product that they may not have gotten to on the normal onboarding course.
Wes Bush:
I think like if you ask yourself on a scale of one to 10, how helpful is this product tour step, maybe that save button would be like a six and if it's not a nine or a 10, don't do it.
Ramli John:
Cool. Good point. I mean, just want one last point about this, and this is interesting conversation. I keep going back to yeah, UX is great, but I mean, the example I can think of is Ikea. How many of you have bought furniture from a Ikea or somewhere else where like you have to assemble it? How many of you is like me, I throw out the instructions and try to, even with a great UX, I'm just going to jam the plugs together, like figure that stuff out. And then they're stock kind of people, the crazy people that don't want that the manual. And then there's my wife, Joanna, who would like step by step, every step, one by one to confirm it.
Ramli John:
So I mean, if I can say one thing to improve, yes I agree, great UX should be there, but there will be some users who would be like, "Oh man, I need somebody to hold my hand." And give them the option I was suggesting. I forgot who said it earlier, giving users control is great UX. Giving users options is really important. So just ask them straight up. Do you want us to give you a product tour? And based on the companies we work with that that's made an improvement in completion, as well as it doesn't bother so many people out as much as just dropping them and dragging them right in. Same thing with a story analogy I had earlier where they'll drag you in. Anyways, I got to move on.
Ramli John:
And in [inaudible 00:56:22] this team of keeping the users feeling like they're in charge, we're just supporting them becoming more awesome keeps resonating. Yes. That is our goal. Make users awesome. Which is a book, actually. One final thing. So finally, in this example, we have this, I picked the template. Together we can overcome and I edited it out. And in this case, the steps are a template, click, download. And then the very last step. Finally, when I download it, I get here and it says success. If you download, didn't start automatically download now here, save time by scheduling your posts. And then they actually tied you to get the 30 day free trial of Canvas Pro again. So I mean, the question, this is the last step here. This is the last voting thing. Is this a red? Is this a yellow? Or is this a green? After they've already achieved the first strike. They say congrats.
Ramli John:
Oh, JD said red. Ah, interesting. Anybody else? Monica says, keep it. Erin says, I like that much, like this better here than the first time. Kay says, G, bunch of greens here. Thomas R a squall. Interesting. Okay. Alan says, Y I mean, R. It's very busy, maybe simpler approach, for sure. The design could use some improvement.G for SMB, it fits. Any thoughts here, Wes, about this experience and anybody else feel free to unmute, this is more of a discussion.
Wes Bush:
Definitely. So I think the reason we're seeing a lot of Gs, take a guess here, is because it feels a bit more right as far as like, okay, it's not too forceful. It's really at the end of the day, we've experienced the value. We've got the first strike and we know what the product can do. And so it's really becomes a question of, do you want more of that? Do you want to really invest in this product and make more graphics, make more amazing things? And the reason I really love it at this part in the user journey is because, well, you may not know is whenever someone gets to that first strike, they're actually a lot more likely to become a paying customer than you even realize. Because at this point, this is when the person has sold themselves on the product.
Wes Bush:
If they really like this specific graphic in this scenario, and they're proud of it, they're feeling a lot of cool emotions that they might've been frustrated before about this graphic. And they're like, oh, I've got to create a card for mother's day or something like that. And you know, the store I usually go to is closed. I got to try this out or something like that. And they made something really nice that they're happy with.
Wes Bush:
And so this is one of the most powerful times that you could ever do this. So when it comes to your own product, just think about right after that first strike and what could you do to really help people make that decision if they want to continue using your product, there's a simple way to upgrade. And they can have that option where I see a lot of first time PLG companies make the mistake is maybe not even showing that option of where to upgrade, making that hard. But in this case, it makes it really easy for someone to really go through and say, you know what? I like this so much. I want to keep doing it for another 30 days. If it's a trial or I just want to purchase it and go from there.
Ramli John:
I love that take. I mean, the other thing I love about this is congratulate people. Often I see when people there, I don't see a lot of success state often where like, "Hey, congrats for doing this." I mean, I probably would have even blown that out. I've seen another one would wave where they say congrats in doing this. Guiding them to the next step is super important. I mean, we haven't really talked a lot about PQL, but this could be also a good time for salespeople to reach out, wouldn't you say? This is like, "Hey, congrats, congratulations." That's a great first point. If you have a sales team, [inaudible 00:08:37], Getting here could be a good time to actually have a human or a person to reach out and say, " Wes, congratulations. We are excited. I saw that you downloaded that pink designed to come together and I'd love to just see if I can help, we can help you out even more."
Ramli John:
So, I mean, that could be an interesting chat there. Any other comments around this, any other talks? I know Fraser said have a team member review for provide for input here is really, really important.
Speaker 2:
Yep. I had a question around what you think is the best metric to optimize your onboarding for. So if you have a step, which is a bit of a marmite step that cuts conversions, but maybe increases short-term ARPU or something because someone invites their team, even though some people aren't willing to do that, but those that do then bring in more money. What do you think is the more important metric to optimize for, and then onboarding?
Ramli John:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I believe it's Brian [inaudible 01:01:44], ex-VIP at HubSpot who said that revenue's not a good north star metric for very reason. You want to find a leading metric that leads that in. It's usually a product engagement. And you just talked a little bit about that, that product engagement could be adding somebody from the team, that could be a good product engagement metric. And you want to optimize for that engagement versus revenue per se, like what you were just talking about actually. So really, really great point. But I mean, in terms of success milestone, you want to really optimize for the number of people who get to that first strike. I mean, that's the first milestone I would really get to for onboarding experiences. Are people finding success and Wes says this a lot, your user success becomes your success. And if they don't find success, then you're not successful so to speak. And Wes, I think you have something to say as well. Yeah.
Wes Bush:
I mean, under week six for the April cohort, you can see there is actually a course on product qualified leads. So I would definitely recommend going through that. That is probably one of the metrics I would pick for as far as like looking at your user onboarding and trying to understand is this performing really well or not? Because a good protocol, if I lead, this is a whole nother can of worms, but go through the course at a high level, it's just understanding, okay, what is someone have to do in the product to see value?
Wes Bush:
And so whenever you're looking at that metric of how many people are actually doing that within the product, and you keep increasing that over and over and over again, you should see a direct correlation between the number of PQOs you get, the number of people who are actually becoming a paying customer. So it's a really good leading indicator to Ramli's point about the fallacy of picking revenue for that metric. When you pick the leading indicator, it's actually a better indicator oftentimes of what is going to drive that specific revenue. So hope that answer your question, Sam.
Speaker 2:
So say you had a another success metric that wasn't revenue, but say let's take Canvas for example, was like creating posters. If inviting your colleagues meant less people then created more posters because they've invited that team and so on. Do you think it's more important to optimize for people hitting their fifth strike rather than the first strike? If that makes sense?
Wes Bush:
I'm not sure I completely understand it. So like, if they were just adding more and more people to the team accounts, so like overall they're recruiting a lot more graphics, is that what you're referring to?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So say that's a scenario where we add in this step that lets people invite that team, but that means there's 10% less people get to their first strike. But those that do are then much better product qualified leads.
Wes Bush:
Yeah. That would be an interesting trade-off, that's for sure. What I would look at is what is the bigger overall one out of those teams? Are they just a lot more engaged in active ends? You might find that overall, if we played the long game looking at a couple of years, you might realize that that was actually the best move because you have a lot more actively engaged products. And if it is specifically a product that majority of teams would get the most benefit from, that might be the right route.
Wes Bush:
But in Canvas case where I think it's probably not the case and the reason they brought that up only for the small business owners, that extra step of inviting the teammates was really because it's really at the end of the day, a great individual product. Whereas it can be used as a team product, but that's after the fact. So if you do have a product, for instance, where it's more teams based and that's where it's going to drive the most benefit, definitely lean into that. Use those leading indicators like that product qualified lead metric to validate that if that is the right direction for you to go.
Ramli John:
Great questions. Thanks. Thanks Tom. If you have any questions, we have a Q and A coming up shortly. But just to recap, I know we use Canvas as a structure to learn a little bit about optimizing experiences. I just want to just do a recap of the activity. If you can take a sticky note here and share some of your takeaways and I'm going to drop the link again, I only see 35 people on this mural but we have 94 people in our Zoom. Feel free to just share what your takeaways. And this is some of the stuff that, some of the things that I'm going to do now with with my products onboarding. Whatever that is, whatever your takeaway is, I'd love to just get to know what that is. And I'm just going to start a quick two minute timer here with some calming, maybe just one minute.
Speaker 3:
Ramli, do you mind putting the canvas... Oh, you changed it. Sorry.
Ramli John:
Oh, there it is there. Some calming music.
Speaker 1:
Are you having that issue with the stickies and dragging behind the area? I think that might be happening on mine.
Ramli John:
I got it. There it is. Sorry about that.
Speaker 1:
Thank you.
Ramli John:
Prior to calming music, it is a good day.
Ramli John:
All right. Thank you so much, everybody. I'm just going to read through some of this. Segmentation is so important. As much guidance as we need, but as little as possible, let users decide. I'm glad. Oh, things are moving around. I will get that locked in later. Put the users in control. Give the users in control, says Allen. Focus on simplicity, constantly reviewing your process. You want to find the right balance between the right moments. There is no magic recipe. You're totally right there. It's just a process.
Ramli John:
Put registration last, give access value. To that point around putting registration last, I just want to stick on this is if you type actually Instagram posts Canva, you can go through the whole Instagram, the Canva experience without actually signing up. There is a way to get there. If you go through Canva through the search engine, they allow you to download the Instagram posts without having to sign up at all, which is really, really interesting to that point. But thank you so much everybody. And I'm just going to pass it off Wes. I think he has some important notes to share around other tools. I know we use Mural for this, but there's a lot of other tools that we can use.
Wes Bush:
If you want to zoom in a bit on the Trello board. I just want to share this because the next step I know we've took a time going through Canva to give you an idea of a simple product, what it looks like to go from that very first experience, all the way to getting to that first strike. But the next stage of this is really going to be you doing the work and going through your own products. So one of the common questions we usually get is if you are primarily sales led right now, I mean, this isn't going to be as easy for you to go through, but what I want you to do, and you can see the way we broke it down here is just try and jot down every single little step someone would need to do in order to experience that first value of your product. You could use Trello. You could use notion.
Wes Bush:
Basically, like I just find Canva and boards are the best. Whenever it comes to this. And the more detailed you can get, we did include screenshots on some of these, as far as we walked through it. It is more helpful. And so whenever we typically did this, like in workshop format before, we just have everyone write down sticky notes on a wall and then have these arguments discussions around what is a necessary step? What is something we could delay? But this way you can obviously share it virtually as a team. And I would just use the labels as really just the colors of like, "Hey, we believe this is a must have step. This is something that we could probably delay." But one of the ways I would recommend going through it too as a team is maybe even just have every single person go through this experience and jot down all of the specific steps.
Wes Bush:
And the reason I recommend that is because there's been so many times where if I just get one person from, let's say a team of five, to go through and write down each of these steps, one person has like 30 steps and another person has like 50 steps. So you find that some people are very dialed in on every single step, but while sometimes people miss some steps. But it's important to go through it individually because you're going to find that holy cow, usually there's a ton of more steps than you even realized. And then the next phase, we all go through this in the worksheet too, so you don't necessarily have to remember it too much, but it's really just going through as a team. Maybe you can book a meeting. I don't know if you could do the first part of this by today or tomorrow or something like that.
Wes Bush:
But before our next call, I want you encourage you to go with your team and try and understand what does your straight-line onboarding experience look like? So that'll be a really fun discussion as a team. So just want to touch on that as far as putting the rubber to the road, because this one activity, even if it was just this activity for this entire program, I can believe that it is going to be well worth it for you. Because in the past we found teams shave off, even just like 20 to 30% of steps without even really losing much. It was just, "Hey, we had these random steps here and we didn't think much about it." So if this is your first time going through this activity, it's going to be super high value for you. And one other thing to think about too is we've talked a lot about reducing steps and I'm a big advocate of always reducing friction.
Wes Bush:
But sometimes like what we saw in that Canva example, where they asked you what is your goal here? Or I think it was phrased a bit differently. Like, who are you, what are you using this for? Is it like for a small business or you're a teacher or something like that. You might realize that by adding a step, you could actually create a better user experience and help that user get to that a first strike faster. So don't be afraid if you do go through this and you realize like, "Hey, you know what, we should probably actually add a step here too." That's something we didn't talk too much about, but it is something to keep in mind as well of what will accelerate and get someone to experience the value of the product faster. Sometimes addition does help because it's subtraction in the longterm. So just wanted to go through that. But Ramli, back to you.
Ramli John:
Yeah. Thank you, Wes. I know we have 12 minutes left and we were going to go through gen for facelift. I'm just going to review a video. And one of the things that I'm going to do is for anybody who wants to submit their app to me and Wes, and I will shoot a video this week or early next week, just go through that story thing. I mean, I'm going to start wrapping up here. So this straight line onboarding template is something that you can go through, every step that we talked about right now. You can get the sheet handed out to all of your team members. You can do this remotely using Miro and Trello. Productlet.com/straight-line-onboarding redirects you right into this worksheet that the Wes and I have created for you and for your team, for you to download that. Go right ahead. And so Nate's asking around this, let me tell you where you're submitting your app here. So I start wrapping up.
Ramli John:
So just let me center this for a second. Just to recap action items, first of all, the early digital copy of the product onboarding book is available to everybody right now. You can go to helpthisbook.com/RamliJohn/onboarding and it will get you there. Chapter seven and eight is where I dig into the straight on onboarding. I talk about the [inaudible 01:15:01] test. I talk about other frameworks that I have, as well as how to use different things, things that Wes was talking about. Adding that experience. Yeah, Paul's asking if you can drop in and we'll drop it in at right after. Go through the straight on onboarding worksheets for your team, productled.com/straightononboarding. And to Nate point, go to productled.com/direct-consulting. This is also on your dashboard under product led.com/dashboard, There's a support section called direct consulting. Submit your app.
Ramli John:
I will shoot videos, tomorrow video. I have my video face on. I'm going to put my hat on, my PLG hat, my PLG shirt and I'm going to shoot a bunch of videos, just reviewing everybody's thing. And what's happening next week, we are excited. If you're trying to get buy-in from your whole organization, we have Claudia [inaudible 01:15:56] as customer experience manager, a jungle scout, which is this team that's over 200 people, and she's done some really interesting things to get alignment and buy-in from marketing sales and executive team around product led growth. And she's amazing, so I'm super excited to bring her on. She's going to do a little presentation, and then we're going to do a Q and A on how to get by-in. And that's a question we get asked all the time, how do we get buy-in? How do we get everybody aligned? Even with small teams, right? How do you get everybody on the same page?
Ramli John:
And to that point, we're hosting a free intro to PLG. We've been doing it every week this week on Wednesday 12:00 PM Eastern. We had 150 people sign up. So invite your whole team, like go to productled.com/plg-intro. And we can also drop that link later. But that is our job is to help you get as much value. I mean, we got 10 minutes left. If you want to go have lunch, dinner or breakfast, wherever you're at, go right ahead. I'll give you back 10 minutes. But Wes and I are usually sticking around up to 2:00 PM Eastern standard time, just to answer any questions, but that's where we're at.
Ramli John:
Thank you so much. I hope this was a valuable experience just walking through this experience itself. Even I learned a ton from all of you. And once again, if you have any questions, we're just here to answer them, and we're happy to stick around for however long it takes for you to get the value of your question answered. And Florence said our free trial is not live yet, what do you do with onboarding still? How can we submit it later?
Ramli John:
Send me a Slack. Send me a DM, Florence, feel free. You can also map this out after, and you can use the same exercise for that, and Florence says thanks. All right. Question time. What are your questions that are on onboarding? I see somebody. All right. Yeah.
Ramli John:
They're on Onboarding. I see somebody on the right. Yeah.
Paul:
Yeah. I just wanted to pick up on the message that I put in the Slack about putting all the value upfront and having that open, let everyone do what they want to do, and then saying, "Right, if you want to take that away or you want us to keep it, then register your details." Wes, have you seen that? John, Ramli have you seen that model working?
Ramli John:
Oh, shoot. I totally missed. Sorry, what kind of model was that?
Paul:
Where you're just giving away all the value up front, so I can come into the product, I can do whatever I want to do and then, if I want to keep it, I exchange what the L's at that point, rather than trying to catch everyone's details up front, because what I'm considering, right, is Zombie signup trial, all this just rubbish just sitting in your system saying that we signed all these people and they're not doing anything. Whereas you could have a one-time use or you could kind of block IPs after so many times. I'm just kind of trying to approach it from that side.
Ramli John:
Oh, interesting. So how do you... Yeah, I mean there's definitely that balance around should we put this in there or not? From our experience, it's a huge blocker and running a little experiment to see, is this a huge risk? I think that sometimes, especially the junior team, they're like, "Oh my goodness, we're going to get a bunch of spouts". That's just something that we've seen as it's not as big as... There's also other technology like Recapture that can do that for you, but do you have any thoughts around that? Oh.
Wes Bush:
As far as that one goes, yeah it's like a trade-off and it depends on your particular product. I'll give you an example too, of a product where this would not work. You wouldn't even want to really try this. This is like a stock photos company, and so they definitely have to pay for some of these photos, they have to attribute it. As part of their free trial, they would give people three or five photos. They had initially tons and tons of spammers, just kind of setting up these bots to scrape their sites, take all these photos and then just use them wherever they wanted.
Wes Bush:
It was terrible. People were abusing the system. One of the things that they could do, at least immediately to try and solve this problem, was for them to really go ahead and create an opt-out free trial, so it actually required a credit card, which was one way. If you have a product group not worried about that, there is not too many things that could go wrong within that particular product. They couldn't abuse it that much. It could be an option just like, for instance, like Canva for some of those search terms, they're realizing that, "You know what? If you want to credit a Instagram post or something like that, let's just get you into the product, create that product experience, and then at the end you can ask for the details if you want to create more like that."
Paul:
Yeah, exactly that. Okay, cool.
Wes Bush:
Awesome. Thanks. Paul.
Wes Bush:
Doula is waiting for your book, Ramli.
Ramli John:
I have chosen the book cover. Yeah, it seems like people have voted for the plain one, and it's about speed and direction and growth and leading, directing, guiding users, so it won by three times more than the next one, by a landslide.
Ramli John:
Wes?
Wes Bush:
Any other kind of questions that anyone want to get in to? Feel free to unmute yourself too, if you wanted to just ask us. That's faster. Yes.
Speaker 2:
I had a quick question because when we were looking at Zoom's pricing page, for example, in a previous session. Do you think that the big players, so like Zoom, Slack, Canva, and so on, can almost get away with having slightly more friction in their own boarding that benefit them because of the brand. If you're quite, like an unknown small company, do you feel like you almost have to have like an even more perfect Onboarding that means you don't ask questions that benefit you?
Ramli John:
Yeah. I can answer to that, example with Shopify. Sign up for Shopify. They ask for 20 questions, right up front. Sure, they did UX stuff, like split it up into two pages, but they can get away with that because they're Shopify, right? If you're competing against Shopify, you wouldn't want to ask, "You have a store right now, which one is it?". Drop down. Pick from the dropdown. Is it big commerce? Is it this, is it that? What is your phone? They can get away with that because they have that brand and they know that people would want to jump through the hurdles. I think the point earlier around that they have reached a maturity where they're not optimizing now for first strikes. They're not optimizing for first experience necessarily, they're optimizing now for revenue Growth. I think in that case, they've optimized their experience now not necessarily for a frictionless experience, but more so, "How do we maximize our revenue per signup?" essentially.
Wes Bush:
I think that there's a counter to that as well, too. If you're an early stage company, you might actually want to add more friction because you're learning. You're in learning mode. Let's say you're trying to find product market fit. A lot of times it's like, let's say you go completely seamless. There's absolutely zero friction. It's just the bare bones. Sometimes you might get lost, and part of that is because as you grow from a smaller company to a bigger company, you're going to start attracting different groups and subsections of people. So segmentation is going to have to eventually become a piece of that, just like Canva, for instance. They realized, "Hey, we got these small business owners. We have teachers. We have like a couple of other core groups." The sooner you recognize that, the faster you can accelerate your Growth as you really prioritized build-out journeys for those specific kinds of users.
Wes Bush:
One of the things that you could do is just ask people whenever they sign up, "Hey, what are you hoping to accomplish in this bigger product?". Is that adding more friction? Hell yeah, it is but it is also super valuable for you in the longterm. It's like, "Hey, yes, there's a trade-off here, but we're okay. We don't have to do this forever either, but by doing so we're going to be able to segment better and maybe this quarter, we take a little bit of a hit as far as the converse drive, but we're looking at this multi-year segmentation effort of finally understanding our users." Yes. It's worth it. It goes both ways, depending on your situation as a business.
Speaker 2:
Thank you.
Wes Bush:
No worries. Good question. Cool. Anyone else want to jump in?
Speaker 4:
Hi. I had a question. Have you seen, or how do we deal with different users sign-up or Onboarding experiences? For example, a user who signs up for a free trial versus when the enterprise license starts and a champion or a client admin has to add all of the users. I mean it's somewhat related. I agree with the earlier points on adding emails and confusion, if not informed about the app when it's a pain, but that's something that we face as a B2B Software Company.
Wes Bush:
Ramli, do you want to take that one?
Ramli John:
Sorry. I just put it in my mouth. I think to that point... I think the conversation earlier around, if that's the case that users would get more value if they had... I'm trying to think of one app where you can't get value if you don't have that... Slack, that's like slack. Imagine joining for Slack and there's only you, who are you going to message? How are you going to get a ton of value out of that? I think that's when, to that point, I don't remember. It's so long ago when I first signed up for Slack. Oh man. I'm sure that's one thing they want to optimize for is invite your team. Cause if not, good luck chatting with yourself or chatting with a robot, at least. So, I mean, that's one thing that I would think about is if it's something critical then I would definitely ask that upfront.
Speaker 4:
Okay, thank you.
Wes Bush:
Sean.
Sean:
Yeah. I guess one of the things that I have been thinking about right is there's a lot of ideas and a lot of different things I want to test and we use Intercom so we can bring data in and we can pop Intercom messages based on some of this. They have their tour feature. It's not super robust, but I'm just wondering in terms of tools and ways to AB test and that kind of thing, right. So much exists around landing pages and on the marketing side. But there's very little on the product side without just building it. And so testing and iterating on this becomes pretty expensive from a development standpoint, especially when you've got actual features you need to deliver for customers and just wondering, any best practices or any tools or any things you see folks that are doing that are allowing them to accelerate and test and iterate faster.
Ramli John:
Yeah. I mean, in terms of tools, we had a few that pointed out, Pendo. I mean, we had Pendo, Marcus Andrews, director of product marketing from us, join us in an app use. And a few of those tools allow you to actually AB test experiences, like imagine being able to AB test product tours and asking the question "Yes or no?" Do you want a product or will that increase completion? So, I mean, without engineering help, it's just one piece of code would allow you to build that. The drawback to that is there's definitely some limitations of customization. And that's why a lot of teams, what we found is they start off with this tool, whether that's Pendo or Appcues, or Userpilot or Chameleon. There's a bunch of them now. And once they figure out what is working and that engineering has two resources is when they can fully integrate the Onboarding experience with our app. Once again, when they have the engineering resources. So it's not a third-party app that it might add on to your product itself.
JD:
I use [inaudible 01:29:00] and I like it so far. Yeah. It's minimal engineered time. The only thing be careful is that you basically had to be like index of the classes that you pick for the tutorial. Because if not every time that you, we use React every time that we make a build to deploy. It trumps everything out, and the tutorial goes to garbage. So quick tip to not have to rebuild everything and over and over again. Yeah.
Ramli John:
That's a good point.
Sean:
We've had that problem with multiple tools where it breaks with each bill, just because of the way the tools work.
JD:
Yeah. Yeah. You just have to index them all.
Frazier:
I have a question. Today, you talked about the user success. What does it look like in tools such as Canva? Our problem is that we have one product with several different parts in it, and I'm actually struggling a bit. How should you proceed with this? You see each product or module has its own desired outcome to reach, or would you rather create one overarching desired outcome that each user should fit? Or are there 10 paths someone needs to go? So that's where the, I think complicated thing for us to achieve. Any tips?
Wes Bush:
I wish you asked this question earlier. This is such a good one. Okay. Yeah. So when you think of this straight line Onboarding experience, yes. Like for the example we went through, we literally just went through the small business owner one, but let's take it from another angle. So let's say we put, we're a teacher. There's a different straight-line Onboarding experience for that specific persona and use case. And I mean, randomly, if you want to find that wave Onboarding tear down, you did as well.
Wes Bush:
I think that one has a really good example of, like at the very beginning, for instance, you sign up for Wave apps, which is a finance kind of app for your business. And they'll ask you, "What are you hoping to accomplish?" Such a smart question, because they give you three options. They're like, "Do you want us to send your invoices or send an invoice to a client? Do you want to manage your finances better? Or do you want to set up payroll?" I think those are the three, they probably have more now.
Wes Bush:
And each of those has its own straight line Onboarding experience that's focused on, like if you pick payroll, okay, great. Let's set up your first payroll sequence and we'll go from there. If you click, I want to really just understand my reports and stuff. It's going to get you to integrate your data so you can go through that. So, yes, the answer is you absolutely do need to know that. The fastest way to get there is to ask a question at the beginning of that Onboarding journey to really self segment people based on what they care about in the product.
Ramli John:
And just to that point, it doesn't have to be 10 completely new paths. For example, the Onboarding for Canva, there's only maybe two or three places at that step that kind of diverges. For example, like which template is popular, templates for blank, right? That's one where you can segment it. So it's not like you're creating multiple lines. It's just at certain points, it diverges. And then it converges at certain ones where it is similar. So I mean, to that point, if you can figure out which steps are better suited for segmentation or divergence and then convert them.
Frazier:
Would you, I mean I've seen a lot of different examples. So people do segment by role or by goal or by even by function or by things you want to do. Just like the next, I don't know, your most important click. I don't know. So from your experience. So what we did is we said, "Do you want to achieve this with this action?" And I, I find that too long because it's a two line text, and then you have three options at six lines of texts. Nobody reads it. It's my fear. So I was asking myself, is it easier if you just put an image and say you are, I don't know, you are the one for the payroll, so you're the guy for the payroll. You're the technician, you're this one. So is it easier doing it for roles or for goals?
Ramli John:
Yeah, that's a good, good, good, question.
Sean:
We're stuck on this as well. Right? Cause we've got kind of by use case, by industry, by company size and then by role within the company and the answers are different for each of those. And it becomes this end by end problem that is where we get stuck. And we just, I love the process you just went through, but to do that for all of those things and then find what's in common. Yeah, that's like a matrix and that's, I think a place where we're getting really stuck.
JD:
Right. Sean, we have the same issue by role on where I'm changing it right now. I'm scraping it off and trying to do by pain point. I'm trying to basically identify the same pain point in multiple costumes. I'm trying to do it by pain, but it's like, what is it that put their hair on fire? It's way harder. It's way harder because in the data is not super obvious, but once at least I go to one super clear, I tested this morning and it works really well. Once you heat it, it's like walking into Nirvana basically. Yeah.
Ramli John:
Interesting. That's a hard question to ask and we find it's easy to JD's point, it's easy to. Yesterday I talked to Claudio, he's CEO of an AirTrans, he called it a different promised lands. What are the different promised land? What are the different types of promises that you're making? And that's another word for what are the different customer jobs and maybe it could be different industries or different roles. But are those different? For example, perfect example is this program right. Their roles, people can join the program from a CEO, as founder, as product manager, as a CS customer success. We can ask that. But, the one customer job we found that joins this program is the people who are championing Product-Led Growth. And the problem is they need the guidance around it.
Ramli John:
We're not second thinking by based on industry, but it's the problem that to JD's point. Is what is the core customer job, or what is that main pain point? What does that, what are they trying to achieve? What does the promised land for them look like? And it would be in this case for Canva, good enough that it's based on the persona. Teachers for them, the promised land is to design a slide that would engage students. And they talk about that in experience.
Ramli John:
If you're a marketer, your promised land is how to create a Facebook ad design that converts. If you're a business owner, your promised land is I'm trying to get more people to buy my stuff and I need a brochure. So I mean that their promised land alliance wealthy personas. But if it's not the case, if you look at Wave where their prompt, are trying to send an invoice, are you trying to do payroll, are you trying to do something else. And it's more customer job focus and figuring that out as the magic. Cause I would just focus on the top customer jobs versus, "Let's do 20 cause your product can do a lot of things." Right. And that's what I would suggest. Wes it looks like you have something to add to the here.
Wes Bush:
Yeah no, I definitely agree with you. Just focusing on the customer jobs is going to be way easier for you to really focus, that I've heard. Because if you think about, let's play it out the other way too, you go through try and map out all the different industries, then you're going to try and map out all of the difference, roles and titles. That's probably going to be a lot. Imagine just every time I get asked, "What country you're in?" I'm like let's find Canada. Does it allow me to type "C" to kind of help out with the scroll effort? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. So, it would be pretty hard now, for instance, if let's say you identified, there's three or five of these man jobs, you ask people what that is. And then you still found that, you know what, the industry is still such an important thing in here.
Wes Bush:
Then maybe you could still have that at the end, but you still know the main intention of why they're signing up. So I'd always lead with that. And if you're not sure, you know what, out of all the things you could really do as a company, what are the main jobs you do help? There's no harm in asking, whenever people sign up, you could just roll this out today if you wanted. When that Welcome Email, whenever people sign up for your products or even for a demo, "What are you hoping to accomplish in this product?" Start gathering that data because that's going to really help you eventually segment on what are some of those main things that people have an expectation around your product to deliver on.
Ramli John:
So good. It's something that Andrew Kaplan actually talked about. Oh yeah. I asked him what his process is for improving Onboarding. Cause he did it for Wistia, he did it for Postscript and HubSpot. And one of his things was just figure out, do a pop-up, do Hotjar or a survey in your site. "Why did you sign up today?" And then he got a bunch of data about with Wistia, which is the video tool. And once he found three or four that keeps popping up over and over again, whether that's kind of get more sales with video or try to upload my video design or something like that, then he focused with Wistia's experience. Like if you sign up for Wistia right now and they ask you, "Why are you signing up for Wistia today?" He based out on that survey, he based out on the question he asked that at the get go. I mean, just confirming once again what Wes suggested, is just asking people.
Frazier:
And I assume you did the same for this program, right? You guys just heard this neat or, I mean, is it what people like, I'm just asking myself. I want to talk to the users, but then maybe they didn't convert to a customer. I don't know that you're working with the competition or they bought the tool from the competition then kind of, I don't know what they reply to that and I wouldn't know if I don't do it. I know the answer to the question. I need to send out the email and to ask them if they want to reply, but I find this step it's very hard to go.
Ramli John:
It doesn't have to be an email. I mean, so to speak, you can just use a pop-up survey on the side just as soon as they sign up, survey pop up. I know it's destroying the experience, right? Oh my goodness, UX designers and product people say, "Why would you do that? You're winning experience." But like you're optimizing for learning at that point. And you want to know "Why? Why are you signing up?" What is it you're trying to achieve? And even a survey, a public survey, you might just get one word, but you might start seeing patterns through it.
Frazier:
Totally. Thanks.
Ramli John:
Good question.
Wes Bush:
Awesome. Anyone else have a question they wanted to dig in? Feel free to just unmute yourself if you have something. Carrie, it's pretty late there. I wonder where you are.
Carrie:
I'm in Singapore, it's two am.
Wes Bush:
Oh no. Thank you for staying up for us.
Carrie:
No worries, it was interesting. Thanks guys. See ya.
Wes Bush:
Bye. Cool.
Ramli John:
Thanks guys. Very insightful. Got to sleep. Oh dang.
Wes Bush:
Yes. If anyone else has that question too, always remember too there is the stock group with questions. Where you feel "Hey, other people would probably have the same question." You're going to get some good responses. If it is confidential about your particular business. That's why I have the direct consulting line if you want to dig in there. But yeah thank you everyone for showing up, stand to the end and this has been fun for us. Hopefully fun for you and insightful. So thank you.
Ramli John:
Awesome. Thank you so much once again, and we will see you the next week. Feel free just to make your thing. JD says super fun. Thanks. You're out. All right. All right. Have a good afternoon, evening and morning to everybody. Bye. Bye.
