superhuman onboarding playbook.md

Obsessing Over Onboarding for 10+ Years — The Architect of Superhuman's Onboarding Shares His Playbook

Superhuman became known for its unique approach to onboarding: a highly-personalized, white-glove, human-led experience. Superhuman's Gaurav Vohra, startup advisor and growth leader, gives us a detailed look at how he built and scaled the program.

The most important question for every startup: How long will customers stay?

If your hard-won customers slip away you have a leaky bucket, stalling ARR. But keep them, even grow them, and ARR accelerates.

Retention has always been important, but it's taking on new urgency for founders. AI hype cycles are getting larger, resulting in "vibe revenue" and "annual curiosity revenue."
Startups need to be dialed in on retention now more than ever. And of all the levers a founder can pull to improve retention, onboarding may be the most effective.

The moment a new customer touches your product, a clock starts ticking. For subscription products, the majority of usage drop-off happens within the first few days. It's most disastrous on mobile: The average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days after installation.

Customers make up their minds on whether to return within minutes of encountering a new product. So founders, product, and growth teams rightly obsess over their onboarding.

As they do, they run into the same questions:

I've spent the last decade obsessing over these questions at Superhuman and in my role advising 30+ startups. These experiences have shaped a specific point of view on how startups should approach onboarding.

This post is for you if you're an early-stage founder, product, or growth hire, working on product onboarding.

Part 1: Do things that don't scale

I believe every founder should spend time manually onboarding their earliest customers. This advice is also true for product owners at later-stage companies launching new products.

Five reasons to practice human-led onboarding

1) Customer success: world-class customer experiences
Startups live and die by customer retention, and retention starts with activation. Nothing activates a customer better than manually onboarding them to your product.

At Superhuman, we took inspiration from Apple's Genius Bar. Through a guided conversation, customers can walk away with not just a product but with knowledge on how to use it better.

2) Product feedback: workflows, features, issues
Each onboarding lets you rapidly and deeply learn about your customers and how they interact with your product. The insights gained during this initial interaction far surpass what can be gleaned from pure data analytics.

3) Drive loyalty: methodically manufacturing evangelists
Spending live time with customers generates a tremendous amount of goodwill. Customers see that you are real people putting in real work to make their lives better, which fosters loyalty and advocacy.

4) Sidestep issues: from moments of disappointment to moments of delight
A major benefit of speaking to customers in person is being able to directly share why functionality is missing, while also noting their request.

5) Resource arbitrage: solving the hardest problems first
It's sometimes better to dedicate build cycles toward core functionality than to automate an onboarding process that relies on incomplete features.

Part 2: Unconventional wisdom for productizing onboarding

Nearly all products eventually transition to some kind of self-serve onboarding. However, the transition needs to be done thoughtfully.

The most effective product onboardings embody three attributes: opinionated, interruptive, and interactive.

Conclusion

Customer obsession is key. Creating an onboarding experience with a focus on human interaction and tailored guidance sets the stage for retention and advocacy. By speaking to customers and understanding deeply their needs, startups can refine their onboarding approaches to ensure long-term success.