Hot take: Your onboarding sequence is probably scaring off 30% of your users

I was sitting in my home office in Austin last Tuesday, watching our product analytics dashboard during a live demo. The user clicked through the first three onboarding emails fine, then hit our 'advanced workflow' tutorial and just... stopped. Logged out. Never came back. I dug into the email data and found that 30% of new signups were dropping off right at that same point. Turns out we were throwing too much technical jargon at them too fast, talking about API integrations and custom fields before they even knew how to create their first project. I trimmed the sequence down to 5 simple steps, moved all the complex stuff to a separate 'power user' track, and now we see almost 80% completion through the first week. Anybody else notice a specific drop off point in their onboarding flow that they fixed?

3 comments

3 Comments

cameronp471mo ago

Burned myself the same way last week. I was so proud of our fancy onboarding video that I didn't realize it was basically a lecture on database schemas.

ward.kim1mo ago

Oh trust me I used to think making everything available upfront was better too but you guys are totally right. Getting them in the door SIMPLE is the way to go, I'm convinced now.

martin.riley1mo ago

Yeah we had the exact same problem last year. I was checking the numbers after a month of our new signup flow and noticed people were just bailing right after they hit the "connect your tools" page. We were asking them to link Slack and Trello and like three other things before they even made their first entry in the system. It was too much too soon. So I cut everything except the bare minimum steps and moved all the integrations into a little optional menu they can find later if they want. The drop off went way down like almost overnight. Now I tell people just get them in the door and let them explore at their own speed. Simple always wins man.