Thanks for staying with me through the (so far) 7 emails on concierge onboarding best practices.
A few people emailed me asking "where is lesson 8?"
So I'm sending you this note in case you're wondering the same.
Our course resumes next week
Before we continue I’d like to ask for your advice:
Has this course prompted you to onboard customers differently? How? What information would help you do that?
We’re going to finish the last few emails based on what would be most useful to you.
That, and we haven’t finished writing because we’re also working on product changes based on the ton we learned from our early customers.
(yes … we’re like you. Searching for customer insight … prospecting … learning and changing the plan on the fly.)
A few product changes we’re making
We’re renaming our service All Aboard!
A few months ago we launched our concierge onboarding service. We called it SoHelpful.io. TBH, we didn’t even try to name it: too many more important things to do (like doing onboarding calls with customers). So I just picked a domain name I already owned and started building.
I’m glad we delayed this decision. We picked a better name, All Aboard!, based on what we learned. AllAboard.io was available, it more accurately describes what we do and we thought we could have a lot of fun with the brand.
Do you like it?
We’re integrating to Segment, Intercom, etc…
When you sign up for All Aboard!, we want you to instantly be able to understand who’s signing up for your app, identify the most qualified, and win them over on concierge onboarding calls.
To do that, it needs your trial customers’ email addresses, among other information.
We want you to invest time in customers, not spend developer time integrating with an API, so we decided to build interfaces with services you already use.
We started with Stripe - a bad choice in retrospect. Most SaaS apps offer a free, no credit card trial and don’t integrate with Stripe until they start charging. Whoops!
(like I said … we’re just like you, learning and improving.)
Long story short: we’re making it easy for you to connect All Aboard! to what you’re already using: Segment, Intercom, Mailchimp…
We're changing our signup workflow so you will be able to trial All Aboard! without a credit card.
We currently require a credit card to take our free trial.
We do this so we only attract the most serious, educated customers and filter out "tire-kickers"
It turns out this isn't necessary - we have All Aboard!, and in one glance, we identify:
Who is this trial customer?
What has he done in our app?
How much (if anything) he is likely to pay?
That means, we instantly understand how valuable each prospect would be. And we get to make an intelligent decision on who to invest time on.
That means:
More prospects
Retain ability to invest in the most qualified
Attract people who don't need All Aboard! now but might need it in a few months.
No more alienating people who happen to not have their credit card in their pocket.
I think that’s a win-win :-)
Anyway, that’s what we’ve been up to. We’re now All Aboard!. You can soon integrate with Segment, Intercom, etc. And next week you won't need to enter a credit card to try concierge onboarding.
As for the course, we’ll continue next week. For now… Can I get your advice?
Has this course prompted you to onboard customers differently? How? What information would help you do that?
As always, please hit reply and let me know.
Kevin
P.S. A few people in the course have emailed me asking about All Aboard!. We haven't done a good job helping you decide if it is for you - we will do that soon.