Mastering onboarding

The speaker is advising against literally naming product features in onboarding tooltips, instead recommending explaining the value or benefit to users.

Try not to name features. It can be very tempting in practice, even though it sounds easy in theory.

We have some awesome advanced features of really cool stuff you can do with Airtable, automations being a great example. However, users don't necessarily need to get that started on day one. They don't need to learn about the advanced stuff when they haven't even looked at a workflow before.

Sometimes you don't need to experiment. Sometimes if the business, let's say activation, right, activation rates go up 6% versus 7%, that precision actually doesn't help all that much beyond being able to say in your performance review, 'Hey, I increased activation by 7%.'

In growth metrics, "activation rate" measures the percentage of new users who complete key onboarding actions that indicate they've experienced the product's core value.

An activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies five to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today.

"Build with a capital B" was Airtable's internal name for a metric measuring how sophisticated or advanced a user's created content was.

We introduced a few more metrics, and one of them with purely a retention metric for an individual. Are you week two retained? Are you week four retained? The other was what we called Build with a capital B, and this was roughly a sophistication score.

The reason to offer a free plan or a free trial but really a free plan, the freemium type of pricing model is if you value letting millions, tens of millions of customers give your product a try, even if they never pay you a dollar.

Personally I'm in the camp of offering a reverse trial. Funky name, but what that means is offer a trial but also offer freemium. Do both.

I would be open-minded about being dynamic and changing that metric over time. Stability in metric is great, it helps with momentum, it helps with building expertise, but sometimes we overfocus on picking the perfect north star metric and by the time you feel like you've found the perfect one, it's actually time to move on to something different and work on a different opportunity.

The key is to figure out what it would be like for someone to experience value when there's no human sitting next to them, and that value doesn't have to be full functionality of the product.

I do think it's very important to be careful that you are rooted in the customer need and rooted in helping that customer achieve maximum value, rather than sitting in the priors of what your packaging scheme might suggest or what might be in the best interest of the company.

Personally I'm in the camp of offering a reverse trial. Funky name, but what that means is offer a trial but also offer freemium. Do both.

We found bucketing customers by their learning style and their building style was more effective than more classic segmentation, like do you work in marketing, do you work in product management, do you work in operation.