Yesterday I did a product huddle with one of our portfolio companies.
They’re in a somewhat regulated industry and customer privacy is a chief concern shaping their product.
Like most passionate teams we’re convinced that once prospects experience the ‘aha’ moment of our offering, they’ll convert / pay / evangelize to help disrupt an industry.
But we’re not there yet.
Because to provide this kind of experience, we need a lot of information.
We need to know intimate details about a customer’s sales, purchasing power, and business relationships. We need to know if the prospect is a decision-maker, aka credit card holder, and we might even need to hop on the phone to vet you.
These requirements do not a great first user onboarding make.
In discussing this issue, the idea of eventual vs immediate needs was born.
What information do we need immediately, before we can grant the user that aha experience, and what do we need eventually, before we can follow through on the promise of that experience?
With this approach to user onboarding we’re going to trim down the form fields, time investment, and prospect headspace as they consider our solution.
Indeed, the last thing we need is friction between pain and relief.
I keep finding myself saying the same thing to startups. Focus on the on-boarding process instead of building more features. Find a way to get the user through the entire Hook model and have that treasured “magic moment” as Facebook’s first PM refers to it as. One thing I am also noticing is that many sites don’t even require users to create a password during on-boarding. They delay that in order to get the user to the product faster and then have them set that up by sending them an Email. Also, if the user likes the product after the first use they will inevitably want to set up a password. Then the very act of opening the email and setting this up reinforces the behavior of opening up emails that come from them.