Onboarding

Onboarding is the user’s journey from the moment of registration or first purchase to the Aha moment when he is hooked on the product. In SaaS, this is a critical funnel: for most products, 40-60% of new users drop off in the first 7 days simply because onboarding did not bring them to value.

In my projects, onboarding is divided into three phases: technical setup (give the client a working product), demonstrate value (show the first result), habit (make the product become part of the workflow). Most teams only do the first and forget about the second and third.

The key onboarding metric is time-to-value: how much time passed from registration to the first result. In good SaaS products it is 1–3 days, in bad ones it is 2–3 weeks. Every extra day in the onboarding funnel costs 5-8% retention by day 30.

Specifics from practice: in one EdTech project, we reduced the time-to-value from 11 to 4 days due to a personalized email series and removed the mandatory step of phone verification. Retention on the 30th day increased from 19% to 31%. Onboarding is not documentation or a welcome letter, it is a product funnel.