Onboarding that stops losing half the trials
Plenty of signups, almost no activations. We found the four steps that predicted a paying customer and built the first session around them.
The brief
Halide sells monitoring software to infrastructure teams. Marketing was working: trials arrived steadily and the cost per signup was healthy. Then more than half of those trials never reached the point where the product does anything visible, and the team was buying more of a funnel that leaked in the middle.
What was actually wrong
The trial dropped a new user onto an empty dashboard and a documentation link. Getting to the first useful screen meant connecting a data source, which meant credentials, which meant a conversation with someone who had them. Most trials quietly died in that gap, and nobody inside the company had signed up as a stranger in over a year.
How we worked
- 01
Found what the survivors did
We compared the accounts that converted against the ones that lapsed. Four actions in the first session separated them almost perfectly, and everything else in onboarding was noise.
- 02
Gave them something to look at first
The trial now opens on a live sample environment, so a new user sees the product doing its job before being asked for a single credential.
- 03
Moved the hard step later
Connecting a real data source stayed necessary and stopped being first. By the time it is asked for, the user knows what they are getting for the effort.
- 04
Wrote the emails off the same four actions
The trial sequence now responds to which of the four a user has not done yet, rather than sending everyone the same five messages on a timer.
What changed
Activation roughly doubled without a change in traffic, which made every existing marketing pound go further. The sales team also stopped spending first calls on setup, because setup had already happened.
“None of us had signed up to our own product as a stranger in a year. Sitting through that once explained the entire funnel.”
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