Since moving down to San Francisco last year I’ve taken every opportunity to advise startup founders. Though I’ve spent most of my career at a large company I learned a ton about creating new products and love to pass it along.

A big challenge I see many founders dealing with is how to get users hooked the first time they launch an app. They try everything. First there are the basics like documentation and tutorials. Occasionally a founder will say, “the app speaks for itself, we just make a great product” which rarely turns out to be true. Most commonly, I hear about optimizing the first-run experience using A/B testing and a barrage of funnel metrics.

But when I ask founders why these metrics matter to them, it sometimes becomes apparent that they haven’t really thought about the more fundamental problem they need to solve. That is to say: why did the user try the app in the first place? Instead they are playing whack-a-metric:

“If we swap the positions of the sign-up and login button, top of funnel CTR increases by 2.7% leading to a drop in churn of 1.2% with a p-value of .005. In the next iteration we’ll change the buttons to brighter orange and reevaluate.”

Whoa now. Let’s pause for a minute.

In my experience, when it comes to first-user onboarding the metric that really matters most is: 5 minutes to “WOW!”

Coming up through an engineering background I started with a strong bias for experimental analysis and leaned heavily toward just following the data. But at Microsoft I eventually had the opportunity to learn from an extremely intuitive product leader, James Phillips, who got me thinking more holistically.

James helped Microsoft quickly turn around a business-intelligence organization that had been struggling to get traction in the market for years. We had tried all manner of tricks to get users, from flashy machine learning features, to low/zero cost, to partner integrations, and outside consultants. Nothing stuck.

After analyzing our situation, James shared with the organization what is perhaps the simplest, dead-easy-to-understand, and flat-out-useful metric for user onboarding and retention I’ve ever seen. He called it, “5 minutes to WOW!,” and instilled it as a guiding philosophy for developing our product experiences.

New users to our service should be able to sign up in 5 seconds, describe their problem, and get a solution that makes them say “Wow!” within 5 minutes. That’s it!

Users have limited attention and lots of options to evaluate. If you can’t make them say “wow” in 5 minutes, then don’t bother with measuring anything else. Fix that first.

The consequences of this approach meant we had to rethink, refocus, and rebuild many aspects of the product suite at high cost. It was worth it. Just a few months later customers were piling up so fast that we had a new problem: service scale!

Getting to “Wow!”

Simple question: your product probably does some amazing things, but are you helping users be successful with their immediate goal? Or does your onboarding experience end with a thud: users annoyed from filling out too many forms, exhausted from tutorials on a zillion features, or simply confused about what to do next? Some tips:

Signing up is a necessary evil but should take no more than about 5 seconds. Users generally understand the need to provide you some sort of identifiable information in return for a customized experience. But they don’t understand the need for filling out long forms, setting up 2FA, providing payment information, or validating their email address when all they went to do is kick the tires on your app. 5 seconds tops!

Engagement and personalization are critical. Your app probably does a lot of different things, but what is the exact use case your user is trying to address? Now, which parts of your app are relevant? Be laser focused about the type of information you collect and then provide the most targeted, bespoke, solution possible in 5 minutes.

Solve it with style! Many first-run experiences forget this step. Don’t let go of the user’s hand until they have a solution that they’d brag about to a friend, co-worker, or their manager. You want them saying, “Wow, check this out!” not “Now what?” You don’t necessarily have to provide a complete solution because the user probably hasn’t even paid you yet. But it does need to be convincing and exciting! Auto-filled templates or solution accelerators that can be used immediately (even with limited functionality) are a great trick to employ in this step. Show off the promise of your product!

Get the user to come back by encouraging them to re-engage with the solution they’ve just created. Re-engagement can happen in lots of different ways but fundamentally: how can you provide value to your user without them having to interact with your service?

Notifications and social pressure are two of my favorites approaches. They both address a deep and powerful human concern: the fear of missing out (FOMA). Notifications, particularly for mobile applications, are the low-hanging fruit of building highly engaging apps. Ask the user what they want to know about, then just tell them! If your app has a social element, such as address book access or content sharing, then you have an even greater opportunity to reel users back in by telling them what friends or co-workers are up to.