"It's like making people sneeze more vs. making each recipient slightly more susceptible to sneezing."

Raviv says the analogy is awkward, but works as a reminder that for Patreon deepening activation of qualified people already in the funnel is more important than broadening the number of people exposed to the funnel.



When most people think about accelerating virality in a viral loop, they ask themselves, "How do I get users to share more?"



But Raviv and the Patreon team saw this as a blind spot.



Instead, they asked themselves, "What if you kept the same amount of shares but doubled your rate of onboarding?" The result would be the same as if you achieved double the volume of shares.



Improving funnel conversion is a powerful way to accelerate virality for two key reasons:



1. Sharing happens "out there."



Sharing can be prompted within your product or onboarding flow, but, unlike onboarding funnel conversion, ultimately sharing is an action that takes place outside of the experience that you can control directly.



2. Onboarding success rate is an exponential function.



In a SAAS funnel, onboarding success affects all other metrics in the funnel, from retention to referral, and exerts a disproportionate effect on recurring revenue.

Defining "financially successful" creators

In order for the Patreon's onboarding experiment to have a compounding viral effect, the company had to be able to identify and single out the segment of Creators that had the greatest potential to achieve "financial success" on the platform.



The criteria for defining a “Financially Successful Creator” are context-driven. Finding Financially Successful Creators hasn't hinged on absolute numbers of followers or an absolute publishing threshold. Instead, the team looks for a qualitative combination of engagement, how consistently the people who are engaging are engaging, and the professionalism of public-facing materials.



All of this is why it’s difficult to qualify Creators before they actually launch -- and even more challenging to then applying that definition across the board to all potential Creators in different categories.



Instead, the Growth team decided to stick to the ultimate end quantitative criteria of a certain level of monetary earnings because it’s simple and functional for the growth team to optimize for that.



Ultimately, their two most basic criteria evaluate an inbound Creator's breadth of reach and depth of relationship with their audience.



The next section will go through each of Patreon's six hypotheses, where they came from, and what the growth team did to test them.

The 6 Hypotheses that doubled onboarding success

Hypothesis 1: Creators with the potential to earn life changing income are lurking in the funnel somewhere



What it meant



The growth team's first hypothesis was that qualified Creator leads were "lurking" in their onboarding funnel -- in other words, great leads were hidden but everywhere.



What does this hypothesis mean? Let's start with looking at its converse.

"The opposite would be to say that we're doing a bad job on acquisition and users aren't even clicking through. The opposite would that it's not an onboarding question, it's an acquisition problem."

Instead, the team's first hypothesis asserted that it wasn't an acquisition problem, that users were in fact hitting the site and even making it through part of the funnel, and some were even launching their Patreon page (the completion of onboarding). But, ultimately too many were dropping off in too many places.

"We believed they were dropping off at every step even though we couldn't necessarily drill down on where because for us, some drop-off is positive as it indicates that unqualified leads are self-selecting out," explains Raviv.

The team concluded that changes to the product at every single step would have a positive effect.



Where it came from



Early on, the Patreon growth team performed a small onboarding experiment where they only made changes at the very end of the funnel (the page editor). The improvement was the addition of simple text-based content that educated users on how to make a good Patreon page, and it was the same content that the teams on the front lines -- sales, community and customer support -- found themselves saying over and over again to Creators.



In the experiment, the user had to get through the entire rest of the funnel before they could reach the new and improved help content, which lived alongside the editor and was only presented to the user at the bottom of the funnel.



The results were impressive. According to Raviv, the inclusion of help text had a major significant impact on every level of financial activation:

"The fact that this bottom-of-funnel change could make such a difference told me that there were probably people lurking all the way to the bottom of the funnel that had potential.

If they're getting to the bottom of the funnel suddenly converting due to this change instead of dropping off, then they're likely to be hanging out at other parts of the funnel but dropping off before they even see this change."

What Growth did about it



This initial micro experiment told them that if they were really going to move the needle, they would have to address every single step of the funnel, from the first message on the landing page, all the way down to launching the Patreon page.



As a result, the team chose to implement a larger scale overhaul to the entire funnel, and they decided to call it Project Mondo.



Raviv explains:

"'Lurking'" means they're present, but dropping off all along the funnel. I probably won't be able to find exactly where they are with a single pinpoint experiment, so I need to cast the net wider. The results can also be multiplicative that way."

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