Why We Need to NAIL Onboarding For Our SaaS

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all right I actually forgot but I have a doctor's appointment so there's more time on the road um I recorded earlier this morning coming back from Crossfit was going on a bit of a mini rant about just people like trolling on the internet and stuff and how that's a little bit annoying um kind of the the nature of what's going to happen though with content creation it's like it's inevitable um a lot of people don't know this uh but I used to have like kind of before Tik Tok and stuff was was more popular I had um an Instagram account that I used for like modified cars and uh got the same kind of thing right like you have people that are just like completely volatile when it comes to responding to stuff on the internet so um the ironic part was that when I

got home from Crossfit this morning and I was looking at social media I had more people that were getting more ridiculous about the comments and stuff so like one person was basically uh suggesting that like I've never programmed before kind of thing they like you know reposted the Tweet with a comment being like you know this person can't think outside of like uh their small tiny scope or something and I'm like oh man like okay so it's weird because like what you have someone attacking you and the the answer is like you're supposed to just ignore this stuff like that's what you do but uh it also leaves a bad taste my mouth just to have someone who's like blatantly putting out kind of like bull crap about me um and then what like do I need to go defend myself to this person that

I don't even know or give a crap about like no uh but at the same time like I'm like just against the fact that they are like I'm posting opinions about things and they're trying to make like a factual statement that's incorrect like my if my preference for something cannot be factually incorrect I'm telling you this is my preference and that's why if you disagree with that's totally cool you're allowed to and you're welcome to but you can't say that my opinion is incorrect or like my preference is incorrect like that doesn't make sense so anyway I just thought it was very ironic that I had to I had significantly more it was almost like I don't know not quite like a 10x on people being ridiculous but like somewhere between two and 5x I would say uh just a lot of stuff to respond

to I people saying like oh this guy didn't respond to me so like one guy was saying like I'm I'm concerned because he didn't reply to me and I'm like dude there was like hundreds of comments on this thread like what do you want me to do um but anyway enough about that going on to the doctors they're going to tell me I'm dead no this is a sort of like a a physical just an annual thing but I booked it like two months ago um so it's kind of crappy but uh I had to duck out of a meeting that I really wanted to be at so um thank you co-pilot I will be using the co-pilot notes to catch up on that it's actually super awesome um I don't use it enough but it's like we've had conversations at work before where we

were like oh man like in that meeting like I could have swore someone was talking about whatever and then we can go ask the co-pilot notes and it jumps you to the spot in the meeting where they're talking about it it's crazy um and no this is not like a sales pitch for for co-pilot they don't they don't give me money for that so but it's super cool so I'm going to use that when I get back um and I figured I'd talk a little bit about Brown ghost I was going to talk about brand ghost um tomorrow but I forgot that I have this drive and I'll do another video on the drive back like why not like like I said I like doing this when I'm driving because I uh I don't like driving and doing nothing so might as well talk about

fun stuff right so brand ghost where we're at uh I've talked about this before we're trying to get our onboarding kind of brought up to par uh with where we want it to be at um some of the interesting conversations there are like this person's not going anywhere I hope that sounds good on the camera CU it sounds good in here but um for onboarding okay let's talk about this so this is going to be a little bit zoomed out from some of the software engineering Concepts but more of like a product fit like onboarding um usability kind of thing but I think this is super important because sometimes uh I think for a lot of software engineers and software developers we don't get to talk about this stuff a lot it's kind of like depending on your company your team and stuff like that's

someone else's problem they have to go figure it out but um before Microsoft and like especially while the company I worked at before magnet forensics especially while it was small like this is stuff we had to think about all the time it's only as the company grew and we had more dedicated specialized roles that we had people to help with this so um one of the things that we're looking at right now is like with brand ghost the idea is that we want people to be able to like our core functionality is to to be able to schedule content on like a recurring basis so you don't schedule it for specific dates you talk about a Cadence that you want to be posting content and then we automatically post that content for you at the Cadence that you have across all of the platforms that

you want to have hooked up to it so that's the idea okay so when we onboard like we have to figure figure out what it means to be successful right and it's kind of like a meta philosophical thing like what what is act what does it mean to be successful and that's kind of hard to answer but we have some things that make it very obvious that it's not successful so for example if someone registers an account and they don't do anything else on the platform that's probably not successful right um and we we see that's the currently the biggest drop off that we can measure is like someone will register an account and then they just don't do anything with it but there could be a million reasons why that happens like it's impossible for us to know all of them but if we

can start quantifying them and categorizing them then we can figure out where we should draw like put more attention to so I've talked about this onboarding flow that we have and we we made it and then it had a bug in it so that we the last few people that have been onboarding they didn't get exposed to it which sucks because we were like we can't measure um but um the goal of that onboarding was basically to say look we will guide you through making your first we call them topic streams so making your first topic stream that way you can get a Social account connected that's a pretty big M Stone in onboarding is youve you've connected to LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram you've connected to something because that's a barrier if people are like oh man like I don't know how to connect

um or you know do I trust this platform form like there's that's a barrier for sure for people to to get onboarded so that's one part the fact that we can make a topic stream a topic stream isn't very obvious to people so it's a bit of a concept to think about because a lot of people don't post content in this way consciously right they might be doing it manually they might not even realize that they could be thinking about posting content this way so we're trying to guide people into doing it and it's something they might not really understand yet so um basically our onboarding is geared to get people creating a topic stream with a one piece of content and have social accounts connected and that way they leave onboarding and basically they they have something that will start posting for them now

they should add more content and stuff like that there's safety mechanisms in place so it doesn't spam but like that would be successful right they have a topic stream with content that will start generating post great okay so that's cool and we've been trying to like that's kind of the first iteration of this onboarding flow that we talked about but even within that there's some stuff that we're like we're not happy with it like we're already predicting where people are going to have trouble based on some of the other feedback we've had uh from users that are making topic streams so to give you an example a topic stream right now is it has a specific post type that you'll need to use and what I mean by that is like a topic stream can be one of video posts picture posts text posts like

that category of post exists for the whole topic stream but like why like why why is that a requirement what if someone just wants to say I have a bunch of content I want to post these times and like this one's a picture post this one's a video post that's how I want to do it pardon me I don't have a good way to mute this and cough um so we're already looking at this going look like it's confusing that people have to pick a type but the problem is that we've designed some of the backend that has this assumption that we will always know the type um so now we're it's kind of weird and it's like it's a perfect conversation to have like kind of like in in startup mode where you're thinking like okay we know we want to move away from

that restriction we know that we don't want users to have to pick that it's way more intuitive to just say like you want to make a post pick the picture the video or not enter the text like just tell us what you want to post tell us that don't we don't need you to like pick the type and then go pick other parameters for it just tell us what you want to post um it just it's way simpler so we know we want that but the problem is that we're about to go do a big blast out to a newsletter to try and get some uh some new users and trying to figure out like another wave of feedback so we need to figure out what we can do in a very short period of time and while we like the idea that per piece

of content we should be allowed to figure out that type of post not the whole topic stream right so each piece of content could be picture video text or a combination instead of the entire thing being of that same type that's the direction we want to go in but it's way more work than we can get fit in in the immediate term which means that as we're refining this onboarding workflow we are currently making decisions where we're like we know we're going to have to rewrite this and it sounds funny right cuz it's like why would we go waste the time and it's like we have to think the goal of the onboarding is to basically minimize friction for people and we think we can do better right we think we can do better we think that that whole thing I was just explaining we

think that will be something that helps improve onboarding it helps improve usability of the platform that's all good but we're not there yet we literally cannot just say oh well we'll just wait another couple of weeks until it's done because by the time we're done that there's going to be something else where we're having the exact same conversation we'll say oh well we should hold off because like this other thing it's not perfect yet like surprise there's going to be tons of stuff that's not perfect and there's nothing wrong with that I think we have to keep reminding ourselves that and as I'm saying this by the way there's not like infighting or anything where people are like no no no like we must do this like we're all agreeing and it's cool because they they become challenging conversations right where um we're we've all

worked close together so I think we're almost always on the same page but when we're not it means we get to have really good conversations and say well like explain your perspective to me like I want to understand because none of us are sitting in these conversations going like I can't wait to prove myself right there's there's no benefit to that right like we all want the same goal we want users to get onboarded successfully we want them to be able to navigate the product easily that's the goal we all want so when someone has a different opinion it's really cool um and I wanted to share this brief example because it was eye opening for me and I need a little bit of water here so give me one moment before I start coughing so the idea around onboarding currently that I've been thinking

is like we're trying to set users up to have a topic stream now there's like kind of two goals to look at here one is the goal for the user and one is the goal for us and in my head I've been going okay if the goal is to have the user get through onboarding and have a topic stream that can post I was looking at this onboarding and going guys like I think what's going to happen is that they're going to have this topic stream and they're going to be like cool like I made it but like I don't want it like I I haven't planned out my content yet I don't know the schedule I want to post for like I just don't know these things and when I was thinking about this and we were having a conversation part of me was

pushing back on this saying I don't think it's going to work because I think it's addressing the wrong thing and when we got talking it was really interesting to me because like the goal isn't actually to have someone design their perfect top stream in the beginning it's not the goal the goal is actually to expose them to a bunch of different pieces and then have such a low barrier to entry that now they have a top EX streem now they can go edit it they can delete it they they can see what it looks like they can add more content disable they can do all the stuff with an existing one and I thought this was uh I was like oh maybe this is like a dumb comparison but I want to share it and uh one of the other guys was no I think

it's a perfect example so I said okay in Visual Studio again if you're a c or.net developer said if I want to go start a new project so say I want to go make a new blazer application I'm not great with blazer it's very new for me and when I go to start I go through Visual Studio and I say new project and it basically makes me a sample one pardon me and that sample one has a bunch of code in it that I'm going to delete right it's the same thing it's not like it's not the perfect app I think there's a cop following me it's kind of awkward oh someone else is between us we're good um so it's it's a very similar thing like you basically get this template that has some stuff in it that you can go tweak and explore

and see it in action and it makes you way more familiar than if someone just said okay here's an empty canvas go start your your Blazer uh your Blazer project you'd be like I don't like where do I even start so even though we have to go delete some stuff like I don't need the page with the counter on it like with the button I don't need that but I have an example of it I have an example of a control calling some code that that will refresh and stuff like that like cool I have a working example don't need it don't want it I'll delete it but I can see it there and I feel like our onboarding is that exact thing it's not making your perfect topic stream but at the end of it it's going to have you set up so that

you can see how it looks and feels and that way when you want to make new ones or edit this one you have a lot more familiarity so I thought that was a really cool conversation that came out of us trying to to have these discussions about like what is the goal of onboarding right it it seemed like it was a lot more simple on the surface I guess um but when we got talking about it I was like hey it's like it's different than what I thought originally and uh I'm glad that we could have conversations as a group together to to chat through that because it's uh it's too easy for people to just be like nope like my way uh I'm just glad I work with people that aren't like that so I got to switch lanes over here it's a different

route than I take for going to work I'm actually only a couple minutes away so we'll wrap this one up soon and we'll have another video on the way back but um yeah I think we got that going on so we're going to wrap up that stuff uh in the next CP couple nights I think Thursday night Thursday night is going to be when the newsletter goes out and we'll see how much traction we get from that that'll be cool uh it's not our newsletter so we have no idea on like how many people will click through if they do click through how many will try a trial um you know maybe we'll get the or like we'll get first paying users out of that um we have a couple people right now that uh one second I got to see where I'm driving here

uh that we've talked to that are like they're kind of they're getting ready to to kind of get on board as paying users which is cool um we're kind of it's in a weird spot because we're like there's trials we can extend them we'd rather just extend to people so they can keep feeling confident in what's going on and then um we we just want to prove that people see the value in it and that they would be willing to pay for it and to be clear it's like if someone was going to pay us 20 bucks a month or 100 bucks a month that 20 or $100 whatever that dollar amount is that's not going to change whether or not we can sustain running it right like we can keep going but if we keep trying to get users on board and the roadblock

ends up being like I don't want to pay for this then we're we're either not solving a problem or we're not presenting a solution that people uh at least the way it's presented they find Value in it right it could be really not a problem or we're doing a bad job presenting it so that for us is the biggest thing coming up which is do people see value will they pay for it the actual dollar amount from one person from from five people it's not going to be it's not like oh we can go retire or like whatever it's it's nothing like that so we would much rather just make sure people are happy making sure that they see the value and at least getting that feedback from them because again if someone's like yeah I'll keep using the product as long as it's free

like keep extending my trial but I don't want to pay for it then it's not to be like a jackass to them we don't just want to say well screw you we're turning off the trial but it's again it's telling us like it's it's a challenge they have but not a big enough problem that they um that they're willing to pay for it so like the viability from a business perspective becomes a little bit more challenging and if that's the case if we keep doing this for a while and we're like hey no users um even once we're iterating on the feedback if users are like we just don't want to pay for this then we can it now the difference is that I need this to live on uh but I only need the backend service for it so uh brand ghost is uh

regardless it's never going to be something that that dies as long as I'm making content so it's cool it's got that going for it but again if we find that after a while of doing this we haven't talked about like a deadline but if we find that for a while people are just like no then uh we either pivot we can reuse the technology or something or just go try something else so I think that's where we're at I think I'm coming up to the doctor's office right here so I'm going to go ahead and end this and I will see you folks very soon take care