6 steps of Holistic User Onboarding: 10+ examples from B2B SaaS you should check

Get inspired by best practices from Coda, Rows, Dropbox, Loom, and more.

Nov 12, 2024

Hello everyone 👋 I’m Kate Syuma, and welcome to Growthmates.news — the newsletter where we explore inspiring and practical growth stories from products we love. Join the company of 4,300+ Product, Design, and Growth people from companies like Amplitude, Intercom, Miro, Atlassian, Grammarly, Framer, and more.

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Today we will make a very special deep-dive into my favorite topic. I’ve spent almost 7 years analyzing User Onboarding since my time at Miro. Last year was an absolute deep-dive into that topic:

First, I ran industry research that covered 80+ companies;
Created 10+ articles and podcast episodes on “Onboarding & Activation”;
Facilitated Onboarding series with Amplitude, Loom, Reforge, Superhuman;
Launched 2 cohorts of the Self-service Onboarding course;
Supported 5 different companies as a Growth Advisor to uncover growth opportunities for Activation (VR, AI, automation, and collaboration tools);
Lastly, I presented at MicroConf in Dubrovnik my keynote speech about the 6 Steps of Holistic User Onboarding.

Today we’ll take a deep dive into that story.

⭐️ Would you like to get a tailored audit of your User Onboarding directly from me? I prepared an “Onboarding audit” to help you uncover growth opportunities, give tailored UX recommendations, and provide a fresh perspective on your roadmap and design solutions. Check out the Onboarding Audit → (2/3 spots for Q1 2025).

Apart from that, I’m always happy to share free resources like this one, so let’s dive into today’s story with plenty of frameworks and examples from B2B SaaS 👇

🚨Here’s a bitter truth: Onboarding is the moment when all our potential users start interacting with the product. And at the same time, we lose most of them here.

However, user onboarding should go beyond “just fine” or intuitive. It should be the most memorable and delightful moment in the whole journey.

When User Onboarding starts and when it ends?

Hmm 🤔 Isn’t it just the first session and simple tutorial? I will surprise you or not, but it starts way earlier and lasts way longer.

User Onboarding ≠ First session. This is a holistic user journey that starts when a potential user started looking for solution to solve their problem. It ends when user built a habit around solving the problem with your product.

And if you want to nail it, we need to think of that holistically. For that, I introduced a framework that includes 6 steps.

Here are the 6 Steps of Holistic Onboarding:

Google Search / Ads → Potential users started looking for solutions. This is where your onboarding starts.
Website → Potential users (visitors) are exploring the possibilities of the product, looking for the value and differentiators to decide to sign up.
Sign Up Flow → The user performs the necessary actions to set up the core value of the product (creating the profile, providing profiling information, etc.). It’s also often connected to the “Setup moment”.
First Session → The user interacted with the product for the first time.
Path to Aha moment → The user has experienced the core value of the product for the first time.
Habit Forming → The user has established the habit around the core value of the product.

Why Activation should be your #1 priority?

When I was researching User Onboarding last year, one of the most recognizable patterns among 80+ companies was this one: “Most users drop off before getting fully Activated for both B2B and B2C companies”.

In addition to that, let’s look at these 3 data points:

40-60% who encounter a poor onboarding experience will never return to the product (ref. Hiver).
Almost 43% of respondents in my PLG survey highlighted that improving Activation and User Onboarding is VERY challenging (ref. The Holistic Growth playbook).
Activated users have 2x higher long-term Retention and 70-80% of them Convert to Paid (ref. Optimize new user onboarding on Reforge).

I hope you are more convinced to start investing in your Activation journeys. Next, how do we get there?

Start with defining Activation as a “Path”.

First, we start with defining your Activation. And most importantly, we look at Activation as a “path”, not a single magical action. Here are some useful reminders:

Start with defining your Habit moment: The user has established the habit around the core value of the product.
Then you extract your Aha moment: The user has experienced the core value of the product for the first time.
Only after that, build a path that creates Setup Moment: The user has performed the necessary actions to set up for experiencing the core value of the product.

📌 Tip — When start to measure your activation steps always start from defining the last step - habit moment. Check its correlation and causation with LR retention and CR to paid and then go to Aha and Set up moments.

Start by collecting qualitative insights — these signals can be collected from your User Research and interviews:

Uncover a set of actions correlated with long-term retention;
Uncover core action + supporting actions + natural frequency (e.g. within 7 days);
Your core action = your “Aha-moment”.

Then you can support your Activation metric definition by doing a “regression analysis” — learn more about it in my previous case study.

Now, let’s take a look at practical examples, best practices, and mistakes to avoid with 6 Steps of Holistic Onboarding 👇

Step 1: Google Search / Ads.

It all starts here: your potential user started looking for a solution to solve their problem. This is the moment where we “Say Hi” to all of our potential users. And unfortunately — “Goodbye”, as we lost most of them right away.

❌ Mistake → Not communicating product value in a clear, unique, and consistent way.

I’m this person who is still looking for an AI note-taker for my calls. Recently I’ve been searching for a new solution and encountered this example.

Voicenotes repeat several times the same things like “AI”, “Notes”;
It doesn’t add extra value to this valuable real estate;
Ultimately, there’s no clear differentiator from other tons of competitors.

✅ Best Practice → Explaining product value with relevant keywords and “social proof”.

Let’s look at another example — Manychat. The product is also competing in quite a busy area of marketing automation tools, and they’re trying to stand out on the search page by:

Highlighting the main value for the user (“Save time”);
Specifying product positioning (“Social Media Marketing Automation”);
Leveraging social proof (“Trusted/used by”).

This is the moment when users build the first impression about your product already. Hence, this is an opportunity to start communicating your core value right here and continue doing that consistently across other steps.

Step 2: Website.

Bitter truth: Website / Home page is where your potential users (=visitors) should see your product value. The reality — they don’t because most B2B companies think their product has nothing to show. Why so? Let’s see what we need to avoid and what you can do beyond just showing a generic screenshot of your product.

❌ Mistake → Giving NO ability to interact with the real product before registration.

Here’s one of the B2B SaaS home pages — do you understand what’s the product at a glance? It’s quite hard to grasp, as we’re looking at plenty of “copy” and 18 (!) logos. While “social proof” is an amazing behavioral principle that helps increase user confidence and create trust, it’s not the only tactic.

The product should speak for itself — even if it’s a complex B2B platform.

✅ Best Practice → Give access to your product with “Loginless Experience”.

What if we not just show the product preview, but give the ability to interact with the real product “sandbox“? This is an extra mile that Rows.com recently introduced.

Rows is a modern alternative to spreadsheets, it’s a horizontal product with a large market size. The core value (=aha-moment) is tightly connected to the first experience, and as sooner you can provide it — the better. They introduced a genius solution with a Loginless experience ( bravo

Henrique Cruz

and the team 👏). Here’s how it performed:

CR to sign-up rose by 72% from 11.1% to 19%.
The activation rate of users who converted from a sandbox is 30% higher than those who sign-up via other channels (e.g from mobile)
More people people using the product >3 days a week in their sandbox accounts. Many of them would have never tried the product.

It shows how speeding up the time to value can affect the motivation and the quality of the top of the funnel for your product. But for this tactic to work out, you need to have an excellent and intuitive UX for your product (get some inspiration on High-quality principles).

Step 3: Sign Up Flow.

We got our visitors to the Sign-up page — success! Most people are not getting here, and this is an opportunity for us to learn the most about our potential users to personalize their experience further. But instead of that, we increase unnecessary “interaction cost” and don’t ask relevant questions to gather information for profiling.

❌ Mistake → Adding “interaction cost” with unnecessary distractions.

Do you remember these endless registration flows where you can’t way when it’s over? Or if you see a lot of visuals, popups, or even “helpful” tips along the way? If all these things are used intensively, it creates an unnecessary interaction cost for the user.

Interaction cost is the sum of efforts (mental and physical) that the users must deploy in interacting with a site in order to reach their goals.
Nielsen Norman Group.

We should find the right balance of things we show during the sign-up flow. And most importantly — optimize for gathering information that can help you personalize this experience further.

✅ Best Practice → Focus user attention on answering key profiling questions.

There are not so many moments in the entire product experience where we can learn a lot about users. This is the right moment.

Dropbox nailed it — they are not just asking for key profiling info, but also showing the questions progressively that doesn’t add extra overload with the sense of progress. My team designed a similar UX when I worked on Onboarding at Miro, and it performed very well.

To dive deeper, check out this article by

Elena Verna

where she expands on the Profiling topic and how to leverage this data. Here's a lot of my favorite questions for B2B SaaS:

Company size;
Industry;
Role;
Current tools ;
Experience level;
Goal / Use case.

Frankly, one of my favorite and quite underestimated questions is “Experience level” especially for collaboration tools. By adding just this simple question, you can segment your users and introduce the first form of personalized onboarding.

Step 4: First session.

This is a real success for some users who got to that phase. Based on the “Hooked” model (Trigger-Action-Reward-Investment) by

Nir Eyal

, they have just invested some effort and cognitive load while completing the sign-up flow. This is why we should give an easy start and personalize the first experience. But instead, we treat all users as the same and think “They will figure it out”.

❌ Mistake → Landing on a dashboard with NO clear first action.

When was the last time when you registered in the product, got through the sign up flow, and ended up on an overwhelming dashboard with tons of buttons and actions? This is not the warmest welcome.

✅ Best Practice → Make your CORE action the first user step.

Keep the first action simple and noticeable. Make sure it’s connected to your core value (=aha-moment). Dropbox is asking users to upload the file, which also activates the Investment loop. If users upload more files and personal data, they get more sticky to the product.

Some actions like uploading content can take more time than expected. In that case, we can leverage “Labour Illusion” by clearly indicating the sense of progress.

Phase has a powerful Figma Plugin that can be used for designing animations like this. You can easily import assets, animate them, and export the results in various formats. What a magic! ✨

But what if your product is quite complex, and it’s hard to make the first action as an easy start? Then personalize your first experience with Starter Kits, Templates, and Emails.

Coda is doing a fantastic job by showing several “Starter Kits” as recommendations based on profiling information the user shared at the beginning.

Step 5: Path to Aha-moment.

Hope you’re still with me, as we’re getting to the most interesting and important moment — the “Aha-moment”, an opportunity for your product to shine bright. This is where we should speed up the time to value. Instead, users are left alone to figure out what the core value is by themselves.

✅ Best Practice → Speed up time to CORE value with pre-made examples and AI automation.

We already talked about Coda, so you remember their Started Kits. It might be still challenging for users to build an entire database and Project tracker, but what if we guide users and say they can do that in 2 minutes?

Of course, the users will not get the final version of the Project tracker, but they will get an idea of the core product value and will complete it by uploading their data (=Investment loop + Stickinnes).

If you have a product that has the power of AI, it’s the right moment to unpack it. The team at Loom knew they needed a solution that wouldn't burden creators with more tasks. Instead of asking users to manually add titles, chapters, or summaries, they turned to AI.

As a result, their Activation metric (“Video First Views”) significantly increased, as well as the speed of creators to share their context.

Step 6: Habit Forming.

We got here — this is already where your users should love the product and create a habit. But instead of falling in love, they churn and never come back. Heartbreak 💔.

Why it’s happening?

❌ Mistake → Bombarding users with annoying notifications from all channels.

How many times you’ve been in this situation? You registered for the product, experienced the aha moment, started forming the habit, and then — bombarding notifications from all possible channels (product, email, SMS, etc.)

The intention of the product team is usually quite good — they want you to uncover more value of the product and help you build a regular system of using it. The problem happens when the “frequency” that the product team is driving is different from your “natural” frequency, or when they are over-using all notification channels at once. What we can do instead?

✅ Best Practice → Showing value-driven suggestions at the right time and place.

Instead of showing valuable suggestions and triggers all at once across all channels, try to identify the right time and place for that.

For example, Grammarly introduced valuable “Premium suggestions” that you can try out daily. Ultimately, the user should build a habit of using premium suggestions, again, using the “Hooked” model, like that:

• Trigger (internal): as a user, I want to sound more confident.
• Action: I write an email to my client.
• Variable Reward: Grammarly gives premium suggestions.
• Investment: I continue using Grammarly.

Extra mile — connect your product value with real user goals. Grammarly is reminding users about the goal they selected in the beginning (“Want to sound more confident?”). Think about a similar approach to create product suggestions— the right value + timing + place.

How to get started 🚀

We’ve just covered 6 major steps of Holistic User Onboarding with mistakes to avoid and some best practices to follow.

Now, apply it in action on your product 👇

Evaluate 6 steps of your Holistic Onboarding — map out the end-to-end experience and do a personal “teardown“.
Uncover the biggest drops and user problems towards Activation — select 1-2 areas to focus on first.
Apply some of the ideas mentioned in this article — start from “Quick Wins” and plan time next quarter to evaluate one of the “Big Bets”.

🤝 Would you like my tailored support with User Onboarding? For that, I prepared an “Onboarding audit” to help you uncover growth opportunities, give tailored UX recommendations, and provide a fresh perspective on your roadmap and design solutions. Check out the Onboarding Audit → (2/3 spots for Q1 2025).

Resources 📕

Profiling: The onboarding step that transforms your growth efforts by
Elena Verna
What is a good activation rate by
Lenny Rachitsky
and
Yuriy Timen
Onboarding at Loom: The Impact of AI and Removing Psychological Barriers by
Kate Syuma
Loginless experience at Rows.com by
Henrique Cruz
The evolution of Miro's user onboarding on
Kyle Poyar’s Growth Unhinged

This is all for today, dear readers. If you found this helpful — please share this with your like-minded colleagues and friends, it would give a huge support for me to continue creating this 💜

With best regards,

Kate Syuma & Growthmates