Samuel Hulick, one of the guys I trust most with regards to SaaS user onboarding, joined us for this episode of the podcast. I met Sam first when he was writing a book on the topic. The best evidence I can give you for the proposition “Sam knows more than the vast majority of people about user onboarding experiences” is the fact that he’s written up 25+ of them publicly (e.g. Basecamp’s) and that the writeups are of very high caliber. Check them out sometime.

[Patrick notes: The transcript below has my commentary inserted like this, as usual.]

What you’ll learn in this podcast:

What mistakes SaaS companies frequently make with regards to user onboarding.
How to start preparing users for success pre-signup, using site copy and appropriate expectation setting in marketing.
How SaaS companies often botch product tours, and how you can make yours serve the user rather than serving the product team.
How to use lifecycle emails to make customers more successful.
How organizational issues at SaaS companies often directly cause problems in the artifacts given to customers, and how you can avoid this.

Podcast: Customer Onboarding

MP3 Download (~75 minutes, ~110MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Customer Onboarding

Patrick McKenzie: Hideho, everybody. This is Patrick McKenzie, here with the ninth episode of the Kalzumeus Podcast. Our guest today is Samuel Hulick, who is behind useronboard.com. My usual co‑host, Keith, couldn’t make it today.

I moved down to Tokyo recently [Patrick notes: And will talk about that more some other day.], so it’s a bit of logistical nightmare getting everybody together, but hopefully that’ll work out itself over the next couple episodes. Anyhow, it’s great to have you here, Sam.

Samuel Hulick: It is wonderful to be here.

Patrick: I think today we’re just going to talk a little bit about what you’ve noticed in your experiences as a consultant/author on the topic of user onboarding, what software companies typically do well, do poorly, how they can improve on it.

Also, on a meta-level, I’d like to ask about your experiences of building up the reputation as an expert in this emerging field of dev‑related topics, and how that’s worked out for you personally in your career. Sound good?

Samuel: I would be delighted to cover all of that.

Patrick: Awesome. I guess, first question. Sam is one of the few people I trust on the topic of user onboarding. I trust Sam largely because he’s done maybe 20 public tear‑downs of websites, saying, “Hey, this is a SaaS company. I signed up for their product.”

He makes copious screencasts/screenshots of the product during the onboarding phase. If you’re not familiar with that term of art, onboarding...

For the full transcript see here.