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

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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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This Growthmates edition is supported by 2 fantastic partners:

Phase.com — a user-friendly animation tool designed specifically for product designers. You can easily import assets, animate them, and export the results in various formats. With real-time collaboration, version history, and in-animation feedback features, Phase fosters efficient teamwork and iterative design processes.

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Command.ai — a user-focused platform offering an alternative to traditional popups or chatbots. “AI Copilot” answers questions, performs actions, and simplifies complex tasks. Perfect for Product, Support, and Marketing teams to positively influence user behavior.

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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 👇

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🚨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:

1. Google Search / Ads → Potential users started looking for solutions. This is where your onboarding starts.

2. Website → Potential users (visitors) are exploring the possibilities of the product, looking for the value and differentiators to decide to sign up.

3. 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”.

4. First Session → The user interacted with the product for the first time.

5. Path to Aha moment → The user has experienced the core value of the product for the first time.

6. 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:

1. 40-60% who encounter a poor onboarding experience will never return to the product (ref. Hiver).

2. Almost 43% of respondents in my PLG survey highlighted that improving Activation and User Onboarding is VERY challenging (ref. The Holistic Growth playbook).

3. 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:

1. Start with defining your Habit moment: The user has established the habit around the core value of the product.

2. Then you extract your Aha moment: The user has experienced the core value of the product for the first time.

3. 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.