S6E14 – Building Habit-Forming Hybrid Onboarding: From First Value to Enterprise Success in B2B SaaS with Ramli John (“RJ”)

Struggling to turn new sign-ups into loyal, paying customers? You’re not alone, and the problem might not be your product, it might be your onboarding. In this episode of Grow Your B2B SaaS, we’re joined by onboarding expert and best-selling author Ramli “RJ” John to break it all down. Ramli exposes what most SaaS companies miss: onboarding isn’t a feature — it’s a full-blown business strategy. We explore how to craft onboarding experiences that form habits, boost user activation, increase retention, and drive revenue. Whether you’re a scrappy startup or scaling toward $10M ARR, this episode is packed with real talk, actionable insights, and smart frameworks that will help you turn more free trials into forever customers.

The Importance of Habit‑Forming Onboarding

First impressions stick. Teams chase new features and fresh leads, but that very first user session decides whether customers stay. Nail onboarding and you can triple retention after nine weeks; miss it and churn soars. Onboarding isn’t just a product concern—it’s a company‑wide mission.

Understanding Onboarding Misconceptions

Onboarding starts long before users ever log in. Marketing makes the promise, sales echo it, and the product must deliver. When those pieces don’t match, users feel duped. True onboarding is a relay race—marketing, sales, product, and success all pass the baton.

Overcoming Onboarding Challenges

Why do users stall out? Watch them. Sit in on onboarding calls. Spot the “uh‑oh” moments of confusion and the “aha!” sparks of delight. Map what triggers each emotion, then shape the journey to shrink confusion and amplify delight.

Implementing Effective Onboarding

Ask every new user one question: “What’s your #1 goal with our product?” Route each answer into a tailored path that hits that goal fast. When users see promised value within minutes, satisfaction and stickiness skyrocket.

Strategies for High‑Touch Onboarding

Early stage? Go high‑touch. Hop on calls, gather rich feedback, learn fast. As you grow, blend self‑serve flows with well‑timed human help. Use a simple matrix: high contract value + high engagement = hands‑on support; lower tiers = scaled, tech‑enabled guidance.

Handling Technical Onboarding Challenges

If your tool needs code snippets or deep setup, don’t scare people off. Show value first: live demos, dummy data, interactive sandboxes. Once users taste success, they’ll happily tackle the technical steps.

Building Habits for Long‑Term Engagement

Think in milestones: first hour, first day, first week, first month. Give users a quick win in each window so they feel constant progress. Small victories stack into lasting habits.

The Future of Onboarding with AI

AI can turn “one‑size‑fits‑all” into “made‑just‑for‑me.” By reading real‑time behavior, AI can serve the right tips, tasks, and nudges at the perfect moment. Use AI to add real value—not just buzzwords.

Conclusion

Great onboarding is a team sport and a growth engine. Align every department, study user moments, personalize the path, and let technology amplify the magic. Do that, and users stick around—bringing revenue with them.

Key Timecodes

• (0:00)-Introduction: Aha moment and onboarding as a business problem
• (0:49)-Episode Overview: Building habit-forming hybrid onboarding
• (1:03)-Guest Introduction: Ramli “RJ” John and his work
• (1:42)-Importance of Habit-Forming Onboarding
• (3:00)-Retention and Profit from Effective Onboarding
• (3:41)-Misconceptions about Onboarding
• (5:18)-The Promise Fulfillment Concept
• (6:52)-Common Mistakes in Onboarding
• (8:00)-Moments of Confusion and Delight
• (9:37)-Goals of Effective Onboarding
• (11:05)-Step-by-Step Onboarding Improvement
• (12:45)-User Case Understanding and Endpoint Focus
• (15:02)-Hybrid Onboarding for Enterprise Customers
• (18:35)-Challenges and Overcoming in Product Onboarding
• (20:49)-Technical Product Onboarding Suggestions
• (24:15)-Immediate Steps for Onboarding Improvement
• (28:21)-Habit Formation in Onboarding
• (30:23)-Future of Onboarding with AI
• (33:33)-Risks and Opportunities for SaaS Founders
• (35:24)-Best Advice on SaaS Onboarding
• (36:08)-Growing Early Stage SaaS from 0–10k MRR
• (37:47)-Scaling SaaS to 10 Million ARR
• (40:04)-Summary of Key Points
• (40:45)-How to Contact Ramli and Closing Remarks

Transcription

[00:00:00.00] – Ramli

To me, the aha moment is essentially the promise fulfillment. It’s the fulfillment of the promises made earlier on when they were on your site, when they were talking to your sales team. That fulfillment of that promise is when they’re like, Oh, okay. There’s a misalignment between those two things where your sales team and marketing team is over-promising and your product team is under-delivering. That’s going to be really hard. There’s no product or human interaction or educational content that’s going to help fix that onboarding problem because it started from the beginning where the messaging or the positioning has been onboarding is not a product problem. It is not a customer success problem. It is a business problem that needs to be tackled by the whole company if they want to really impact early stage relationship.

[00:00:49.19] – Joran

In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about building habit-forming hybrid onboarding, how to Guide Users from your first value to enterprise success in B2B Salesforce.

[00:01:03.16] – Joran

My guest is Ramli “RJ” John, also known as RJ. RJ is the author of the best-selling book, Product-led Onboarding, and he’s currently working on his next book, Eureka, the product onboarding playbook for B2B companies launching in June 2025. Ramli works hands-on with SaaS companies to help them improve user activation, retention, revenue growth, which means he has seen the inside of many different SaaS companies and the data related to their onboarding. We will dive today into why self-serve onboarding is no longer sufficient, how to build scalable hybrid experience for different customer segments, and how to drive users to value faster while setting the foundation for long-term success. Welcome, RJ.

[00:01:40.04] – Ramli

Joran, it’s nice to meet you. Thank you for having me.

[00:01:42.02] – Joran

We’re going to dive right in. Why is creating a habit forming onboarding so important for B2B SaaS today?

[00:01:48.19] – Ramli

Yeah, it is really so important. I think people forget about it because product teams are so focused on launching new features, and marketing and sales is so focused on trying to get new signups that This middle ground is often forgotten. I call it the ugly duckling of growth because it’s often the one that’s forgotten. The reason why it’s so important is there is data shows that first few, and we intuitively know this as people, that the first few seconds, the first few minutes, the first few hours that you have with a product or a person really sticks around and it has long-term impact. There’s a study from Profitwell that they found studying 500 or so B2B SaaS companies. They’re an analytics companies, so they have this, is that if a user or a person has a great onboarding experience in that first few hours, it turns into a 2-3X increase in terms of retention after nine weeks. It’s also a study from Inner Trends, another analytics company, where they found a similar trend where if you can keep those users engaged in that first week, the 12-week impact in terms of retention is a lot higher.

[00:03:00.20] – Ramli

I’m talking about retention, but also profit well found that the likelihood someone to pay after a great onboarding experience is a lot higher. That’s the reason why it’s so important. Often, it’s the only thing that people see in your product after they bounce off. Unfortunately, a lot of products, their onboarding experience is not that great. There are studies from different companies where 40 to even up to 80% of new users sign up once and then they don’t come back for SaaS companies. It It’s important, but often forgotten and missed.

[00:03:32.21] – Joran

It makes sense. If 40 to 80% don’t come back after onboarding, you already say what the impact could be when you have a really good onboarding to your SaaS.

[00:03:41.22] – Ramli

Exactly. Just a little bit of lift there. It has long Longer term, in fact, I call it the snowball effect. If you can start with something small and impactful in that early stages, then it can turn into longer term results and outcome.

[00:03:55.14] – Joran

We’re going to talk about how to implement proper onboarding step by step. First, I’m going ask about a misconception people have about onboarding. What misconceptions do you see in the market right now with SaaS companies or SaaS founders?

[00:04:08.04] – Ramli

It’s often think about the onboarding itself, something that happens in the product. I think that’s often missed how The onboarding, it’s okay, now they’re in. Let’s start the onboarding process. I would argue that it’s specifically for SaaS companies where the onboarding actually starts before they get into the product. Because I like to see as they’re not just onboarding to the product, you’re actually onboarding them to a new way of doing things, a new way of life, a new way of doing their work. It starts from the beginning where they first encounter your product in an ad, on the search page, where you’re actually onboarding them to the idea or the promise about what your product can do, how it can change your life. That is often the work of product marketing, messaging, positioning. Even in the sales pitch where the sales team is pitching your product to a prospect, they’re giving a promise. They’re onboarding that prospect into a concept, an idea, a new way of life, a new workflow. When they get into the product, it’s now you’re onboarding them to the reality of that promise. It goes from promise made to promise fulfillment.

[00:05:18.02] – Ramli

That’s why if there’s a misalignment between those two things where your sales team and marketing team is over-promising and your product team is under-delivering, that’s going to be really hard. There’s no product tour or human interaction or educational content that’s going to help fix that onboarding problem because it started from the beginning where the messaging or the positioning is off. That’s a big misconception. That’s the reason why it just gets to me. It gets to me when, we have an onboarding problem, let’s get the product team involved and let them do their thing. Don’t bother marketing or sales customer success. Particularly for SaaS companies, I would say that it needs to be a cross-functional effort if you’re trying to improve your onboarding because it does impact from the beginning all the way into their full life cycle, and it needs to be a whole problem. I recently read a post. Somebody shared my idea around this where onboarding is not a product problem. It is not a customer success problem. It is a business problem that needs to be tackled by the whole company if they want to really impact early stage retention.

[00:06:25.13] – Joran

Yeah, it makes sense if you’re bringing in the wrong company promising something wrong from the beginning, a product is not going to solve it. I used to be head of customer success, and we always said that we’re sometimes filling up a leaking bucket in a way if you’re not actually getting the right clients. Of course, that’s one step further or two steps further. Still, same principle applies here. What is a common mistake across many SaaS companies when it comes to onboarding or even before that?

[00:06:52.13] – Ramli

I would say that a common mistake that companies make when it comes to onboarding is… I recently shared a post about this on LinkedIn, how the tendency, maybe just for me, but I’m finding a lot of teams do this, is, Oh, let’s fix our onboarding. Let’s figure out the right tool. Let’s start building and designing and looking at what best practices are on how to do this. But I would say that the most impactful thing that you can do if you’re going to start your onboarding, fixing your onboarding experience, is really starting off with looking at what your current users are doing, what are the best users doing. I’m not just saying let’s dig into analytics. That’s true. You can look at where people are dropping off. But what I really like to do, especially for companies that have onboarding calls for high touch or even early stage. I know we’re going to get into this a little bit, but if you’re early stage, pre-product-market fit or below 10K MRR, I suggest that often that you actually don’t take a product-led approach. You take a very high touch approach because you’re maximizing for learning. During those onboarding call recordings with customers, I’m watching out for two things.

[00:08:00.19] – Ramli

First of all, where are the moments of confusion where the customer or the user is asking, What does this mean? Or they have that face that looks confused, and they’re like, Can you repeat that? What is that? That’s a great place to identify as, People are confused. Are we describing it wrong? Are we overwhelming them the way we’re describing this? The moments of fusion, and the other one is the moments of delight. Identifying moments where they’re actually physically viscerally leaning in into the call and they’re saying words like, Oh, what? Or, Aha. They’re giving you visual auditory cues that this part in the product is actually where they’re getting excited about it. Now you start thinking, Okay, interesting. How do I scale this up in the product? How would I scale this up in other places, human interaction? You’re trying to figure out exactly where that is. I think that’s where I would start. I would try to understand those moments of confusion, those moments of delight, and then I can start thinking about, Okay, how do I build an experience that caters and drives people away from confusion but towards delight?

[00:09:12.29] – Joran

Yeah, and that’s the part of onboarding, where you get them from confusion to delight. What you see sometimes at SaaS companies, they try to get a lot of information from the user. How would you look at that? In your case, you’re saying you need to get them from confusion to delight, take them on that journey, probably from on how to fix a certain problem with your SaaS. What would you recommend the goal of good onboarding should be?

[00:09:37.19] – Ramli

I would say that to your point, great onboarding drives people away from confusion. I think that’s especially for more complex B2B SaaS. Let’s talk about the opposite first. What does a terrible experience look like? It would be confusion, it would be overwhelmed. For a lot of B2B SaaS or SaaS companies where you have multiple features, you might have multiple products, how do you drive them towards that? How do you avoid that, particularly? Success is really about getting them to what they want as quickly as possible. Going back to what I mentioned earlier, what was the promise made to them? When they read your homepage or they read your site or your pricing page or talk to your sales team, there was a perception formed in their mind as to what your product can do to make it easier for their lives or their work. They’ve signed up and, Okay, now it’s time for me to me to experience this. The goal of the successful onboarding is getting them to that promise fulfillment or that promise completion, getting them to that promise land so that they can say, Okay, I get it now. I totally understand what this product does.

[00:10:46.06] – Ramli

That’s where it is. Getting them there, people call that as an activation moment. Some people call it as the aha moment. I like calling it as the ultimate win. What is the ultimate win for the user? What is that thing that they are looking for that they finally says, Yes, I finally got it, and they’re ready to dig deeper into the product itself?

[00:11:05.11] – Joran

If somebody thinks, Oh, yeah, this is not what our onboarding does right now, and they’re like, I need to start changing our onboarding. For example, ourselves, we’re actually changing our onboarding as we speak, and I might create new tickets based on this conversation afterwards. How would I go about step by step improving my onboarding? You already mentioned find the moments of confusion, find the moments of delight on the journey, but any other processes, frameworks, things we should consider?

[00:11:30.03] – Ramli

The best onboarding experiences do. If you look at Neural or Canva, it’s really try to understand what are the core use cases or the promises that your product make. And interior-wise or framework-wise, it’s called the Job Speed. The interior, some people are familiar with this, but the idea is people hire products to do a job for them, a job. When you hire a tool like LinkedIn to connect with people, or you hire, let’s say HubSpot to build deeper relationship at scale with your customers, whatever that is, try to understand those ones and really understanding what those are can help you ask the question upfront, try to figure out exactly why your users are signing up. Often the best onboard experience is ask, why did you sign up? What is your primary use case for signing up for our product? Because that helps you now to understand, Okay, they said this. Let me bring them to that promised land, to that endpoint, that goal or that desired outcome as quickly as possible because they have signified to me that’s what they want, particularly. I think that’s the next step, break it down step by step. Figure out exactly what your product’s use cases are or the primary top three use cases or why are they signing up.

[00:12:45.05] – Ramli

Second would be try to figure out the endpoint of that. What is that thing that they want, the desired outcome? And to third is, now, how do you build an experience that gets them there and guide them, particularly, to that spot and help them.

[00:13:00.16] – Joran

When you ask them, what is the primary use case of you signing up? We did it before, for example, in a field where they can just fill out whatever they want. That’s what people do. And in the end, it becomes quite useless and people get lazy and they just fill in random keywords sometimes. Would you, I guess, I know, for example, HubSpot does it well where they also have, I guess, jobs to be done. You want to do this and the product relates to that. Is it always preselective and based on that, you map out the onboarding?

[00:13:28.05] – Ramli

Early on, if you’re not sure, yet exactly what those primary use cases are. I would probably make it more open-ended. We did that once at Appcues, actually, when I was working in Appcues, a product onboarding software, where we would just ask, What are you using Appcues for? It was open-ended, and we got some surprising responses. I don’t recall them, but I was like, Why? That’s an interesting thing that I didn’t consider before. Those things are impactful or interesting or helpful because now you’re like, How people are doing it like this or using my product this way? Then if there is enough, then that could be the option. Starting off open-ended to maximize learning, it does increase friction because you’re maximizing learning. Then later down is now you’re optimizing for completion. In that case, you probably want to preselect the top three. Typically, it’s three because over that, it’s overwhelming. Then there’s often a field other, and the other one can be a catch all where they click that and it open up an open field that they can type in exactly what they’re looking for. That’s ideally the process you would go through starting off if you’re not familiar with it yet.

[00:14:37.17] – Joran

Yeah, makes sense. You mentioned early stage, take a high touch approach, definitely do onboarding calls where you’re going to learn about things, get those aha moments. When we talk about, for example, when you’re a bit later stage and you’re going to focus on enterprise, and this is also where I guess, the hybrid onboarding probably comes into play. How would you recommend onboarding them where the app isn’t enough product isn’t enough to onboard them?

[00:15:02.09] – Ramli

There’s a couple of ways to take this approach of trying to figure out exactly when the hybrid approach or human approach comes in. I like to think about it as a two by two matrix where at the very bottom could be the average contract value. Then at the very on the side, the Y axis is the product engagement. If they’re high contract value and they’re highly engaged, I would help them right away with humans because First of all, they’re right in our fit. Their customer fit is perfect. They’re highly engaged. I think that’s when I would get in there because particularly if I’m talking more like enterprise, B2B, SaaS, where the true value of those products is not a single user, but it’s one champion who’s engaged in inviting their whole colleagues, 60 of them. How do I tap into that excitement right away and bring them through that experience so that we give them resources to champion the On the other hand, low contract value and high engagement. In those case, I would probably think more about one-to-many approach. There’s this whole field in customer success that’s come up in the last couple of years around scaled customer success or digital customer success.

[00:16:15.22] – Ramli

You’re probably quite familiar with this. I’m seeing it more and more companies like Full Story, Mixpanel. They have a whole dedicated team now called Digital or Scaled Customer Success. Even at Appcues, when I was working there, I left last year and they were hiring for that particular role. I think those ones where it’s low contract value and highly engaged, it could be an interesting approach where you do one to many. On the bottom end where it’s high contract value and low engagement, I think that’s a massive red flag. In that case, they’re a big company. They’re like, you’ve used third-party, maybe third-party tools, like something that, Apollo or something else, they have let you know that, oh, they work at a big company like Microsoft, let’s say. Somebody from Microsoft sign up for your product and you’re like, Oh, my goodness, we need to pursue this. They’re not engaging. I would say that’s when it gets tricky. How do you engage them? How do you identify them? How do you reach out to them? There’s a few strategies to try to figure that out. You might have to take more of a sales/CS approach where you reach out to them or you figure out what went wrong.

[00:17:24.09] – Ramli

Maybe they’re stuck and they had some technical issues that you need to help them out. I’ll really invest I’ll just give that a little bit more because it’s a massive red flag. The other one that I didn’t talk about, the low ACV, the low contract value and low engagement. I call that the graveyard. Maybe you can automate out. You can help automate automation through in product, educational content or email. Sales. But in that case, since it’s a low contract value and they’re not engaging well, then I would consider how much human touch you would approach there.

[00:17:52.19] – Joran

Yeah, because in the end, I think we have a saying in Dutch where it’s like pulling a dead cow out of a pond. You can do a lot of work, but in the end, you probably will move the needle that much. It’s a good one calling it Graviar. Or a dead cow pulling out of the pond. Are you struggling to find a cost-effective and scalable marketing channel? Check out where it is. We help you to have other people recommend your SaaS, and you would only pay them when they deliver you paid clients, making it a very cost-effective and scalable marketing channel. Want to learn more? Go to getreaditus. Com. When people look into improving their product onboarding, you helped a lot of companies, right? Where do they struggle the What challenges do they keep running into? And maybe some ideas on how to overcome those.

[00:18:35.16] – Ramli

Often, the challenge is not knowing where to start. Where do we drive them to? And then this framework, it really does help. Like breaking down what is the job that we done and how do we get them there? Then building that experience out. Because often, I think this is especially for companies where, once again, there’s a lot of options. There’s a lot of use cases, a lot of features. It becomes like they Look, user comes in, they’re like, Oh, let’s give you a tour. Here’s where this button does. Here’s another area. Here’s another thing. It really is a tour. It’s an overview tour. Those things are not very helpful at all because that’s just information. It’s not transformation. It’s a saying where it’s not helping me transform my approach or my workflow or my thinking. What I often take, especially if it’s going to be a walkthrough, is very action-driven and focused. By completing this, you’ll be able to do why. By completing this walkthrough or this tour, you’ll now be able to set up your social media profile or something like that. It’s very targeted towards an action rather than an overview approach. I would say that’s where things go wrong.

[00:19:46.17] – Ramli

It’s just becoming, here’s everything. Or I’ve come in once where they had an onboarding checklist. I was hopping out this company and they had a checklist came up. There was eight items. None of them were checked off. I’m like, I have to do eight things? Oh, my goodness, there’s so many things. I suggest that they break it down step by step. They break it down into three checklists that help them structure their approach there.

[00:20:09.23] – Joran

Let me give you our case right now. We help a SaaS company set up an in-app referral program with a freemium model. They just sign up. They need to basically install a tracker script, a signup snippet, and connect their payment processor. Three things they need to do. But then in the end, they get embed within their app where the users start recommending them. Before they get one in their dashboard, it takes quite a bit of effort from them. Would you recommend us, for example, showing dummy data, showing a guide rather than pushing them to do all those steps, and then in the end, it might never happen? What is the recommendation here when it’s a bit more technical product?

[00:20:49.28] – Ramli

They have to set up a code in their website.

[00:20:52.09] – Joran

Yeah, twice. So once by a market and once by a developer, and that’s where all the friction comes in.

[00:20:57.05] – Ramli

That’s huge. We had the same problem at AppQs. Is there anything they can set up beforehand before they can install that into their site? Maybe set up their referral program names and things like that?

[00:21:08.09] – Joran

They could, but in the end, our product wouldn’t deliver value, I guess, if they don’t do this groups.

[00:21:13.26] – Ramli

It’s a good question. There’s a few ways to take this. I think you mentioned dummy data. That is something that is helpful that I would experiment with. Maybe even creating them, that would be helpful. It’s something that a company like Amplitude does where you have graphs or charts that show Once they have data, here’s a referral program and here’s how much you made or something like that. Is that something that’s part of the product?

[00:21:37.15] – Joran

It is definitely part of the product. Asking people to recommend the SaaS company, they would get a commission, Swag, whatever the SaaS company wants to give away.

[00:21:46.07] – Ramli

Yeah. In that case, dummy data would be helpful. Amplitude does something like that where part of the onboarding is asking you what company you are. Are you a SaaS? Are you e-commerce? Are you a marketplace? Then it would show a relevant chart based on that. In this In any case, that is possible. It does require coding, and it requires an engineering team. A second approach as an experiment is using an in-product interactive demo where they can walk through it. I know a company like Deal has used it to walk through the It’s our process. Setting up HR is complicated. They actually use Novatic to show what their experience looks once it’s fully filled out. That does a few things. First of all, it gets them excited. It’s okay, now I see this. Let me start setting up my stuff and getting going with that. Secondly, not just motivated, but it actually shows them what an outcome can look like so that they have a visualization of what exactly that is. That would be helpful in that case. The other thing that I would try to get them to set up things before asking them to install that code.

[00:22:49.19] – Ramli

They might not see the stuff, but visualize it once they have investment into it. There’s this psychology principle called the IKEA effect. Since they’re investing into customizing. They’re more like, Okay, I’ve invested this much already. Might as well keep going. I think that’s valuable in that sense where I know this is something that Drift did much earlier on. One of their onboarding steps to Drift for people not familiar, it’s a chatbot. It helps with support. One of the early steps they had was to name your chatbot. I found that giving a name to a chatbot helps you personalize the chatbot so that you’re like, Oh, my goodness. I already gave it a name. Might as well install the drift code to my website because I’ve already personalized it. Might as well go through it. That’s another experiment that you can approach where is there a way to help them customize this already so that they’re more invested into it.

[00:23:46.17] – Joran

It makes a lot of logical sense. I love the Drift example as well because you’re creating something, creating, I mean, not a person, but creating something where you’re almost killing it, when you’re not completing the steps you need to do. I guess One other thing, the final thing, I want to start changing my onboarding. What is one simple thing they could maybe start off today with? It could be, I guess, figuring out the jobs to be done, or is there any other things they could be doing today to prepare themselves for creating a better onboarding?

[00:24:15.14] – Ramli

I would say it starts there talking to users and seeing onboarding calls. It’s a great place to start. I get excited when working with a company and they’re onboarding their customers right now human-wise, human touch, because there’s so much insights there that’s untapped. I know for the longest time, our growth product mindset, even customer success, has been all data-driven. So what does the chart say? What is the correlation from this to that? Where’s the biggest drop That shares a lot of what is happening. But the why part, why are people not doing that? Why are people struggling here? There’s so much insights when you interact with a user. It is also one approach. If I’m able to talk to a client’s customer, I would love to do that. I’m often held back. My second best is analyze their onboarding calls and give that. I think that’s a great place to start. Also, tapping into your team members who are already front-facing customer success in sales because they have a ton of insight around where are people getting stuck, where are people confused when you do the sales pitch, or where are people getting confused when you’re doing those onboarding calls?

[00:25:29.01] – Ramli

Are you taking a cost-functional approach, almost a growth team approach, when I’m helping a team improve their onboarding and getting them on the same room and asking the question, What is our aha moment? Are we on the same page about what that is, our activation moment? Because often, even where I used to work at AppQs where I asked somebody for a product, I asked somebody for customer success and marketing, what is our aha moment? I got three different responses. That’s not a great place to start in, aligning on what that is already a win. Because you can drive an in-product experience, a human touch approach in onboarding emails and the messaging towards that particular moment in the journeys. It’s not scattered and everybody rolling in different directions.

[00:26:13.20] – Joran

I can imagine, though, it’s hard to find one aha moment, especially if you have multiple features.

[00:26:19.04] – Ramli

Yes, exactly.

[00:26:20.07] – Joran

And you’re going to get multiple products.

[00:26:21.07] – Ramli

How would you go about that? It goes back to what we mentioned. If they have multiple use cases, you could have multiple aha moments or activation moments. To me, the aha moment is essentially the promise fulfillment. It’s the fulfillment of the promises made earlier on when they were on your site, when they were talking to your sales team. And that fulfillment of that promise is when they’re like, Oh, okay, I get it now. The connection from the before of what they thought it was and perception to actually experiencing it is the aha moment. Obviously, you can use data and do what Facebook did and say, Oh, I’m just seven friends. Add seven friends in 10 days, things like that. I’m actually much more simplified version of that that just focus on getting the user to do that one thing once, and then getting them to do it a second time is a win already. Rather than complicating it with X and Y and doing this and that, get that user to do that promise fulfillment moment is to me a win already. To get them to repeat it is another win because onboarding is not just a one-time moment.

[00:27:31.21] – Ramli

It has to be about habit formation, and habits takes repetition. When you’re trying to build a habit about going to the gym or writing a journal, you’re not like you did it once, and I’m like, I’m done. I’ve built my habit. No, you have to do it over 30 days or however many days it takes. That’s when you can say, I’ve built the habit around it. It’s also true for a product, they need to do that a few times before you can say, Oh, they’ve built the habit.

[00:27:57.24] – Joran

It’s not just signing up to Facebook, finding several friends, and never come back. And so be a great onboarded user. It’s actually coming back and doing things multiple times. Would you have any recommendations on how to build habits? I think it’s the most difficult thing to do. You said 40 to 80% never come back after onboarding. How to properly onboard them and then also create these habits.

[00:28:21.14] – Ramli

I will break it down into stages. I would think about it in the first hour, in the first hour, first day. That’s where the most drop off happens. Getting them to a quick win, a same day win. How do you get them into a win within that first day? For a lot of products, unfortunately, that’s not the promise fulfillment, especially in B2B, where even at Appcues, for us, our promise fulfillment was getting them to install a code snippet, launching a product tour, and getting it live and their users seeing that product tour. Sometimes we found it took 14 to 30 days for our user to finally, customer to finally get Hoping that it happens in day one is crazy. So the same day when that we focus on is getting them to start building, going back to the IKEA effect and so on the builder so that they can start designing what their tour could look like and customizing and things like that. That’s the first stage is focus on the same day win. The next stage is focus on the week one win. How do you get them to continue having wins that first week?

[00:29:28.20] – Ramli

What is the next step in getting that win? For us, it was finally testing internally or inviting a team member to give feedback on that product tour, whatever that week one win is, that propels them to hopefully in the first month win and in the 90 day win. I’m thinking of it in stages of win milestones along the way because then that helps them see progress and build that habit rather than seeing the end in mind as this is too long, impossible, going to take forever. I have to get these people involved start off breaking it down to milestones rather than starting with a big one.

[00:30:05.03] – Joran

We didn’t recommend finding these wins first and putting them on onboarding emails or materials you have. Yeah, okay, cool. How do you see the future of onboarding, especially with the new AI tools, you have, I guess, the interactive onboarding, right? Of course. What is your opinion here?

[00:30:23.22] – Ramli

The future of onboarding with AI. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I think we’re only I’m on the very early stages of seeing AI’s true power. This is what people are saying, of course. But when it comes to onboarding, right now, where we’re at with onboarding and AI, what I’m seeing companies like UserPilot do and other tools is they help… It’s more generative AI. They’re using AI to help you write your product or your content. I truly see a world where it’s something that Duolingo does, but at scale. What Duolingo does, I was listening to a podcast with Duolingo, and I didn’t notice, they use AI for something really cool. They have thousands of iterations of messaging. When you’re Duolingo, it’s this easy way to learn a language, but they’ve been experimenting with figuring out the right messaging prompt or mobile prompt to get you to come back to Duolingo, and they have negative prompts like, Oh, Ramli , you’re so lazy, or something like that. Come back, please. Obviously, that’s not what it says, but it was an exaggeration. Or is it a positive prompt? Or your three days in, keep going, or something like that.

[00:31:31.22] – Ramli

They have thousands of this, and they’ve used AI to analyze your habits, what works for you, what brought you back, and all that things to hyper personalize an experience to get you to come back. I feel like that’s where it’s going to go towards, where rather than using it for messaging and getting people to come back, it’s about hyper personalizing an experience, particularly for that user. Right now, when you need to design those use cases, What is your primary use case? Somebody, a human, would have to design a flow, particularly experience, a step-by-step experience, to get a user towards that end goal, that end promise, that desire outcome. I see a world where AI can build that experience so everybody sees a different guide or different options, whether you’re a visual learner, an auditory learner, or whether you like product tours. Some people hate it, or do you like videos, crafting an experience, particularly for based on what it knows about you when you were surfing on the site? Did you click on videos? Did you do this? Would be super cool because now it’s like a hyper personalized to your learning style and also what your perfents are, particularly.

[00:32:43.16] – Joran

I love it because I know Duolingo does a lot of experimentation. They have the bird. Sometimes the bird is sad, sometimes the bird is happy. So good. I think that’s nice. For some people, it works when the bird gets sad, and some people think, I don’t care about the bird being Like I said, so I think it’s nice to have tons of different iterations to find out what works best for R. J. And what works best for Jora.

[00:33:07.22] – Ramli

Yeah, so true. What works best for everyone and what works best, particularly for that user. You could have thousands of iterations of that, say, messaging. That would be hard to scale up if it wasn’t for AI. Now, you don’t have just one person writing or designing it. You have somebody helping you.

[00:33:24.29] – Joran

It goes really well into my next question. What is the biggest risk or opportunity SaaS founders should prepare for right now?

[00:33:33.11] – Ramli

I would say it is the danger of the shiny object syndrome, where it’s easy to be distracted with slapping on AI or adding this on. I understand I’ve been exploring it myself. I think there has been a lot of hype around AI companies, and the investment into AI companies has been super big. A lot of products have shifted their positioning from From product to product, AI-powered product. Everything’s AI-powered. I understand that, but I would be cautious to make sure that it is adding value to the users. It goes back to what users are. A common misconception about product-led growth is that it’s about product users and product teams, empowering thing. For me, product-led growth is really about making sure users are successful as much as they can, the end users. That applies here. It’s doing this, is adding AI or making AI-powered, adding value? Is it making my users more successful than they currently are? Are they a better version of themselves because of this? It would be something that I would be cautious of because it could be tempting to just add it on because everybody else is doing it. It’s almost like peer pressure is what I’m seeing happening right now.

[00:34:56.08] – Ramli

And I think it’s going to continue happening this year, especially as people We’ll talk a lot about potential recession. How do we drive more revenue? Let’s add AI power to our product and we can drive revenue. Then you look back, it’s like, it actually didn’t because we just added it without thinking through exactly will it add value to our customers and users.

[00:35:14.20] – Joran

If you had to summarize your best advice on SaaS onboarding in one or two sentences, what would you say?

[00:35:24.03] – Ramli

I already gave it a little bit of a headache in the last question is that if I had to give advice, ask yourself this, how do I make my end user as successful as they can be? That would do wonders. That responds to, should I add humans in the whole process? Because sometimes adding humans can help users become more successful or Or should I make it more self-serve? It’s about going back to that question, will this help me make my users more successful than they really are?

[00:35:52.15] – Joran

We’re going to go to the final two questions. These are more revenue-related questions. You can take it broad, you can keep it on onboarding. But when we When we talk about growing a B2B SaaS, what advice would you give a SaaS founder who’s just starting out and growing from 0-10k monthly return revenue?

[00:36:08.14] – Ramli

I would say for those early stage ones, from 0-10k revenue, your job, your focus right now is really about maximizing learning because you’re trying to validate or invalidate your assumptions. For me, when it comes to our topic of onboarding, the most learning you can get is talking to the customer and onboarding high touch. I know that doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t scale in what Paul Graham, the founder of YC, said, do things that don’t scale early on. And part of that is doing those calls high touch. It’s something that Rahul Gora, Gora, which is the founder of Superhuman, talked a lot about in actually a recent first round article where he said that early on, that’s exactly what they did. They onboarded every single people to an email product, an email tool that replaced Gmail. That’s like, why? People know how to use email. It’s been around for decades. It’s because he said, We are maximizing learning. Then the next step, once they have it now, they’ve actually created a self-serve product now, a self-serve onboarding. All of their learnings they apply to help them design experience that tackles confusion and delight all at the same times.

[00:37:21.23] – Ramli

I think that’s where I would advise them to resist the temptation to make it software from the get-go, because then you would miss out on a ton of those insights that you might need.

[00:37:32.01] – Joran

You wouldn’t get all the insights from the customers to figure actually out where are they being stuck. Let’s assume we are now past 10K MRR and we’re going to make a huge step. I know we’re going to grow towards 10 million AR. What advice would you give SaaS on this year?

[00:37:47.01] – Ramli

Yeah, at this point now, there’s this whole organizations around success, product, marketing. The real true challenge is now about aligning everybody on the same team, getting everybody rolling the same team. That’s where I think this is where it’s now thinking about organization. How do I make sure that multiple team members from different functions are working together? There’s multiple ways they can do this. They can create temporary growth pods that we did at AppQs, where I was in marketing, somebody was in product, somebody was in design, we’re tackling specific problems around activation, retention for a short amount of time, 3-6 months. Or you can take an approach HubSpot or Amplitude does where they have full orgs that are cross-functional that tackle those particular part of the funnel. I think that’s where at that point now I’m thinking about how do I make sure my team members continue to talk to each other. That’s where down lock can happen when you have insights from customer success sales flowing into product and marketing to inform them with each other. Because at that point, a lot of people have specialized in their particular role. In that case, I’m thinking a lot about how do I make sure that they’re continuing to be aligned with each other.

[00:39:03.12] – Joran

Yeah, it goes really well to what you said at the beginning, or it is a business problem, so you need to keep talking to each other. Guys, let me see if I can try to summarize. When we talk about building a habit forming hybrid onboarding, at First of all, I guess, why? The first impression has the long term effect. So 2-3 times increase in retention when users have a good onboarding, because in the end, often 40-80% don’t come back after your onboarding. As you mentioned, onboarding is a business problem. Onboarding start even before the product, onboarding them with the ID. What do you want to change? Figure out the jobs to be done, find the desired outcome and how to build the experience to basically get there. Onboarding calls will help find the moments of confusion in the lights, especially the aha moments. It’s even nicer when they actually say it. Then, of course, ask what is the primary use case of signing up. Great onboarding guides people away from confusion. Experience what is promised on the site. To come back to that, focus on first day win, first week win, first month win, 90 day win, and then map out the journey from there.

[00:40:04.16] – Joran

When you talk about enterprise, you can take a hybrid approach, high ACV and high engagement. Jump in right away. When you have a more technical product, use dummy data or showcase the outcome via an interactive demo and have the technical steps at the end so they can actually get more invested before they have to do those. For the future, hyper personalized, leveraging AI to find the perfect messaging. Great example from Duolingo. Avoid the shiny objects in the Don’t add AI just for the sake of it. When you’re early stage company, take a high touch approach, do onboarding calls, make questions more open-ended to maximize learning. Stay the stage, align the organization to tackle certain challenges together. All your words.

[00:40:45.05] – Ramli

Thank you.

[00:40:46.08] – Joran

We’re going to wrap things off. If people want to get in contact with you, R. J, how can they do?

[00:40:50.05] – Ramli

People can find me on LinkedIn, Ramli  John. My new book, people can check it out, eurekabook. Co. That’s coming out in June 2025. You can read a sample there. The first three chapters for free if that’s something that you want to take a look at. Then, of course, if it’s before June, they can pre order it with some pre order bonuses, and after that, they can directly purchase it there as well. Eurekabook. C. Co.

[00:41:15.19] – Joran

Perfect. We’re going to definitely add a link to it. You even have an onboarding towards your own book where people can get the first three chapters, and then they can onboard into the book, and then they find it.

[00:41:26.16] – Ramli

Exactly. Free trial.

[00:41:27.24] – Joran

It’s perfect. They’re already I missed it because they already read the first three chapters, so why not read the whole book? Perfect example of getting PLG into the book sector. Thanks again for coming on. For people listening on Spotify, please leave us a review if you haven’t done so. Again, helps us to boost the algorithms, and we’re going to add a poll as usual to this podcast. Answer it. I’m happy to hear what you thought of this episode. Thanks again, Ajay. Thank you. Juan, I appreciate your time. Thank you for watching this show of the Grow Your B2B SaaS podcast. You made it till the end, so I think we can assume you like this content. If you did, give us a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel. If you like this content, feel free to reach out if you want to sponsor the show. If you have a specific guest in mind, if you have a specific topic you want us to cover, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Take a look at it. If you want to know more about Reditus, feel free to reach out as well. But for now, have a great day and good luck growing your B2B SaaS.