Ideas are easy, execution is everything.
— John Doerr.
Starting a business is tough. It has ups and downs, false starts, obstacles, and setbacks. But if you find a problem worth solving, you can weather the challenges and build something meaningful.
While it might seem impossible when you’re starting out, I’m here to say it’s not. This is the story of how Usetiful went from the seed of an idea to a G2 leader and high performer in digital adoption platforms and customer self-service.
Before we started Usetiful, JJ and I were colleagues. Over the years, we’d both built several in-house user onboarding solutions. However, once we tried to partner with an external vendor, we realised just how hostile the market is toward startups and small businesses.
Winning market share, earning trust, and building loyalty are barriers for any business. Research suggests that about 90 per cent of new startups fail after a few years. Acquiring customers was one thing, but holding on to them was the difference between success and failure.
Digital adoption used to be a luxury. But now, it’s an absolute necessity if businesses want to compete within crowded digital markets. Our goal was to democratise Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) and make them available to smaller startups and small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
Data privacy has always been a big part of our ethos. Usetiful was built with zero-knowledge design in mind and paranoid end-user privacy solutions. When the European Court of Justice declared the EU-US Privacy Shield invalid in 2020, Usetiful became the vendor of choice for European corporations.
We are a Camel startup. Unlike the modern Unicorns that dominate the headlines, we’re not interested in blitzscaling until we get acquired. We don’t operate with one eye on the exit door. What motivates us is that we’ve found a meaningful problem that we love solving. We want to do it over the long term.
Start with the problem
We have experience as a plucky startup breaking into the game. However, we’ve also spent a lot of time working with other startups and SMEs. As a result, we’ve gathered a diverse market experience on the problems facing software development businesses.
It might sound simple, but if you want to build a sustainable business, you need a problem to solve. Too many companies start the wrong way around and create solutions in search of a problem. While many of these products are exciting and novel, they fail to ignite because people don’t really need them.
We knew the problem we wanted to solve: helping startups and SMEs retain their customers. It’s a clear and present issue that affects new ventures. We would address the problem by making user onboarding easier and more effective.
What is user onboarding?
User onboarding involves helping new users learn and adopt a platform. Perhaps more pointedly, it’s about helping people realise the value of a product and how it can help them solve pain points or achieve goals and objectives.
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One of the best things about startup culture is the obsession with data. Teams leverage data to understand the factors that affect user retention. The churn rate is an excellent metric for helping teams understand how their business is performing.
Frederick Reichheld, the inventor of the Net Promoter Score, showed how increasing customer retention rates by just five per cent can boost profits by between 25 per cent and 95 per cent. Customer churn is the enemy of growth. Usetiful helps businesses reduce attrition by ensuring they know how to get value from their product in the first place.
How do we solve user onboarding problems
Thanks to our past experience in the software development world, we had a firm grasp of the best practices that larger businesses use to engage new users. We also understood that there were other digital adoption platforms (DAP) on the market, although many of them didn’t offer value for money.
We focused on helping smaller startups that didn’t have the time or budget to build bespoke user onboarding features. In particular, we considered the core features they needed to help activate and onboarding clients.
“Aha” moment
One of the most interesting things about working in the user onboarding space is that you learn a lot of tips and tricks that you can apply to your own product. We realised that when users engage with an application, they have a short window to make a good impression. So, everything needs to be funnelled towards helping prospective clients understand how they can get value from your product.
Users download an app because they have an objective or a particular pain point they want to solve. The app needs to minimise any friction involved in achieving its goal. As such, developers must create a user flow that leads to an “aha moment.”
The “aha moment” is the point when everything clicks about your product. Or, more precisely, it’s when a customer realises how your product will help bring value into their lives.
An “aha moment” doesn’t need to be complicated. It can be as simple as realising that you can use Uber to order a cab when you’ve missed the night bus. The “aha moment” occurs when you are notified that the driver will arrive in three minutes. In short, the value and convenience of the product become apparent, and you know that you’ll use it again.
Different journeys
While guiding users to the “aha moment” is the end goal, we understood that each product has its own way of getting there. Sometimes, users just need small, barely visible nudges to help them realise how a product can impact their lives. Other products are more complex and feature-packed, so they need more extensive user onboarding flows.
Considering these differences, we knew that our product needed to be flexible. That involved empowering our clients to build user onboarding flows using a drag-and-drop interface. This decision opened up user onboarding to non-technical teams. What’s more, we included features like tooltips and hotspot beacons that could facilitate simpler onboarding requirements while offering product tours for more complex applications.
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Making our product universal was a big challenge because applications are very diverse in design and technology. We understood that our tool needed to fit around our client’s systems and not the other way around.
The importance of demos
Another valuable lesson we learned along the way was the importance of automated sales demos. While they are one of the less well-understood elements of a strong onboarding experience, they offer businesses a lot of good options.
For starters, they are highly automatable, which suits the trend for product-led growth. Customer acquisition is expensive, and not every team has a big sales and marketing budget. Automated sales demos help teams show the strengths of their product, which can help drive leads and sales. On top of it, they help you to operate outside of your time zones.
Perhaps more crucially, they help users understand what to expect from your product. Because new users know which problems you solve from the start, it ensures that the people who enter your sales funnel are relevant, which helps your churn rate drop dramatically. It’s also a competitive advantage – we have won some of the biggest accounts mainly because relevant competitors had closed offerings and clients preferred a more streamlined way forward.
Final thoughts
In 2023, we’ve finalised building the core of our engineering team. We will continue to invest in our platform to ensure its flexibility and stability. Each month, we add new features and make improvements to our product. Again, feedback is crucial to us, and we’re always taking on the needs and opinions of our users.
We have a strong presence and a loyal customer base in Europe. However, next year, we plan to help teams in Asia-Pacific and the Americas. Expanding into these territories is a big step, so we’re looking for local partners to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible.
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The post Usetiful’s journey: Democratising digital adoption and solving real problems appeared first on e27.
