User Onboarding

“Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that a hundred percent of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting a hundred percent feature adoption of anything else in your product. It's also the first opportunity that you have as a company to deliver on the promise that you made out in the marketplace.”

“My analogy for this is, going back to this teammate analogy, it's like if you hired a teammate, but you're never allowed to get on a call with them and you can only go back and forth asynchronously over time. That works for some teammates and eventually that's actually how you want to spend most of your time. So that's still the future, but it's hard to initially adopt. But the key unlock is actually first you need to land with users in a way that's much more intuitive and trivial to get value from.”

“You have to think about users on modern internet consumers having three attributes. So they are lazy, they are vain, and they're selfish. Lazy meaning, 'I don't have time for this, so blow my mind away. Otherwise, I'm not going to pay attention.'”

“We would pay our best drivers $35 per mentor session. The mentors were our very best drivers, and they were evangelists for the brand. They would share personal tips on when and where to drive. This created tremendous leverage and social proof for new drivers who were on the fence about taking strangers into their car.”

“There's a real fear of the blank page. We just got people to walk through, keeping their interest up, keeping the bar of effort quite low, but within three or four steps, they'd built up something that they'd never been able to do before. The words we literally got were, 'I didn't know I could be a designer.'”

“Very often I think the biggest wins in retention come from inflecting the early user experience. So if you're at three, six, twelve months out, usually a customer has formed a pretty strong opinion about whether or not they like this product. But in that very first experience, you have a lot of opportunity to teach them about why this is a valuable product.”

“It is important to get someone into a product and very quickly have them experience some special sauce, something that's amazing about the product. Shortening the time to scene and having that incredible moment and seeing the true value of the product - that's super important.”

“Growth teams are often too obsessed about removing friction. If you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplified onboarding, please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action. What is the problem that you're solving? You always have a problem of people are confused in it, but people don't know where to go or they get lost in it or they're not educated enough. That is the problem.”