Why we made this report

In 2020, your onboarding is going to be one of the most important things you can invest in. It has a direct impact on product activation and adoption. It improves retention and decreases churn. Essentially, it can make or break your SaaS product.

For years, we've helped hundreds of SaaS companies to improve their onboarding, both with our product and our content. However, we noticed that a lot of SaaS companies still haven't mastered their onboarding. There's still a lot of room for improvement.

We wanted to take a deep dive into SaaS companies so we could understand exactly how they approach product onboarding. Do they personalize it to different user personas? Do they use contextual messaging? How quickly do they provide the Aha! moment?

You can find the answers to all those questions and more in our report.

Ultimately, by learning how SaaS companies get onboarding wrong, we can learn how they can make it better.

What we did 1000 SaaS products free trials or freemium offerings onboarding flows

We looked at over 1000 different SaaS products. We signed up for their free plan or trial, and then worked through their onboarding flows. Each time, we noted down every possible observation about how it worked.

We looked at whether they had a checklist, or whether they used a product tour. We looked at whether they asked us for our goals. We even counted the number of fields on the signup forms.

In total, we spent thousands of hours compiling this research. We allocated 2 hours for each SaaS product, to keep things consistent and fair. We then painstakingly noted down every finding you could think of. Then we had to analyze our data and write it up in the report you're reading now.

We're finally ready to share our findings with you.