Golden Flow

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One of my passion projects at beehiiv for the past several months has been something called Project Golden Flow.

The name is derived from building a golden flow from new user signup → activation → conversion. As some ridiculed in our all hands live chat, it also sounds like someone is taking a piss. Whatever, I’m in favor of things being memorable one way or another.

Here’s a chart with data that we pulled back in April.

It shows that 3.5% of signups went on to become a paying customer within their first 30 days. This is relevant for a few reasons:

Nailing the early user experience is such a critical and impactful initiative. Every incremental bip in conversion equates to thousands of dollars of new MRR.

But building the world’s best onboarding experience doesn’t just correlate to new revenue, it also makes a great first impression, improves user’s perception of the platform, reduces support tickets, and gives users the confidence that beehiiv is the platform they should bet on.

The initial goal of the project was to increase the conversion rate from 3.5% to 5%, which we actually just nearly achieved this past week after several months of effort.

There are still a few dozen initiatives in flight to push this conversion even higher, but I wanted to share what we did to accomplish this thus far.

Starting from the top, we redesigned our signup page and added Google SSO. We previously required visitors to enter their first name, last name, email, and password to create an account, whereas SSO removes that friction altogether.

After creating an account, new users are taken through a multi-step onboarding process. During our company offsite in May, we physically sat in a room with new employees and watched them progress through this onboarding for the first time. We identified a handful of unnecessary and confusing steps and ended up removing some and improving others.

The new multi-step onboarding process is shorter, more direct, and entirely personalized pending on what users submit in previous steps. We also built a parallel mobile onboarding experience that is optimized for new users who are using their phones.

Behind the scenes, we relaunched new email comms that correspond to the new user journey. The new emails are also personalized and sent from the same dedicated “onboarding buddy,” Bea, who helped them navigate the multi-step onboarding process.

Prior to Project Golden Flow, users would complete the onboarding and land on the dashboard. The issue was that the dashboard lacked thoughtful empty states and didn’t give them a clear sense of direction, which led to new users feeling overwhelmed and confused.

We recently launched this new checklist that clearly outlines what actions new users should take to complete their account setup and get started. Users are free to skip at any time, but it gives clear direction and removes uncertainty.

After completing (or skipping) the checklist, new users will now land in a totally revamped dashboard experience that is intentionally simplified to reduce confusion. We also introduced a dedicated section for resources and tips to help accelerate user education.

As they become more familiar with the platform and their usage increases over time, the dashboard actually morphs into a series of different layouts. Ultimately after certain milestones, users will see the final dashboard configuration reserved for more experienced users.

We also launched dozens of professionally designed newsletter and website templates to help users avoid the cold start problem and launch even more quickly.

While some new users are creating a newsletter for the first time, most actually already have one on another platform and are evaluating beehiiv as a better alternative. Those are two entirely different cohorts of users, and to ensure the latter cohort has a seamless experience, we built additional features to grease the wheels.

We launched a new subscriber import tool that has much less friction, better error handling, and an overall better experience. This allows users to import their list from another platform in just a few seconds.

We rebuilt the subscription migration tool that allows users to transfer their paid subscriptions from platforms like Substack (who takes 10% of their revenue) to beehiiv (where they immediately make 10% more money). All of this happens seamlessly behind-the-scenes without readers even knowing the migration took place.

And lastly, we are currently rebuilding our content import tools that make it simple for content hosted on Wordpress, Ghost, Substack, Webflow, etc. to be ported over and hosted on their (beautiful) new website on beehiiv.

Project Golden Flow isn’t just an engineering initiative though; it’s a cross functional effort across product, engineering, growth, support, and security.

The security team built advanced ML models to identify high risk users so we can inversely provide a frictionless experience for those users deemed less risky. The support team built an entirely new workflow to prioritize tickets from new users on the trial so they receive a response as quickly as possible.

The last piece is very important. You have to assume that most new users had been exploring several competitors prior to making a decision to use your product. If they hit a road bump during onboarding and don’t receive the proper support, it’s so easy for them to abort and try another platform.

Currently our support team has a response time of just a few hours for new users, ensuring that they are taken care of as quickly as possible.

Of course, there’s still plenty more to do here.

We’re shifting even more support resources to prioritize new users. We’re launching a new high touch VIP experience for users we’ve identified as high intent and high value during onboarding. We’re launching even more new tools and experiences to make using beehiiv as simple and enjoyable as humanly possible.

We’re going to keep testing and iterating until there’s a Harvard Business Review case study on it.

And if you thought this breakdown was valuable, just imagine how ConvertKit feels. I can’t wait for them to copy us like they always do (I should be on their payroll).

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it useful, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: mail.bigdeskenergy.com/p/golden-flow

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