04 · 2022 · Course / community SaaS
Simplero · Rewriting onboarding so customers actually reach their first win.
Redesigned the first 15 minutes of Simplero from cold dashboard to guided, intuitive setup, moving the activation needle and quietly fixing a long tail of churn drivers along the way.
- 38%
- lift in 7-day activation
- Senior
- Product designer
- 3 sprints
- to MVP
- 2022
- shipped
- Role
- Senior Product Designer
- Team
- Design + PM + 3 engineers
- Tags
- Activation · Onboarding · Retention
Simplero is a course and community platform for solo creators and small teams. By the time I joined the project, the product had quietly accumulated every feature a customer had ever asked for. The first 15 minutes. The make-or-break window. Was a cold, intimidating dashboard.
The challenge
A product that worked, hidden inside a product that didn’t welcome you.
The activation funnel had a sharp drop-off in the first session. Support could see it. Sales could see it. The data team had instrumented it. What no one had done was connect the drop-off to the specific feeling customers had on first login: that they'd signed up for a product that demanded they already know what they were doing.
I led a discovery sprint with a small set of new customers. First-week sign-ups who had agreed to share-screen with us. The pattern was painful and consistent: eight tabs open, no idea where to start, churned by day three.
Approach
Welcome flow as a product, not a screen.
We rebuilt the first 15 minutes as a single, opinionated flow with a clear "first win". A published page customers could share with their audience the same day. Onboarding stopped being a series of empty fields and became a guided tour through the customer's own product.
The team and I prototyped three flow shapes in parallel. We picked the one that produced the most "oh, I get it" moments in user testing. Not the one that ticked the most checkboxes for the product team.
“Activation is not an onboarding screen. It’s the moment a customer realises the product is going to work for them. Design for that moment.”
Outcome
The first session stopped being the last session.
7-day activation lifted 38%, and we saw a knock-on effect on 30-day retention. Support tickets in the "I'm lost" category dropped enough that the CS team noticed in their weekly review.
Reflection
The biggest leverage in growth design isn't the homepage or the upgrade page , it's the seven minutes after the password is set. Get those right and the rest of the funnel quietly improves.