Kill the Tour, Grow the Core

A field guide to turning bloated onboarding into cashable retention

Author

Alan Z
May 12, 2025

Twas the night before a board packet was due, our shiny new product had just hit the AppStore, and the activation chart looked like a ski slope pointed at bankruptcy.

73% percent of fresh sign‑ups never actually entered the core loops. The CEO was already grumbling about wasted acquisition spend. We had wasted six weeks polishing a 12-step guided tour instead of getting users to value on step one.

That slap in the face became doctrine. Over 5 years and 3 companies later, I sharpened four plays that always rescue retention:

  1. Delete the ornamental tour.

  2. Drive users straight to the one action that predicts love.

  3. Identify and nuke the step where half your funnel dies.

  4. Keep onboarding long after day one.

Each play is rooted in ruthless funnel analytics, causal inference, and cross‑functional ownership. Each one has battle scars and revenue to show for it.

Delete the Damn Tour

Product tours are designer comfort blankets. Users treat them like pop‑up ads. A userpilot study shows nearly 80% of people bail when a tour runs longer than 5 steps1 .

So I wrote a manifesto in 3 words: Floor to Value.

Floor to Value rules:

  • Ask for the absolute minimum credential wall. Email, password, go.

  • Drop the user onto a screen where payoff is instant and obvious.

  • Track time‑to‑value like revenue. Every extra second bleeds life-time-value (LTV).

We tested it during a growth war room at Meta. The legacy flow asked for 9 fields and forced a guided tour.

Median time‑to‑value (TTV): 100 seconds.
day-one (D1) churn: 41%.

We ripped out 6 fields, deleted the tour, and dumped users straight into the core flow with a pre‑seeded prompt message.

  • TTV fell to 14 seconds

  • D1 churn dropped to 32%.

8M actives meant ~700K more people stayed

Why “Perfect” Onboarding Fails

The next trap is designing for stakeholders instead of users. I once watched a team burn a sprint debating button colors while activation quietly decayed. My suggestion was to replace the entire wizard with two buttons.

  • Time‑to‑first‑creation dropped by 41%.

  • 30D retention climbed 18%.

Nobody remembers what color the old buttons were, but Product leadership quoted the lift in 2 back-to-back QBRs.

The lesson tattooed on my forehead: optimize outcomes, not steps. If a flow element does nothing for core metrics, torch it and move on.

Find The Magic Number

Every sticky product hides a magic number: the threshold action that predicts users will stick. Slack’s number is: any team that sends 2,000 messages retains 93% of the time. When a user hits the magic number, you call the user “activated” – it just means the user will stick.

I wanted ours, so I built the ugliest Airflow DAG of my life. It dumped week 1 events into Snowflake, brute‑forced logistic regressions on every action, and sorted by p‑value.

One spike hit the ceiling: Share 3 diagrams in 48 hours. Users who hit this action were 7x more likely to pay by month 3.

We rebuilt onboarding around this metric. The editor loaded with a collaborative draft, the Share button pulsed until clicked, and every growth email existed for one purpose: push users to share diagrams.

The completions jumped from 22 to 59% in 2 quarters. Marketing cut ad spend 30% and still hit revenue targets because activation finally pulled its weight.

Recipe to find your own number:

  1. Export week 1 cohorts.

  2. Pivot into user rows, binary columns for each action count ≥ 1.

  3. Run logistic regression on 30‑day retention.

  4. Rank by coefficient magnitude and p‑value.

  5. Pick the top hit, sanity‑check in a funnel view, then redesign onboarding to shove users through it.

Corollary: if a feature does not push users to the magic number, kill it.

The Silent Killer: The “Oh S**t” Step

Most teams obsess over the top of the funnel (TOTF) and ignore the kill switch: the single step where 40 ‑ 60% of users bail. We called it the “Oh s**t” step at a past startup because that is exactly what you say when you see the drop.

Here is the playbook that saved my last client:

  1. Build a step‑by‑step funnel in Amplitude.

  2. Calculate abandonment cost at every step:
    Lost users * LTV = dollar value of that leak.

  3. Test removal or redesign of each step until leaks shrink.

Their funnel showed a 58% drop at KYC/ID verification. 5 fields, 3 screens - guaranteed rage quit. We tried 3 changes in parallel:

  • Swapped the form for a one‑click bank connection using Plaid.

  • Added live video support for users who got stuck.

  • Offered a $5 credit for successful verification.

Abandonment fell 73%. Fraud stayed flat. That single fix paid for 1 year of engineering salaries.

The funnel leak is usually obvious once you look. Stop polishing edge cases and start fixing the hole.

Onboarding is Forever

Sign‑up is just chapter one. CommandBar surveyed thousands of SaaS users and found 95% want the option to replay onboarding later. Most products give them a one‑time guided tour then dump them in the help center.

At a company I was consulting for, we built a Rolling Onboarding Loop:

  1. Instrumented rage clicks, blank searches, and support tickets.

  2. Clustered the pain points.

  3. Shipped contextual hints or micro‑flows tied to those events.

  4. Measure lift in next‑session.

  5. Killed or iterated based on results.

Search queries for “how do I…?” fell 42% Continuous onboarding also forces documentation, copy, and product surfaces to stay in sync. It's hygiene disguised as UX.

Sell it to The C-Suite

Executives love shiny demos but hate churn. Speak their language:

  • Floor to Value cut D1 churn by 9 points. Multiply by acquisition cost for hard customer acquisition (CAC) savings.

  • Activation optimization boosted paid conversions by 37%

  • Killing the “Oh s**t” step recovered 73% of would‑be dropouts.

  • Rolling Onboarding reduced support tickets 25%.

Those numbers yank features off the roadmap faster than any slide deck about “delight”

The Tech Stack That Makes it Easy

  • Instrumentation: Segment to S3, Snowflake warehouse.

  • Processing: Spark and Python statsmodels in Airflow.

  • Experimentation: Statsig/Posthog Feature Flags, sequential correction. Bayesian (some jurisdictions COUGHEUROPECOUGH flag Bayesian priors as manipulating user outcomes, check with Legal)

  • Visualization: Looker dashboards with one definition of retention.

  • Alerting: PagerDuty on D1 retention, activation and “Oh s**t” abandonment thresholds.

If you have a tight budget, or there's a lot of red tape to onboard new vendors... Postgres, dbt, and cron will get you 80% there.

Take It Home

  1. Delete your ornamental tour by Friday and time the value hit.

  2. Run the regression, discover your magic number, redesign the first session so most users cross it.

  3. Map the funnel, find the “Oh s**t” step, and attack it with design, ops, and incentives until the leak stops.

  4. Wire the Rolling Onboarding Loop and never stop guiding.

  5. Kill any roadmap item that does not improve these metrics.

Do that and your product will stop bleeding users. You ship less code, earn more money, and finally justify that growth budget.

I break tactics like this down every week. Subscribers are already reporting double‑digit activation lifts and sleeping better during board meetings. Join them. Hit subscribe, level up, and let every release make money instead of noise.

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