Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:38:58 · Oji Udezue
[00:38:58] S0: Let me talk about a few fundamentals. Onboarding is a substitute for sales and, you know, all these account management teams for millions of customers. The task is how do you make it approximate a human and how friendly a human is and how approachable a human is. Because if you can do that, then you can process thousands and thousands of customers very quickly. Onboarding is an exercise in understanding the mindset of a buyer, of an evaluator. It's nothing more than that. Meaning that the province of understanding is social psychology. It's not really product. It's biopsychology. And I guess who knows a lot about this stuff? It's people in the, offline industry, the people who stock shelves, the people who provide inventory online, and so on and so forth, they are extraordinarily good at this. So the reason I say this is to divert people who are gross to really find where to source their inspiration from for onboarding, first of all. If you think about this as intentful in that way, which is people come not knowing anything about you and then they progressively develop confidence that you are the tool of choice, you then have to break it down into how does that journey go through a mind, the average mind anyway, and how do you assist each part? One is value proposition understanding. One is trying to see if it's simple enough and provides enough value. One is kicking tires, and one is making the choice that this is something I'm going to go forward with. How does your onboarding support all of these things? Now, I think there are two parts of onboarding. One is mandatory, the setup. It has to be spare. I try not to make it more than three screens, but it's about how do you say what this does and provide the essential setup that your customer needs to be successful. At Calendly, for example, we ask them about connecting their calendar and setting some defaults. Is it nine to five or whatever that is? Those two things set up all the future success. And if we made it optional, more people would fail. So it's information and the essential setup, and it should be as short as possible. Then there's a whole other set of things that should be optional because they're not necessary for everyone to be successful, but they're beneficial if people are curious.
00:41:31 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
And also, it can be what we call a random access so people can get back to it anytime they want, like if they're feeling help. And so if you divide onboarding into those two things and then figure out what to put in one and what to put in the other, I think you can be quite successful. And this is just the tip of the iceberg that I get into in the book. [00:41:56] S1: Are there any examples of really big onboarding wins, things that really helped with conversion or activation that come to mind?
00:42:01 · Oji Udezue
[00:42:01] S0: Well, I think keep it short is one big win. The fewer things, the better that are central that everyone has to go through. It's unclear if all those click throughs go here, go here, and all those things work. The wizards. Yeah. Yeah. The wizards have had, in my experience, limited benefit so much as just directing people to the one thing that they need to do post mandatory onboarding. Having examples, not 10, one or two of what good looks like is particularly powerful because it's mimetic. People see, oh, okay. This is exactly what I'm shooting for, is very powerful. In terms of trial and conversion, letting people understand and being very clear about where they are in the trial cycle, whether that you want them to pay for it now or they need to pay for it later after seven days. Have... Having them understand that really clearly so they know where they are versus they feel like they're completely at sea, I think is very important for conversion. I think there are a few things like that, but I also wanna mention that it's different for every product. Right? Depending on where you are in the quadrant and the amount of augmentation and problem solving and how sharp the problem is, you might wanna adjust your your approach. And this is the kind of thing that there is no... There are some fundamentals, but it's not necessarily this one size fits all. In fact, at Typeform, we're trying to maybe invent a new twist on freemium just because of some of the things we're seeing for our particular customers. And so, you know, these are, for me, some new learning as well as I go through each different product.
00:43:49 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:43:49] S1: Along these lines of onboarding activation and getting a user activated is really important. And I'm curious, do you have an example of what an activation milestone was at Calendly or Twitter or Typeform just to give people a sense of like, here's a good example of an activated user milestone?
00:44:03 · Oji Udezue, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:44:03] S0: I think this goes back to, you know, people with Pendo's and the Amplitude of this world. You have to sort of think through your journey, right? Like, at Calendly and also at Typeform, we have three thresholds of increasing activation, right? And we just try to make sure that people go through each one, as many people as possible. And frankly, we try to forget a drop off between the increasing definitions of activation. So at Calendly, we wanna make sure you've you've you've created your first meeting. Right? But then if you've created five within a week, that's really much more powerful. At Typeform, it's it's really about have you published the form and have you gotten responses and have you gone to look at what the responses mean in the insights page, for example. At Twitter, is are you following anyone or are you being followed? Right? Because that that verb, follow, is the way you start to construct your informal community. Remember what I said is Twitter is for people who want informal community around a topic. That is not... You know, Facebook is about who do you know. Twitter is about who do you wanna know, who's passionate about what you're passionate about. And so if you haven't set up your follow graph at all, you're not gonna really activate. It's not gonna be compelling for you. [00:45:23] S1: Awesome. Those are great examples. It's funny hearing that Twitter activation milestone out of context sounds so creepy. Have you followed anyone, or is anyone following you?
00:45:23 · Lenny Rachitsky, Oji Udezue
[00:45:23] S1: Awesome. Those are great examples. It's funny hearing that Twitter activation milestone out of context sounds so creepy. Have you followed anyone, or is anyone following you? [00:45:31] S0: Yeah. Because a lot of people go in and then they don't... They tweet into the void or they don't feel like they have a voice. Right. But that's not the most important thing. Most important thing is are you getting content that you're interested in? That makes you wanna come back and see more and follow is a huge part of doing that. [00:45:47] S1: Yeah. Just on the point of Twitter, I don't know if this goes anywhere, but it's crazy how it keeps going no matter how much destruction is happening all around. [00:45:58] S0: You want you want me to talk about that? Because I wanna talk about [00:46:00] S1: it. Please. Let's do it.