20Product: The Secret to Successful Onboarding from Notion and Airtable, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make in PLG Today& Why 90% of Onboarding Today is Done Poorly with Lauryn Isford, Head of Product Growth @ Notion

0:00There's a difference between missing a goal because your hypothesis was disproven and missing a goal because you didn't execute well. The biggest red flag to me is when I hear a heavy bias towards experimentation. Time to value is critical. The large majority of users who sign up in a product -led motion will not come back. This is 20 product with me Harry Stabbing's and 20 products is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product leaders to discuss Just starting, scaling and managing product teams, and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Lauren Isford, head of product growth at Notion, managing Notion's product like Growth Engine and Self -Serve Business.

0:39Before Notion, Lauren like Growth at the air table and previously worked on growth teams including Meta, Dropbox and Bluebottle Coffee, and if that wasn't enough, Lauren's also an active angel ambassador and advisor, but before we dive into the show today, and speaking of tools we cannot live without, I need your input on the 20VC Mirrorboard about new Yes, we should feature for 20BC in 2023. Just head on over to myro .com forward slash 20BC. Myro is a tool, I consider it to be truly game changing. It's a visual collaboration tool, packed with the right tools, tech and templates to help you think of and create that dream product.

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2:36Lauren, this is such a joy to do. I've had so many good things from many prior guests on the show, so thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here. Now, I would love to start. I love some context. I also want to start with a definition because I get confused by growth that's thrown around as words so much. So how do you define growth and how did you make your way into the world of growth for you? Great opening question. I would define growth as the practice of kick -starting, fueling and scaling business outcomes. Once you have a product with MarketFit, you focus on growing and scaling that product by building the mechanisms that fuel and accelerate its growth that could be bringing more customers to the product, helping those customers get more value, helping them progress to different outcomes.

3:27Generally, all of this would be in service of maximizing the number of users or a total amount of revenue that a business or a product generates. What would you say then was your first role in growth? If you were to diagnose that entry point? It actually was quite a coincidence. I joined Dropbox as part of a program that they called the Dropbox Rotation Program where when you graduated from school they placed you on a variety of teams and the very first team that I worked on after I graduated was Dropbox's growth team. That was really my first exposure to the world of growth which at the time didn't even really have a formal name but but now has become really a staple part of a number of consumer and SaaS software businesses.

4:10When I was looking at your history, Lauren, I looked at the incredible companies and I thought we normally do a quickfire round at the end. But there's like several amazing companies here that I want to understand what you took from them in a relatively condensed time frame. And so we're going to do a quickfire on a lesson from each company and how it impacted your mindset. And so I'm going to start in chronological order. Dropbox. What was the biggest lesson and how did it impact your mindset? My biggest lesson from Dropbox was probably that growing a business as a game of inches. We worked on trial conversion, helping folks convert to premium plans after trying Dropbox with their team for the first time.

4:53I understood just how much impact could compound from ensuring that different markets, different payment methods, different customer profiles could all experience drawbacks and get value out of that experience and going really, really deep in the data to figure out where different pockets of customers weren't converting as well as they could be. I don't think I really understood how much return you can get simply from being precise and rigorous and detail oriented in ensuring every customer is getting maximum value and I really learned that there. That is hilarious. I did hear from many of your colleagues about your data centrality so we're gonna get to that later.

5:32But sticking on the theme of a quick fire, you're airtable most recently. How did that impact your mindset and what are the one or two biggest lessons? Air Table is an area where I started to really focus on product -led growth for SaaS. Something that I think we did really well at Air Table is thinking of PLG or that product -led motion and the sales -led motion or sales -assisted motion as being part of one engine for the business. I find that businesses will say, well, I need to pick one. Either I'm a product -led business or sales -led business, and we were actually able to work the two in concert and make sure that when folks gave air table a try, we were actually thinking through the full journey of that customer over time and when it would actually be the right moment for them to graduate from a free plan or small team use into something more sophisticated or more complex deployment.

6:25This is something that to me feels under understood, if you will, that we did pretty well at air table.

6:50So I will say that for an early stage business, just finding its footing, developing product market fit, monetizing customers for the first time. or in those early chapters of monetization, picking one motion makes sense. There should be, of course, a learning period to think through what is the right, go to market for you. Maybe you collect a wait list of signups on your website, you experiment with some product -led motions, which could be community -led growth, it could be content marketing, it could be SEO, and then you might bring in a sales hire to help figure out outbound sales versus inbound, you know, qualifying the folks who have signed up who are using your product in a limited capacity and make a call from there on if your product is most amenable to a product led motion or a sales led motion.

7:36If you decide that something like a product led motion makes sense, users should be able to experience your product and learn its value by being inside the product and becoming a user. Developing a sales team later on takes on a very different flavor. Your reps will be working with existing customers who might even be paying customers and selling additional value on top of what they've already experienced, which, of course, is very different than emailing outbound and trying to find people who haven't been exposed to your product yet and teaching them that. Both, of course, should be done together if you ultimately want to build that upmarket motion, but the composition of your sales team will actually look and feel very different because of the nature of how you find and qualify and convert leads.

8:22And then additionally, there should ideally be some efficiencies for you in having that product -led motion at the beginning because there is a larger pond of great customers who already know and understand the value of your product. So that sales conversation is really more how to get the most out of using the product rather than experiencing it for the first time. You mentioned there kind of those early steps in special in terms of that user experience. My question to you is, what makes truly great user onboarding? And how do you think about that today? Onboarding is a term that's used very broadly, and there are many tools that you can buy to help you, or that claim they can help you with onboarding, where you help orient a user to your product with the hopes that they are more likely to be more successful.

9:08The metric many companies use to represent this is activation rate. So the percentage of folks who sign up for your product, who then ultimately are expected to retain long term. And usually there's two dimensions on which activation is defined. The first is either engagement or retention. So did Harry sign up today and keep coming back tomorrow next week and next month. But then also sophistication or early habit building. So did Harry also take an action that was high value? Did he create a document in notion that was meaningful? Did he build something in air table that was usable? Those together indicate that someone has found value.

9:45They keep coming back because they see something that they want to come back for. and also that they're doing the right things to experience that recurring value over time and uncover and unlock the magic of what your product offering is. To me, onboarding is one of the most important things you can invest in. Interestingly, it can be very hard to move that activation rate metric. Unlike a lot of growth experiments where, you know, maybe the classic is that you add a big button or you make a button bigger and you see more people click on it, onboarding is more complicated it because ultimately you're in the business of helping people learn more effectively, trying to simplify and make digestible all of the functionality that your product offers.

10:26Today, many of the design patterns that are used in products, are tooltips. You sign up for something and you see eight or ten or maybe even twenty different pop -ups that define terms for you and ask you to learn a bunch of things. And the reality is that nobody's actually learning that many things that quickly, the The real impact in my opinion comes from being patient and breaking down what actually the user needs to know right now to be able to find value that's relevant to them. I have so many questions for you. This is fantastic by this. Exactly what I wanted. But in terms of like finding value for you, the challenge is with notion, with air table.

11:03These are horizontal tools that are incredibly powerful, but to many different users with many different needs. The way that I as a pollcaster turned investor is very different even in my job compared to how someone else uses it in their job But how do you have a horizontal user onboarding when the needs and value derived is very different? Very very good question and hard to do right Something that we do at notion that I think generally is tried and true is to ask someone what they're here for Many businesses will actually cast or assume or segment that a user is a certain kind of user. Maybe they sign up with a Gmail account and one might assume that they're there for a personal use case.

11:47But it's possible that they used their Gmail but are actually evaluating your tool or your product to deploy at their business. Just starting with that simple question of, are you here to do work with your team? Are you here as a student? can really help you as the builder of the product understand the value the customer's seeking and reflect it back to them. And then demonstrating value is more of an exchange. So when you ask a customer to tell you something about them, you can meaningfully change the product experience and reflect that back and help them see that this product can be relevant and specific to their use case and in fact the product will help them get there.

12:24So there might be templates or examples or different customizations that the product can make for them to help them get there along the way. How important is time to value or time to wow? You know with Uber or with any door dashes like clicking and saying, oh, it's quite a quick and compressed time to value. How important is that in that early onboarding phase? Time to value is critical. The large majority of users who sign up in a product -led motion for a consumer product or a SAS tool will not come back. So the reality is that that first impression means everything. It's not realistic to teach everything about most products in that first session and in that first impression.

13:05With that in mind, it's important to ask smart questions and also to be realistic about what the right cross section is of features you offer that are both useful and relevant and also magical. and demonstrate some sort of wow factor inspiration that will make the user feel like this is something differentiated that they should keep using. It's simple, always better in user onboarding. I think simple is always better. Is there ever the concern? And sorry, I'm really going granular, but I'm enjoying this so much. You know, there's like the loading screens, and sometimes there was like the rumors that they have them, just because they want you to feel like they're doing work in the background.

13:42Like it's more difficult than it is. Is there ever a case where for enterprises for heavy enterprise use cases, actually it's better to have more thought or simple isn't better? Is that ever the case? You make a good point, though I would say that that loading screen instance or even in an enterprise deployment, really what you're getting at is demonstrating power or demonstrating the high ceiling that a product can offer, inspiring and creating that feeling that something magical is happening under the hood, but you're not asking the user to do that hard work. You're doing it for them. So in that case, actually, the setup process happening under the hood, ideally, should make that end user experience feel more simple.

14:25Now, in the case of significant enterprise deployments, often there will be a human assist in getting something set up. So activation and onboarding may be less incremental to the business, but they still can help a customer move forward and make time spent with customer facing teams more efficient, so that that time can really be used on more complex questions, more advanced, features set up rather than just getting the basics in motion. You said time spent there, and as an investor say, a lot of my time spent is with founders who are focused on the wrong metric in the first place, misunderstanding an activation metric, which doesn't accurately define value in a lot of cases.

15:05How do you advise founders on choosing the right activation metric, right metric to focus on in this early stage of onboarding? In general, I have some controversial opinions here, which I will share, but caveat that they're shared universally. In activation metric, should correlate with long -term retention. So if you activate this week, you should be more likely to be active in six months. It should also demonstrate both retention and also sophistication. Some sort of use that indicates that a habit or value has been found, that a certain feature that's important has been used, and probably around 20 % of your customers should be able to reach that metric.

15:47Now the last piece is controversial. Many activation metrics that I've seen in working with companies can be more narrow. So you know, you have to do this set of five or seven things in order to be activated and only a small percentage of customers get there. The reason why I don't like very, very narrow activation metrics, they tend to over -focus to me on what the company projects as being value for the user, rather than measuring if the user has found value themselves, which is often best measured by them coming back and continuing to visit and build a habit over time. I would prefer to go with something a little bit more broad.

16:20The other thing I'll say, it's helpful to do an exercise in correlation and ideally causation to understand if some early things that users do in the product ultimately correlate with retention, as I mentioned before. But that exercise is not one I would spend too much time on, because the reality is, especially in earlier stages, your customer base is going to evolve and change pretty dramatically in the years following when you define that metric, and you'll probably want to change it and revise it to something that reflects actually what your users are doing today with the features that you've launched rather than the ones that were focused yesterday.

16:52So I wouldn't spend too much time really trying to find the perfect metric, recognizing that it will evolve. You mentioned in terms of how a certain part of the onboarding would correlate to a certain retention or in a cohort. What would an example of that be when you said about with a correlation and causation? Just so I understand what that actually means in real life. I think a great example to call on air table would be if a creator of a new base, which is the spreadsheet interface that's central to the air table product, we're to build something of substance. So there's some number of entries in that spreadsheet and bring a collaborator into that base to work with them.

17:30That, to me, would be a signal, and I've done the math so I can tell you that's correct, that they're much more likely to keep using air table six months from now. Because they've done substantial work, they've brought in a collaborator in a product that's designed for teams. And together, those two people are working on something that they can ultimately grow into a more sophisticated deployment of the product over time. Can I ask you a really unfair question? What is good retention for a E2B PLG motion? What's baseline good? What number is it D30, D1A, C3360? What are we looking at here? Some loose rules of thumb.

18:07I would say you want the large majority of signups to come back to your product again in the first seven days. Roughly 15 to 20 % of teams using your product continue to collaborate after a month and over the long term somewhere in the order of 10 to 20 % of teams continue to find value maybe even that number increases as folks discovered new use cases and new value in your product over time. What are some other very common mistakes you see startups make when it comes to use onboarding? I'm sure you go through onboarding flows and I'll know. What are some that you see very often? There are a couple that come to mind.

18:44I mentioned briefly that I generally don't like tooltips. They're basically a quick wall of text, usually defining a bunch of terms that the user doesn't understand and will continue to not understand. The other pattern that I don't love is a checklist or a more passive opt -in, so you could imagine you sign up for a product tomorrow and something pops that says do these 10 things and if you choose to do them, you will be all set up to use this product. The reality is that something passive like that, where you can choose to engage with educational material, is probably only going to have about a 10 % opt -in rate.

19:20So 90 % of your customers will never actually learn any of those things. This means that actually if you want effective onboarding, you have to be more assertive, more opinionated and actually ensure that 90 % of your customers are completing that educational material. Now, there's a balance there because you have to pick the right material that's relevant to most people. But in general, a checklist is just not going to get you the breadth of engagement that is needed to really move the needle on activation. How do you do assertive education? Because I'm with you in terms of the pop -ups, this button does this, this does it.

19:54But like, what do you do? Is it like a hard paywall of education where you can't get through the flow without it? How do you assertively present education? There are a few patterns in the market that I like. And by est, I think air tables onboarding is very good. I also think linear. onboarding is very good. In general, something more visual, more progressive, and more experiential is generally better. And so what I mean by that is asking a user to do something in the case of linear and terrain a command, showing somebody the visualization of what will manifest in the product for them rather than just telling them, here are the terms you need to know.

20:30And then progressive, I actually would love to see a product do this really well. I'm looking, so let me know if you find one, but progressively disclosing different pieces of the product. So instead of giving a customer everything all at once, teaching them pieces of it over time, and graduating them into the full experience so that they can focus on understanding the most important pieces. I love that. I actually thought of games, actually, when you were talking about that, often games that early levels are so easy that they are essentially on boarding in the most base functionality. I totally agree with you there.

21:04For a lot of founders listening, they're thinking great. I do also have to run, you know, sales team, the S team, a product team, and actually this is a growth function in a way. I should probably need to hire for growth. When's the right time to hire for growth do you think? It does depend on your go -to -market. If a business decides that a product led go to market is the right approach in the early days. I would have somebody, usually, an engineer, though it could be a technical PM focused on growth earlier than in other businesses. You can actually deliver more scaled impact early as you're developing that initial motion.

21:41I guess if PLG is not necessarily the crux of go to market or you're still figuring it out, the rule of thumb is to introduce someone working on growth after there's product market fit and to invest more if you see good return. But it does depend, and I've seen some companies bring in one person, usually an engineer who's passionate about the area, pretty early, to set up the scaffolding. Make sure experimentation is possible, do some of the initial data logging, try out initial onboarding, and that has good return. We're getting granular here, but people love it when you go granular. So I'm diving straight in and deep in on this one.

22:15Data logging and data acquisition in the early days. What does good look like for you in terms of the infrastructure that I can give you when you come into my company as a gross leader, gross advisor? What would you like to see? In general, the ability to experiment is nice. There are some tools out there that can make this easier. It depends a little what you're trying to do. If the goal of bringing someone into work on growth is really to help with acquisition at the top of the funnel, That's more growth marketing. Maybe Google Analytics is enough to work on SEO and SEM. If more is needed or if you're interested in doing more, including stuff in the product, maybe experimenting with your pricing model, onboarding.

22:55In general, some degree of data engineering is necessary. So actually having somebody in seat who can help set up the initial data pipelines and logging for you to be able to understand if changes made to the product are good for users and good for the business is necessary. Some sort of analyst -facing tool could be amplitude, could be mode, could be hex, is necessary to make sure that what you are learning can also be digested by and acted on by whoever's working on growth. And then ideally an experimentation tool like Epo to round that out and make sure that you're able to actually try stuff and learn from it.

23:31We're hiring for these people in the early days. It could be that fast technical PM who's going to be on growth or it could be actually gross people to work with the PM. I need to know what to hire and in my head I've got a data -centric experimentation brilliant, but I've also got someone who needs to be creative and needs to understand that we don't have all of the data We don't have a rigid structure to our growth What are we hiring for and what is the right process to hire those first growth hires? So the first question I would ask if the goal of this growth hire is to bring more sign -ups and customers in so acquisition or to improve return on total users, customers, or revenue, once those customers sign up for your product in the first place.

24:17How does that change the person that you have? In the first camp where you're really focused on acquisition, the right archetype of a hire is growth marketing. This is someone who's worked in data -driven marketing who understands the dynamics of key data -driven campaigns. In some cases, maybe has experience with community led growth or content marketing, depending on exactly what you think might work well, given what you know or we don't. In the second case, you're looking for someone who is more comfortable interfacing with or is an engineer. And the reason for that is that actually meaningfully changing the code base of the core product is necessary to have the change that you're seeking.

24:53In general, it's hard in growth because LinkedIn might just say growth. And it's not clear if that candidate is someone who's got more of a marketing background or more of a product in engineering background, but the work they're experienced in will vary. Can you have someone who does both or is this a mythical unicorn? I think it's a bit of a mythical unicorn, especially if you're only hiring one person, if your team is small, if you're focused on making sure that you get good return and you just want to try with one person, it's going to be very hard to find someone who could do both. What questions should we ask to understand the quality of candidates?

25:27Let's actually be specific. Let's focus on the maximization of value post -product, the engineering like candidates. What questions will be asked there? What case studies will be due to understand the quality of candidates? I've never done this before. You're educating me. I think interviewing for growth is really fun, especially if you're looking for someone experienced because the prompt can actually be pretty straightforward. What I would do is give that candidate our website and have them sign up for the product, maybe ensure they can have access to more than just what they would normally have if they signed up today on the website.