What onboarding/upgrading techniques worked well for you?
I have a big focus on improving our user onboarding at the moment. We have an issue with Project.co where people are signing up but very few are upgrading to a paid plan. For me this is broken into 2 issues:
- We need to improve our onboarding so more people get to the point of value. We do have people using their accounts but we need to improve the percentage of people who Carry on using the system for managing their projects. We’ve worked hard to make the sign up process simple and guide people towards creating a project then tasks and inviting people. At which point they can manage a project and create more projects. We don’t have a strong email nurture sequence at the moment so people can just leave and not get much in the way of contact from us (clearly we need to improve this).
I’m interested to know what onboarding techniques have worked particularly well for other indie hackers? Product tours? Hotspots? Modals? Emails?
- There isn’t much need to upgrade and people are using the free plan. Is our free plan too generous? See here for current pricing options: https://www.project.co/pricing/ - We only limit by the number of internal team users can use the product. People can manage unlimited projects with up to 5 internal users on the free plan currently. We’re going to experiment with limiting the number of active projects people can have on the free plan as well.
I’m interested to know what pricing, free plan limits and upgrading techniques other indie hackers have had success with as well.
Thanks for your help in advance.
Hi @matt_byrom, just fond your post -> do you have an update for IH? Did you get a lift in free to paid upgrades? 🤔
I've spent some time digging into onboarding. I see that as one of the most crucial element in building product.
Currently, we're using:
Thanks very much for your comment here @bartekwitczak - Do you have any indication of which of these the people who sign up see as most useful? Do you get a good engagement with your product tour? I was also using Intercom product tours a while back but ended up building some more simple directional pages into our app. I need to re-test with them now we have more data.
Basically, we don't have cohort analytics yet. That's why I can't exactly tell what's the effect of each of those tools. Still I have a feeling that in our case the biggest impact is from test data and the least from email sequence. That's probably due to target customer.
A few things to check based on the signups so far
Thanks for your comment @vivekvenugopalan - We have (what seems to be) a reasonable retention on our free plan. The people who start using features carry on minus the tyre kickers who don't. Projects are our most used feature, it's what our system is built around so it seems to make most sense to limit this as it's the deciding value piece on our software. At the moment I don't think we're being gamed. As Project.co is a personal system where comments come from user to user it's important to have individual logins. But it's certainly something I'll watch out for. I guess this is super important when pricing is per user.
Some great feedback and this comment gives me a lot to think about. Thank you!
A few products I have signed up to have for a couple of weeks after signing up sent regular emails describing how to do a particular task starting from the basic to more advanced as the weeks go on.
I have found these very useful and as well as on-boarding new users it also keeps you thinking about the product.
Hey @iainfreestone - Thanks for the feedback. Yeah this is on our radar. Something we're going to be setting up within the next few weeks.