Product-Led Onboarding™ boosts your user activation rate, by eliminating "busy work" in your current onboarding process and helping more users experience your product's value, faster. You do this by optimizing your product's time-to-value.
In this course, you'll learn how to:
Wes Bush:
So, the rest of the lesson, we're going to break it up into four steps. Now, as I mentioned seven minutes ago, at the beginning of the lesson, at the end of every step, if you don't have it built out yet, pause the video, go through it, apply it to your product, and then press play, and I can go on to the next section. I can wait. So, the first section we're going to go through today, as it relates to building your straight-line onboarding experience, is identifying user success. Once we do that, we can map out how someone can get there in your product. We can eliminate some steps along the way when we vet it. And then, ultimately, develop your straight-line onboarding experience. So I encourage you. If you have a colleague or anyone else who is going to be responsible and working on this project with you for your onboarding experience, feel free to invite them along for this exercise.
Wes Bush:
And you will notice that the end result will be better when you have more opinions to fuel the fire, if you will, whenever it comes to crafting your onboarding experience. It has a very quick time to value. So let's dig in. Where do you start when it comes to end user success? So there's really two things you need to identify. The first one is, what does end user success look like? Now, when it comes to, let's say, a product like Intercom or Drift, which is in the live chat software space, you might argue, end user success looks like acquiring more customers. That is success for those companies.
Wes Bush:
But the step two is the strike. What is the strike when we think of Intercom or Drift? Is it uploading the script to your website? Is it potentially having a few conversations with folks on your website? Now, there can be many strikes just like in bowling, it's not the first one, maybe it's just a pin knocked down kind of thing. But there's lots of different strikes and they're part of the journey towards end user success. So if your ultimate end user success is acquiring customers, maybe your first strike might be having a conversation with someone who is interacting with your live chat software solution on your website.
Wes Bush:
And so, just think about that for your product. What does your end user success look like? And what does your first strike look like for your product? And what is the main difference? Well, end user success is really focused on the end result. And whenever we break that down, I'll touch on it in a second here, but there is multifaceted view of this. It's not just as simple as a strike, which is someone might do this and experience this kind of outcome in your product. End user success is something that we're almost always aspiring for. And so, when we're thinking about what that looks like, there's really three components.
Wes Bush:
There's your functional job, which is, yes it is a live chat software solution, we can help people have more conversations on their website. That is the functional piece of it. But when we look at any product, we don't just buy for the functional reason. We also buy, largely, based on emotional reasons too. And so when we think of live chat software, when we're going through a trial, or maybe a freemium version of it, and we're interacting with the first person who's interacting with our tool on our website, it feels interesting if you've never used live chat software before, because it's so similar to instant messaging tools that we're familiar with. We're like, "Hey, it's like Messenger, but for business. It feels easy to use. What the heck is wrong with this? It feels awesome."
Wes Bush:
And so, that experience from an emotional standpoint, it feels good. It feels easy. And it feels like we're having a conversation versus, I don't know about you, but you replied to a contact us request, and it feels a lot less personal. And also from the other side, from the person who is putting in that contact desk request, they don't feel like, "Hey, is this going to go to one of those emails that they never check? And am I going to get a reply?" So, emotionally, it feels much better in that sense.
Wes Bush:
Social upgrade however, is, let's say you were the person who installed the live chat software solution in your company. And you're having hundreds of conversations every single week. And you're closing at least five figures every single month, just through this one new channel. How do you think you'll look to your colleagues? Do you look like a rock star? Or do you look like someone who's just on the next line to get fired? Which one? It's probably, maybe not a rockstar, but you are looking pretty good. Maybe, whenever it comes time for a promotion, you got some more leverage. You can request a bigger raise. You can do a lot of things. Socially, every product has an impact on this. And it's up to you to figure out, how do we help people in this department? So, end user success encompasses these three upgrades. There's the functional, which is what your product does. There's emotional, as well as the social, that all focuses on end user success. And so whenever we think of that end goal, where we want to drive people towards, this is it.
Wes Bush:
And so what does end user success look like for your product? If you don't know, pause. Just start thinking about it. Go back to the functional, emotional and social upgrade. Have an answer for each of these. It's going to be the foundation for the rest of this lesson. We are going to be solely focused on, how do we manufacture end user success in your product.
Wes Bush:
So the second part of this is really identifying the first strike for new users in your product. So how do we really define a strike? A strike is the moment when a new user first realizes meaningful value in your product. Now a strike can go by many different names. There's the aha moment, the moment of truth, the value switch, the wow moments, magical moment of truth. Maybe that's pushing it a bit too far. But, as you can see, we're not really reinventing the wheel here. A strike just fits with the analogy of the bowling alley framework. But whether you refer to it, internally in your business, as an aha moment, moment of truth or anything else, what we're getting at here is that the feeling is the same. So whenever we think of a strike or an aha moment, what it should feel like is, well, at this point, you understand how the product can help you. You've experienced the core value of the product to some degree, maybe not the full degree, but some degree. And you got some, maybe something done very quickly that could have taken you a really long time before.
Wes Bush:
So I'll go through five examples of a strike. And at the end, I'm going to ask you, what does your strike look like? Think about it as I go through these examples. Now for Airbnb, this might be making your first booking. You feel pretty good about that. You feel excited, you might feel, "Hey, this is going to be an adventure. It's not just one of those hotel motels that we know what to expect. It's going to be different. Google. It's finding an answer to something complex. For Facebook, it's connecting with your friends, maybe a long lost colleague.
Wes Bush:
For Zoom, it can mean having your first video conference that is bug free. Oh my goodness. Even just thinking of comparing it to Skype, when you're passing around your usernames and all those different things, and it takes you the first 5, 10 minutes of the meeting to just figure that out. It's frustrating, to just have something work. That's literally their value prop, why they're succeeding right now. Expensify. It could be creating your first expense report that actually doesn't suck. If you know most businesses and their expense report procedures, it's brutal. And if they can make that easy, that's an amazing strike. That's an amazing time where you say, "Hey, that wasn't that bad, to get that expensed. I like that."
Wes Bush:
What is the first strike for new users in your product? Think about this, long and hard, because what we're going to be doing now is focusing on mapping out the journey of what it really takes someone to go from, I just heard about your product. I'd like to check it out to I've experienced the value of the product, and I'm really excited to become a paying customer because I love it.
Wes Bush:
So this is the journey. Every customer journey has these three components. There's the beginning, the first touch point. They learn about your product, about your company, about what you're up to, maybe it's through your blog, maybe it's through an ad, you get the point. It's the first touch point. And between that beginning and the middle of their journey, you're losing these people by a lot. There's that Intercom statistic, again, we shared at the beginning, 40 to 60% of users will sign up and never come back again. So you're losing 40 to 60% of users from the beginning to middle of this customer journey. And so, what we're going to be focused on is, identifying what that strike is, and then getting people to end user success as simple as possible. And so this is really just reverse engineering what it takes to get to success.
