New User Onboarding & Time to Value

Customers (or users) generally hire a software or a service to solve a problem. This results in immediate gratification (or value).

When customers first sign up for your product, they will either get what they are looking for; or they won’t…

In case of SaaS application, they are a bit like IKEA furniture. Unless you assemble the pieces together, you wont experience value. SaaS customers must wait to experience the value of the product. It’s this delay that makes churn a common theme among SaaS products.

This delay also referred as Time to Value (TtV) i.e. the amount of time it takes a NEW user to realize the products value.

User Onboarding is important as you want these users to realize that the product they hired is solving their problems. Product Managers should focus on reducing TtV and drive new users to being active users.

The longer your time to value, the higher customer churn. Users have very little patience. The key is to focus on optimizing your new user onboarding experience. Focus on the key actions that correlate to activation - typically an action that provides value.

It is important to have a continuous user onboarding for existing users as you introduce new features and products. TtV can also help move your already active users to engaged users where the cadence of a valuable task performed is higher. This will help drive adoption of your SaaS product.