When it works, why not do it more?
At Sleep Reset (case study here) we increased onboarding conversion by about 8x by using the new methodology of intake or question forms. I became fascinated with the new approach and wanted to delve deeper into the psychology of how question flows work.
Will go deeper into the psychology of how they work later!
Going Big!
Seeing the effectiveness of inatake flows, the goal became to build a startup to build, deploy, and test on boarding flows. Think Insta page or Optimizely but for onboarding funnels.
Proving it was a Problem Before Building
Having an intake solve growth problems at Sleep Reset was a fantastic starting point of verifying a need. My gut was saying other companies would benefit from this solution, but wanted to further increase confidence.
To ensure that this was a problem that people were having, there were two main approaches.
1. Talking with companies to understand their growth pain points
2. Market research to see if a product already existed
The first two companies that I had discussions with asked if they could test the product! We negotiated a price and decided to move forward.
I didn’t know how to code…
There appeared to be two clear options:
1. Find an engineer that believed in the vision and wanted in
2. Dive in and learn how to build
After thinking through the pros and cons I signed up for a few React courses and dove in! (Thought process on the decision can be found [here])
Over the span of 1 month two objectives were completed:
1. Finished a react course
2. An MVP to spin up on boarding flows were complete!
4 Main Components to Design For
There are 4 main areas that lead to the success of intake flows
1. Social proof in a subtle way
2. User is learning or pertinent information to the user
3. Personalization so the user knows your solution is for them
4. Persuasive copy - this is somewhat broad
Sitting Down with the Founders
This is arguably one of my favorite parts of the process - trying to extract everything they know about what drives their target audience to make decisions
We would make lists of the following:
1. Trust symbols or social status
2. What are the main reasons user's have signed up
3. Typical objections
4. Related studies to what the product is delivering
We Focus on Running Goolge Ad Experiments
Rather than doing user tests, we found that pushing tests as fast as possible leads to the fastest increase in conversion
Understanding What Happened
Like any process, understanding what happened is crucial to improvement. We would run a comparison of conversion in addition to day 3, 5, and 10 retention to ensure that the flow was capturing user's that aligned with the product.