Early adopters often determine the long-term success of a product, and user onboarding is your best opportunity to engage, educate, and convert them.

But you already know that—that’s why you’re here. In this guide to user onboarding for startups, you’ll learn how to create a first impression that users appreciate and keep them coming back.

Why is user onboarding important for startups?

User onboarding is more than just getting new users to log in. It’s about making sure they realize the value of your product so they keep coming back.

A seamless onboarding experience reduces friction, increases user satisfaction, and significantly reduces churn. Moreover, this has a huge impact on startups. Companies with less than 200 full-time employees 40% of users after one monthbut after three months, on average less than a third of users return.

Prepare your startup’s user onboarding

Onboarding happens asynchronously now—No in training calls. As you grow, three tools will become important to improve and personalize your product experience.

To deliver a targeted onboarding experience and give users the guidance they need (just when they need it), you need:

• In-app guide: Perhaps the most important part of onboarding, you need tools to guide users through key features with contextual tips and interactive content. Types of in-app guides include interactive walkthroughs, native tooltips, resource centers, checklists, and pop-ups.
• Product analysis: Once you launch your onboarding flow, product analytics will tell you where the pain points are and how users are interacting with your product. Analytics are critical to understanding how the onboarding flow is performing and what could be better.
• Feedback capture: Collecting user feedback in real-time will help you continually improve the onboarding experience. Is something confusing or frustrating? In-app input capture is the quickest way to find out.

What should startups include in user onboarding?

Successful user onboarding helps new users achieve that “aha!” moment—the point at which they really start to get value from the product.

There are several important steps to take users from their first interaction with your product to awareness:

1. Welcome and orientation

Start with an introduction to the app and a basic tour of the main navigation. A clear, friendly onboarding experience helps users understand the purpose of the app and how to find what they need to complete key tasks.

2. Guide the user through the configuration

Some products require initial setup before users can start taking advantage of them. For collaboration tools, users may need to add teammates. For music discovery apps, they may need to set their listening preferences. Onboarding should guide them through these steps so they are ready to use the product effectively.

3. Facilitate setup and payment tasks

The “aha!” The time comes when the user achieves the goal that makes them interested in the product. For example, in a task management application, this could be checking completed tasks; in a billing tool, it may accept payments.

However, before they can get there, they often need to do some organizing, like creating that first task. Good onboarding guides users through the setup and rewards to ensure they see the value of the product as soon as possible.

5 best practices for new user onboarding

1. Personalize every experience

To get maximum results, segment users and tailor the onboarding experience to their varying needs. Whether you personalize onboarding based on personas, in-app behavior, or industry, your startup needs a customized onboarding flow that meets the unique needs of each user segment.

For example, education technology startups should guide teachers and lecturers in how to upload grades and create courses, as well as guide students or their parents in submitting assignments. Personalization ensures that every type of user quickly finds value in your product, so they stick around and build lasting habits.

2. Analyze and repeat performance

Product usage data helps startups track how users engage with the onboarding flow (and where they experience problems), so you can easily monitor and optimize the impact. Analyze drop-off points, guide completion rates, and feature interactions to identify areas for improvement and make data-driven adjustments.

Examining data helps startups ensure that they continue to scale and retain as many users as possible. You can A/B test different messages, wizard lengths, and personalization segmentation to find the best onboarding approach for your users.

3. Automate onboarding to match growth

As your startup grows, improving new user onboarding becomes more important—and even more challenging. This is where your in-app guidance and analytics can make or break your product experience. Leverage the automation capabilities of your product experience platform to create onboarding flows that adapt based on user behavior within the application—without manual intervention.

For example, a startup can automate in-app pop-ups to guide users through certain tasks or features based on features they have never used in the product. This ensures that as the startup’s user base grows, the onboarding process remains consistent and efficient.

4. Distinguish between new users and new accounts

In B2B products, accounts often have many users, with new team members joining regularly. When new users join an existing account, their onboarding can be more efficient because the primary account setup is complete. In this case, the goal is to help new team members understand current activities, rather than starting from scratch.

5. Accommodate different learning styles

Consider offering flexible onboarding paths to accommodate how users choose to learn. Modularized content allows users to explore topics in their order.

For longer or more complex onboarding, tools like a progress bar or completion percentage can help users stay on track. Combining multiple formats, such as video demos and illustrated guides, ensures broader accessibility. Adding gamification elements can also motivate users to complete their onboarding journey.

How to measure and benchmark startup orientation

To truly understand the effectiveness of your onboarding process, startups need to track (and measure) the following key metrics:

• Onboarding completion rate: How many users successfully completed the onboarding flow? To find it, divide the number of users who completed onboarding by the total number of users in the onboarding group.
• It’s time to appreciate: How long does it take for users to adopt core features after logging in? The average time to assess a startup is 1.5 days.
• Feature adoption: Are users engaged with your core features after onboarding? On average, only 7% of features drive 80% of clicks for startups.
• Retention rate: Do users stick around after initial onboarding? For startups, the average user retention in one month is 40%.
• Time in app: How much time do users spend on your mobile and web apps? Average time was 22.7 minutes on the web app, and 5.9 minutes on the mobile app, for startup.
• Guide engagement: Are users interacting with your in-app guides? Startups have an average guide engagement rate of 27.4%.

Leading with data is a core element of product-driven growth (PLG). To see how your product compares to other startups, explore product benchmarks.

Startup onboarding highlights: PagerDuty

UX Director Jeff Lopes was looking for an in-app guidance tool to support PagerDuty’s rapid growth, ensuring its users could keep up with the platform’s developments. After testing several products, they found the ideal solution in Pendo.

By using Pendo’s In-App Guide, PagerDuty increased onboarding engagement by 700% and increased webinar registrations from 10-20 participants to over 120.

Guides have been an integral part of their feature rollout, especially for the beta group, allowing them to create feedback with polls. Jeff also uses Pendo Analytics, which allows him to observe user behavior in their natural environment, providing more authentic insights.

Startup onboarding highlights: ShippingEasy

ShippingEasy’s customers—small, independent online retailers—don’t have much time to learn new software tools because they’re busy handling incoming orders from all over the web. So teams needed a way to onboard new users quickly (and effectively) to demonstrate the value of their platform as early in the user journey as possible.

To achieve this, ShippingEasy uses in-app guide to guide users through the most important tasks in their applications. For example, they created a series of tooltips to show new users how to set up an order, which is an important workflow that retailers need to know.

Want to see more? Here are 5 real-life examples of great in-app onboarding.

Why startups prefer Pendo for onboarding?

Pendo’s product experience platform is comprehensive, giving you product analysis, in-app guidance, session replay, and customer intelligence.

Startups leveraging Pendo can leverage the power of in-app guidance, segmented messaging, and real-time data to ensure their users get the most out of the product from the start. For startups focused on scaling, these tools provide an invaluable foundation for user engagement and retention.

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By now, you know why onboarding is so important—and how to get started. Get started with Pendo Free, or take a tour to see how easy it is for you to set up customer onboarding.