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Everyone blames the app when the real killer was the onboarding flow
I keep seeing postmortems where founders say the product just didn't hit product-market fit, but they ignore that their onboarding had like 7 steps and required a video call to start. I ran a small SaaS for 18 months out of Austin and we had 40,000 signups but only 300 activations. We kept rebuilding features and adding integrations, but the dashboard analytics showed people dropped off at the exact same screen every time, the one asking for their company's billing info before they even saw a value preview. Finally I removed that step and just let people test with a fake account, activations tripled in 3 weeks. But by then we were out of runway and had to shut down. So when you read a postmortem that says 'no market need', ask if they actually watched a session recording of a new user trying the product on day one. Has anyone else found that the real failure was buried in a boring signup page instead of the core idea?
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avery_foster312mo ago
Billing before value is annoying, but 300 out of 40k is brutal, so yeah, that step was probably doing a lot of heavy lifting. Still, I'd push back a little on calling it the real killer. You had to shut down anyway, which means the free trial people weren't converting to paid either, and that’s a market signal, not just a friction problem. Maybe the onboarding was bad, but it also sounds like the product just didn't have enough pull to get people past a minor speed bump. I’d want to see what happened after those 900 activations before blaming the signup page for everything.
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