---
title: "Unpack the stack with William Imoh"
description: "William and Tim discuss Saas companies' different onboarding, upselling, and developer experience approaches. Livestream guest: William Imoh https://twitter.com/iChuloo Livestream Host: Tim Benniks"
date: "2023-04-06T05:03:44.000Z"
url: "https://timbenniks.dev/videos/live-uniform/020-gmh8pm-nvl0"
youtube_url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMH8pM-nvL0"
playlist: "live-uniform"
duration: "52:50"
image: "https://img.youtube.com/vi/gMH8pM-nvL0/hqdefault.jpg"
tags: ["cms", "product-strategy", "devrel"]
---

# Unpack the stack with William Imoh

William and Tim discuss Saas companies' different onboarding, upselling, and developer experience approaches. Livestream guest: William Imoh https://twitter.com/iChuloo Livestream Host: Tim Benniks

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMH8pM-nvL0

## Transcript

[Music] [Music] thank you [Music] oh right we are live again with yet another unpack the stack and so this unpacked the stack will still be unpacking the stack but not super technical we're unpacking startups and workflows and onboarding and pricing and all that fun stuff and so with me here I have William my valued colleague so William tell us about yourself who are you what do you do all that stuff yeah thanks Tim and um yeah I'm happy to be on this episode of unpack the stock thank you as she said I'm William I am a senior technical product manager that's a really long title at uniform yes but I like it yeah and um I'm helping to solve like all the different problems with you know our customers have and um helping and Charlie build better digital experiences using uniform obviously obviously yeah that's that's what I do in a nutshell but outside that um you know I'm learning to fly plane and uh hi awesome I like yeah yeah so um yeah I do a bunch of cool stuff travel and um yeah that's that's William yeah I really like it when I send you a slack you're always in another country that that's something to Aspire I guess that's very cool yeah um since you know we work remotely and we can take work anywhere I think that's exactly one of one of the the good bits is to you know capitalize on the ability to be anywhere at least around Norway where I live yeah exactly and I love that it's a little bit async so you don't have to be at the same time with everybody even though it's at home right so we are relatively open so anyways this stream is not about uniform but it's generally we just get an expert in to talk about stuff that I personally don't not really know anything about and I work at a startup so I better know this stuff right and that's why we have you and so let me what I really want to go into today is like what are the different variations that you see within the startup world with the SAS providers especially like we have things like onboarding flows and there's differences between of course if you have like a Community Driven project like something like next or maybe upright or stuff like that first is more Enterprise related products like content stack for example or ampliance like there's different onboarding and there's different ways of how can you actually make sure that somebody understands what you're doing or do they need something before or do they explore themselves and there's all these different approaches and with that in mind there's also pricing structures and there's so much I want to know so maybe what we can start off with is yeah what are kind of the different onboarding flows that you see in the SAS world yeah um so thanks for that typically I like to tie you know the onboarding of the product to you know the end goal of the product right so in a typical user Journey or like a sales funnel uh you would have the acquisition portion this activation portion yeah and um that's the revenue portion so when I think of onboarding that brings a user from acquisition all the way to revenue I think of how can I how can I better optimize that process or I would say how do I bring them into the into the application and eventually get them to convert to being paying customers at least while I do not run a charity and they have to pay for the product exactly um yeah so with with that I started to think about what are the different you know pricing models especially if it's a new product so is this a you know paper user pricing model is this a freemium model where they get like a free trial or free version of the application and then we try to upsell um a paid plan to them is this a flat rate model where you have to pay once they get into um the application is this usage based so you can sign up start using the application once you hit like a usage cup then you have to pay or is this a license like a really large enterprise software as we you know we see um so understanding the pricing model then brings me to you know understanding or defining how I want to shape the own body so how much information do I need to collect of the user doing on body it stays safe you know a premium model where there's zero commitment up front just give me your email we send you right into the app you can try stuff and throughout the onboarding till they get to their you know the a lot of a lot of people call it an aha moment right and at uniform we have something called the first uniform moment yeah right so until they get to their first uniform movement or that aha moment uh what are the bits and you could decide to collect information along the way right so understanding the pricing model defines what amount of information you need onboarding do you want to make sure you know this user is good for the money so you know they are qualified do you want to even qualify them doing on boarding right this would determine you know what steps what processes you would put in place what Gates you would put or if there are you know any Gates out of yeah and so what are differences between because I've seen personally that some tools have multiple ways of onboarding like for example when you go to for sale you can kind of use their CLI or you can go through the website and then just do a few clicks um why would a company like for sale do both is that because they might have different audiences or is it just a thing you do because I know at uniform we also have multiple ways so what is your opinion about that yeah so obviously when you're defining when you're building an onboarding you know flow just like every other experience on your application you will try to personalize this and to personalize you need to understand your audience so who's going to use this if you have a tool like for sale that could be used by really technical folks that are you know script ninjas and they live on the CLI you want to you know give them that power and if you have you know folks that are pretty much beginners of you know Hobbies I just want to deploy uh whatever website they've built you want to give them a nice GUI that they can work on so some of these considerations are made when you think about the user and also when you think about using the application at scale a lot of tools um you save a lot of time when you use something like a CLI rather than when you go through like a GUI and a good example would be AWS you could do a lot of I was about to ask you about that because I've recently had to set up a an S3 bucket just to put some files in but with a bit of security so it's open with code and then it's closed again yeah I could not tell you again what buttons I have to click in their interface to actually set up another F3 bucket I'm going to lose an afternoon again so what is why do they have this what is it so I yeah for AWS I think that's like everyone says they they prefer function of a form right so it's more of like how it works rather than you know maybe how it looks and that's the whole customer service bit um to that but it's with with S3 for instance I I typically would say if you want to do anything on AWS you have to read like a tutorial each time especially if you do not do that all the time or you're like a front-end um developer but obviously the the devops platform and platform Engineers are pretty familiar with like you know these processes they have um they've they probably use some um they they use more of the I'm trying to remember Chris I guess yeah right yeah these scripts and related things that's that's this AWS tool I always forget the name but yeah it just means you're going to have to write a lot of scripts to production like environment and AWS instances and services and the likes but if you're like Hobbies like some of us you just want to go to the dashboard look through the tutorial or use chat GPT click through a bunch of things and set up bucket yeah yeah I might have to ask jet GPT how to set up an S3 bucket because I don't remember anymore but that this is kind of like it's interesting right because this they they have decided to be less friendly to The Click around people and more friendly to you know the script kids so we say or the death of scriptures um yeah so let's say you are in you kind of get it you're happily using a tool you have learned through the onboarding what that all means right how do you then what are the different ways to upsell the next tier like what are the little carriage that you're dangling for people how well how does that generally work yeah so um I see in three steps generally right I see first you give access right limited access update limited access second you show value right you show value of what the user has currently and what they will have if they you know they move to a higher plan and then lastly you make it easy for them to switch to a higher plan so the problem with the number of organizations is they have you know one and two covered right so you get access to you know the free tier or you know the free portion of the application you see the value in upgrading but sometimes it's a thought difficult to to upgrade right they have like a number of processes then they could have some extensive qualification that needs to come into place before you can move up on plan and I can imagine it's quite worth it because if you have your free tiers relative it could be that you choose that your free tier shows value but it's relatively limited and when you want to go up there's new features that you have to learn about so I can imagine you're getting that quite a bit so when you go up you actually get like a meeting with like somebody to help you to kind of make that happen right so sometimes you just have to get it down that kind of makes sense to me yeah it does it does make sense to get it down and a very important thing also is to set clear expectations from getting so if it needs user comes in they see in their only free tier right these are the limits they have right off the bat and this is what is a clear next step if they want to upgrade if they want to you know move to they want to move to the next tier this is what they need to do if they want to get value from the current tier this is where they need to go these are the boundaries that currently exist yeah and you know what I just remembered if you go to gems.com and you go on the website because gems.com is clearly for developers right but there's some sort of really interesting upsell there as well it's not a SAS I know but when you look at this website you go there as a developer you look at the speakers and you really love it right and then there's a page that says convince your boss and this is the email you're gonna write yeah to your boss to be able to go there you know to me that is like marketing upsell developer awesomeness right yeah those kind of these are pretty cool tricks and so in your opinion using SAS tools right what what is the most valuable way of upselling that makes everybody the happiest shall we say yeah so it might be a personal thing and based on the type of SAS it might change obviously but here you go yeah yeah so I I like to focus on the value that's been derived right and obviously if it's a SAS that has a mode so there's like clear differentiation between all the other products and the pricing sits very very close to this value that's been delivered then there's a very strong incentive to you know to upgrade take for instance yeah I just have GPT in my head why not we'll go for it yeah take for instance uh we had chat GPT hit a couple of million users in yeah a couple of days or weeks it wasn't yeah I think it was the best release of software in history yeah yeah in a couple of these crossed the million users you can see there's a very clear value proposition yes even though it was it it was internally a freemium too right so we all started with like the free version when they released um the you know charge GPT Plus a lot of people jumped on me it was like a no-brainer right even before it was released folks were already like yeah if you ask me to pay for this I will pay for this so we charge up there's a clear differentiation the pricing is based on the value that you would get not some arbitrary um you know would I say arbitrary offering from open AI but it's directly tied to like usage and stuff like that so yeah and so I guess when you have something that grows like very fast this like jet gbt for example is just the amount of how often or how many requests you can give that you just upskill or maybe it's also more performance so you get your first in the queue or something yeah so um that that would bring me to how exactly do you price how do you price software right so the price software the number of variables the first variable the value proposition and your mode so what exactly is this to how difficult is this problem how frequent is this um how frequent is this problem um then you look at competitors right so what are competitors saying what are they charging for this to you even have competitors because for some tools you you basically do not have that so you have like that Advantage yeah next you're looking at the cost of goods right that's an accounting term as well but you're looking at cost of goods sold which is how much does it cost to make this if software what does it take to provision you know an instance or exactly right yeah yeah per user what would this take for us to spin up like a new um in case of chat GPT new instance or a new interface for them server cost to break it down to the unit what will this cost um then you look at your typical buyer Persona so who do you want to attract a day like do you want to attract the you know the everyday user that would that's willing to pay you know 10 bucks out of pocket and it's nothing or do you want to go for the heavy heater start looking at like you know a couple hundred thousands um per year or even running up to a million per year right and then lastly which I think is the most important you know thing to consider when defining how or what to charge you need to consider your users you want to talk to them so if you have like a free tier you want to talk to folks in your free tier and be like yeah how much are you going to pay for this so you've that's that's also a measure of how much value you've been able to deliver right so if you might be delivering value but that's perceived value on your end right when it comes to the user of course if you build your own products you're you know you're delivering value because you're literally building it just credit exactly your own age essentially yeah exactly so for you it's perceived value for the user it's actual value they're getting out of it so in your own world the price should be you know enormous it should be astronomical because this is saying every baby is beautiful it's beautiful yeah yeah exactly but when you talk to your users they tell you oh man I'm sorry I can't pay you know this or I can easily pay you know 100 bucks or wow this is amazing I I can get my company to pay you know X thousand per month for this because it's really useful it saves us this much um money right so when you put all these together you've gotten all these facts together um if you have like a sweetener or you you see that your your mouth is it's like it's really good like open air and chat GPT right at the time money was launched there wasn't like any clerk competitor for it right um so when you look at all this you can decide to yeah let's let's put this at this amount and when we do that this is how many users this is what the the total addressable Market looks like and this is what they are able to pay yeah because I can imagine if your throttle addressable Market is a bit smaller but they're all more Enterprise for example yeah um I can imagine that something like enablement actually can help a lot with upselling but I just said this word enablement and when I joined uniform which is a pretty long time ago I didn't know what that was it was done to me all the time I just didn't have the name for it and yeah so can you talk about what enablement means in a SAS company yeah yeah so typically like simply put enablement is I call it teaching right teaching your teaching and yeah teaching your users or your customers how to use your product and eventually refining the product with the feedback you get from these users so it's a two-way street right you don't just teach and thumbs up to teach you get feedback from them you you see just like every good teacher you see exactly what works what does it work what they don't get and then you refine the product based on feedback you get from you know these enablement activities and um yeah to to enable the user that's you know the training aspect you need to train them to use your product the more complex the product the more enablement you need and for every experience again you would want to personalize your enablement as much as possible right especially when you have a complex product because for each user while they will have they will have similar problems the use cases will be different right so yeah for yeah for as much as you can personalize the experience the better um for you um also you want to support them so after even after like training the user you want to you know provide ad hoc support you want to check in like hey is this working or you know are you utilizing this yeah it's like a finger on the pulse kind of thing because I can imagine enablement is also a really nice way to explain things in the right context so when people say you know what I don't want to upsell because I don't really know why I would need that feature some money enablement can actually shape the perception that you have of that feature in your context of your company yeah so I think it's a really failable tool there right yeah yeah yeah personalized enablement I think that's where there is a lot of value General enablement is valuable but picking it as personalized for a user that's where like you know immense value um also lies and then lastly there's the Beat Around like you know monitoring you know performance of enablement what works what doesn't work uh see how enablement drives or reduces churn on the user so for SAS um for SAS products some of the metrics you would look at is John rate right so while you've got any you know a customer in do they drop off or does lifetime value just keep you know increasing Beyond like your expectations an enablement plays a big part in this as well especially because with SAS there's always going to be like you know incremental improvements to the product it's going to be new versions releases oh yeah of course you're gonna have to update all that stuff all the time yeah so enablement is it's more of like a living a living process using one time and as you enable users you need to monitor you know performance of this and you need to be proactive right so you need to understand get live you know active feedback from the user and update the enablement to that as well because um back in the day when I didn't work at a product company I worked at agencies right and what we saw but this I've never seen this from a startup this is more like the more old-school HD XP or Erp type companies right what they would do and I'm not sure if this good is good or bad because I don't have the contacts right but when back then it almost felt like they made the software so complicated that I had to get certified yeah and and then you go to the certification class or whatever you want to call it we're still in person back then you would almost know more than the teacher but they just go over like a few slides yeah and you get a certification but we had to pay for that and so it's almost like they would make money for something that's very complicated then you had to have certification and like all these things were so messy in that sense but I have not seen that at all with any startups do you know what the Tipping Point is to go back to like a more clean approach that we have now or is it just because these companies are perhaps older have more history and it just slips in as a piece of like new business or something do you have any opinion here maybe it's just me who had this weird experience yeah so uh this is book I read on pricing models I can't remember the name I'll find out and share with you but one of like the models there is to sell software and also package enablement with the software so the software is so complex but at the same time it is so valuable exactly that's the thing right yeah yeah yeah so it's so valuable but then access to usage of that software or the expertise at that at least at that time isn't readily available right you don't just go on YouTube and you already see someone has put up a video on you know how to use it and you can take a crash course so there wasn't that doesn't exist in that that's just a different world yeah yeah exactly so there was always this is the software it's very valuable we've had like demos you know proof of concept you see that this works but to use this we need to enable you to use it right we need to enable you to see you know the value in that but the enablement itself of that magnitude costs man hours right yes and on the Enterprise grade that's a lot of chatter yeah but I can also Imagine like if you have something that's extremely valuable but it has a bit of a learning curve it somehow seems to work that way and only the unicorns out there are extremely simple have no learning curve and have immediate huge value you see a few of them clearly yeah but a lot it's actually more it's the business World online is very nuanced and you have to fit things in and they become complex not everybody has the same context so with that in mind it actually makes sense not to have a free tier but kind of to gate it so when people do come in that they actually understand what they're doing and so how does it how do you actually attract new users and work with users and feedback loops and stuff like that when you don't have a free tier do you think your marketing is different or is your enablement approach different like what is your opinion or maybe your knowledge around this yeah so typically because you don't have you know the ability for users random users to come in to you know check out your product and probably because of the pricing or the revenue piece line you want to have qualified users so you know a fun bit optimized right you have quality throughout the funnel not just everything there are a number of things you could do right to attract users um first what most people have is you have product demos right and which is productive you you invest a lot of time into you know communicating the value of your product um obviously there's going to be a lot of upfront work to sourcing issues as a reaching out to these users there's going to be a lot of outbound marketing um right yeah there's going to be a lot of outbound marketing to match inbound marketing as well and when you get to these users the product demo has to be top-notch so that's something a lot of like Enterprise companies rely on it's the demo also uh I've seen a number of tools that have some form of product core yeah yeah so you go in um you go in like you have an account but you actually do not you have dummy data you go in you can you know test out the product see how the Future Works look at user experience and if you want to convert to what's being a user you want access you can then request for um requests for Access um this also I see this commonly with tools that are really complex and also tools that require some form of like provisioning and security yeah yeah exactly yeah with financial technology tools so in Europe there's planner right and uh clana is very big a sites like the payment space they're also like in the e-commerce space building like storefront providers checkout providers other management systems and these systems to to use them or to get the most value out of them you you know you you would want to they would want to at least qualify you and then know that you're going to convert towards becoming a paying user but at least I just want to if you just want to play with the system you just want to see what's available they give you like a sample store you can click around on they give you like yeah yeah exactly with sample orders just to see how things work right you don't have to get into clana itself to you know to try the app or create an account because literally you wouldn't it wouldn't make so much sense yeah it wouldn't make so much sense to you I had something like this I was talking to someone who works at the Pim system and yeah product Inventory management so I thought okay so it's just a product data model and you enrich a little bit and make some connections and you're good turns out they have 500 API endpoints everything is custom for every customer it makes zero sense for me to just log in and understand it yeah and I'm not gonna happen and so this is something um I just want to talk about this because the more we discuss these things and the more I learn about our space is that Developers I am one of those I know but we can sometimes be a bit pedantic I guess because I saw this lovely tweet threat from somebody that says Okay I want to try two fenders they do similar things right one is a free tier I just go in and try and the other one is a gated free tier and then they were complaining that this gated thing took a bit long and it was a bit hard to get but in the end he didn't buy either of them because the one that he went in for free didn't get it yeah yeah and then the one that had a little gate in it to to teach it took him too long and so he didn't do anything to me that's such a developer move to just be so fast with judging yeah and like let me just click around I have experience right one of those yeah actually I think in one of those systems that you need a bit more enablement if that enablement step or that gate is like super smooth I think it's actually a boost for the product yeah right you might like it more if that enablement is so cool right yeah yeah so for such products I typically would recommend that enablement step has to be super smooth right because putting a gate you're already asking for some commitment up front exactly user right and with the internet these days attention spans are fleeting right so you want to be able to yeah you want to be able to capture the user and you're asking for the attention to hey reach out to us and we will contact you sometime right you if if you if you want to you know you make it as efficient as possible you want to say we're going to reach out to you in a couple of minutes or we're going to reach out to you in an hour yeah at least the same day or somehow and then next day it works yeah just communicate some you know some time frame communicate like what to expect when to expect this this access rather than you know saying hey we're going to reach out to you and um you're never and then we have too many inbound leads so maybe tomorrow that's not the way to go because I've had it where I had to use it with some headless CMS I think I don't remember exactly which but I had to use it was somewhere last year and so they have a gated approach as well but there was not even a contact us so we had to go through a partner and it took them two weeks to profession something and then they didn't actually explain to me how it works as you see and now it's probably obvious right and so I I did certainly not use that it's yeah so it's a smart business decision to go that way but then you have to do it really well and so there's many examples I guess yeah they are quite quite a number of them and again it depends on what are the revenue objectives for this exactly right there are some companies I've uh a friend of mine works at this uh consults for this Marketplace that they are like a Marketplace for marketplaces so if you don't want to do your own yeah if you don't want to build an app Marketplace right like you know a lot of tools like have like their own application marketplace where you can developers can build theirs like slack and put it up there if you don't want to build yours they can host one for you that's pretty cool though yeah but that's pretty cool pretty complex for them you have a couple tens like less than 100 clients but they are doing several tens of millions a year in Revenue yeah right with a handful of clients a handful of like customers so for them yeah they don't they don't mind if you spend one month in their pipeline so long as they qualify you properly yes you know that you are going to convert to you know to becoming or there's a very high chance you're going to become one of their clients so for them Revenue a dual length is quite long but once somebody is in it generally works right yeah it exactly generally Works um that's that's what needs to be considered users will not understand this because everyone has like you know their own expectations and people have like software used to expect a lot of tools will have like free tier especially developers who are used to two seconds you're already in and you're I am always like like but actually it I'm the more I learn about the space and I thought I knew a lot but you always see the community teaches you back right I'm always one of those people like just give me a free tier which always open everything should be always open that's why I didn't like these older dxp systems where you couldn't just get it because I wouldn't for the life of me understand how to install a system like that so but I was never happy with that but the more you think about it it actually makes more sense and I think this enablement stopped it's actually sales as well and marketing yeah because if that enable and staff works well for a developer and for let's say some business oriented user um you get much more ammunition as a person that uses the tool to tell their bosses we need to buy this thing yeah for sure perception yeah you're empowered and and assisting I usually say that when folks consider the buyers in an organization they are the decision makers but they are also influencers within the organization that determine if this tool is going to be both or not yes the folks that would be in the CMOS here saying hey no I don't know how to use this tool or what does it even do but that's very important because imagine you go in you look at a tool and you are like one of these developers that thinks they understand it all they exist yeah there's lots of them I know I've been like yeah and then you might not understand it and you have a bit of an achy feeling because you haven't gone over the hump yet and then you might tell your your business maybe let's not put these on the short list that's not a good thing right yeah it makes sense that's that's not and a lot of these you know folks are pretty influential right in organizations even though they are not decision makers right so I feel also folks need to consider them with enablement and onboarding and uh also what you'd asked about how do you convince folks to you know to buy your tool or to try your thing when you don't have like a free model um a good strategy that's worked is you know employing customers stories and social proof right so oh yeah exactly yeah you want like a lot of your users your existing customers to you know to talk about your product you want to have use cases you know with them you know showcasing the value they've gotten um from your product and you want this to be loud and you want it to be out there so yeah uh just about anyone that's considering your product stumbles on this and recommendation and referral that's like like has a very strong you know influence on the buying decision of users social proof too when you see a lot of you know a lot of your current users or your you know folks that have tried your software go and say wow this is this is amazing you know this tool is it's great it's helped us you know Drive Revenue upwards you know 20 30 month on month or year on year uh for the last two years yeah stuff like that yeah definitely yeah definitely drives you know the conversion from you know just a random user to yeah I want to buy this too and so when we talk about let's say you don't have a free tier right and so you have this little gate in place and you need to somehow get these users in and so of course lots of companies have developer relations people um do you think if it's there's no free tier is is it death row or is it maybe evangelism is it like do these things start to change now because eventualism is essentially just creating social proof and kind of shouting it off the rooftops without being annoying to Developers right where in devrel it's a little closer to the to the fire of the developers like how do you see that so again I I see I see that folks that are you know talking about a product um or selling a product or providing support they also have to sit close to the business they need to understand what are the requirements of the of the business right and how do they get users to you know see this value in the business at times for certain products you would have folks that are in what would I call them developer relations move from the developer advocacy side towards yeah more of like evangelism right yeah because typically most even Enterprise companies have evangelists that are not developer evangelists they are Racers and you know evangelists trying to build social proof and talk about like the product yeah and try to make it not sound like marketing right yeah because I think essentially that's if you want to talk to people who are slightly technical it shouldn't feel like marketing or buzzwords I think that might be a nice definition of all these things yeah yeah just that that's I think that's the best form of marketing actually is make it not look like marketing except where it's like this is explicit marketing this is what you need to put yes exactly yeah I always say like for example when people ask me hey how does death row Market what I tend to say is imagine you're shooting a commercial for a barbecue sauce I'm just gonna go weird with this imagine this is your barbecue sauce right the way you show that commercial the way I think it works best is you just show an amazing recipe right you're cooking the thing you're explaining how it works people get excited about it but the the sauce is just on the side you might use it you might not but the sauce is there because you represent the sauce but that's it and if you do that long enough and the context works every time people start to associate that sauce with amazing cooking and then there you go right it's just perception building and yeah I'm quite excited to see how that works with different startups that have free tier or no free tier or a gate and I think enablement can play a huge role there as well yeah yeah enablement plays a huge role also support right so a good oh yeah a good example I have is with Bigcommerce so I know becomers has always had a gate even though they are a headless um you know e-commerce service right to use become as you you sign up they have like a free tier that's like hidden you have to go to you have to try to log in and then switch to sign up before you see the free so they do that on purpose right to help you enable to understand what you're getting yeah yeah so for the first time I try to sign up to become as I ended up in their community right and I spoke to like a developer Advocate that was there and like you know got some I already know what like you know headless Commerce does I was just looking for what's the differentiator between then was big Commerce and Shopify right why don't I use like Shopify apis instead of like Bigcommerce but exactly the community I could like I'd already come really close to the product I could see like some of the features they had um I could see the recent releases they you know they put out I was like wow okay this is amazing and I think it didn't take a couple of hours I got access to you know to be Commerce to Try It Out Create products and add Integrations right so um yeah that's that's actually a pretty nice flow unless you have a million people who come in yeah yeah except except that right but I think for for products like you know like Bigcommerce it's already they're solving an established problem right yeah it's nothing so people know why they go there exactly so people know why they go there they know what to expect at least 90 of the way and then when they go in there they're going in there to find like what's the differentiator from you know competitors yeah and um that also gives bitcomers the ability to qualify user before you know they come in and waste some software resources yeah exactly yeah yeah um so I have one last question because in the beginning you spoke a bit about like these aha moments the thing that makes a conversion for a user right can you give like a a fun example or a good example of what an aha moment could be and make it concrete just name a brand especially if you had one right what would it be yeah so if I had a brand it would be tick tock okay here we go yeah so it will be ticked off if the first time I came across Tick Tock right um I I like to think I'm very self-aware person so I'm usually very conscious of crawling through social media and not getting sucked in it so I can do other you know other stuff but when someone sent me a video during I think it was during the pandemic of from Tick Tock it was just a link right they sent it to me they're like yo man you need to check this out I click the link it opens up in my browser I saw the video you know it was really hilarious while I was still laughing the video ends and then another video that's similar to that pops up right and I literally just watched that as well and another one pops up yeah I was like yeah and I I think then I was standing and just checked it out and I stood there for 15 minutes without doing anything and just videos the same videos and because I think because I didn't touch that the algorithm was like okay cool this guy likes these videos let's just keep showing him more stuff like this and when I stopped I was like ah aha so this is how this works like I was already sucked in I was already like I could see the value of like how how Tick Tock was going to be like huge because exactly it was just amazing right and it didn't take me what it just took one video and a couple of seconds after for me to realize you know what the proposition of tick tock was right obviously there's going to be other side quests like yeah allowing creators to you know monetize their content there's the allowing people to be more expressive you know to learn allowing company advertise products but uh for them I think their aha moment is for a user a start moment where a video ends and it just goes to the next thing that you want to see so they understand you so yeah they understand what would be the aha moment for Tech talk for a creator for a Creator so I think yeah I think I think for a creator that it could be you would start to think what would it create or want out of this so the aha moment always starts from what's the value to be derived from this product right so for a Creator it could be I want to create this and I want to get one Anonymous View on my video right that's like an oh I didn't share this I didn't put this anywhere how did how did I you know get someone to see this because creators obviously we care about reach of our content right so Tick Tock when you create a video they suggest tips on hey this is how you can make your video reach a wider audience you post it and it actually does reach a wider audience once that happens from the first Anonymous or you know your first random View you're already incentivized you're already feeling like yeah I get this too now I get this is this is how it works this is what I need to do then you start to learn ways to even make better use of the tool yeah that's that's what I think by I always anchor the aha moment to the first time a user derives value from an application and to understand that you need to know what's valuable to that user and that also means it the aha moment can be very small yeah right it could be I publish my page in some headless CMS and suddenly there's something on the screen and that was very easy that can be aha moment too right yeah that is that is that is an aha moment if it's valuable to the user and again the the the software or the team is intentional about showcasing that feature to the user right yeah exactly it becomes but there are some products that the aha moment probably isn't what was intended by that is also a thing like oh this kind of sucks my aha is nope I guess but then if you have good onboarding and good enablement the likely steer away from that problem yeah yeah you would you would likely and there's something I learned from you know building this this is actually like one thing I learned is sometimes the best form of onboarding is no onboarding okay yeah so for instance when when I was building this e-commerce product in Dubai um we had like designs for we had designs for discrete react native we have like a splash screen we had um we had a splash screen we had it coming to the app there's the sign up you know or you sign in into the app give us some information about your location so we can show you products that are in your area yeah right but we saw that users would drop off once we start to ask like random questions even though at that time online grocery delivery was starting to become a thing during the pandemic users were not you know they're used to going to their regular brick and mortar stores to buy exactly so yeah what we thought was good on boarding it's free it's minimum commitment like we're asking those so we can personalize your experience was actually hurting us right and the moment we took out yeah we took out those beats don't bother don't worry about signing up do not tell us we don't even need your phone number we don't need your address we'll try to identify your address that's the only thing we ask for is once you come into the app you open up the app you immediately see products yeah yeah groceries right in front of you right a couple of seconds we ask for permission to you know for your location so we know we can serve you from stores around you if you give us permission we show you product similar products from stores around you this time around right but if you do not give us permission you can still like browse the app but you can add stuff to cart we have like a local cart yeah that's hosted in in the app so users can you know they get the feel of the experience even without creating an account without any form of onboarding what we did after we saw that this worked and we saw more interaction in the app is we started micro adding like you know micro onboarding bits throughout the app to ask you for your like location or some like your phone number yeah because I've been thinking about onboarding in a simpler way even if you go to let's say Amazon or yeah eBay these websites look so ugly the thing is that's actually a feature of onboarding because you feel like you can buy or sell something there and it's for everybody because when you go to the Chanel website you don't feel like you're like at least for me I'm not gonna buy something there because yeah well I might to buy a present for my wife or something but I'm not going to buy Chanel men's shoes or glasses because it's so high-end so my onboarding somehow by the the fishing of the brand is less smooth and they always have bigger forms because when I work for these type of companies I would say only people that are worthy will fill out these forms right so they scope down their customer base on purpose same if you want to buy a watch or something you have to actually go to the shop you cannot even get it online you can just look at it and so that's also a form of onboarding I imagine if you just have a very simple interface it just directs you to one thing it's relatively cool right you probably need less yeah yeah yeah a lot of like I've seen tools where the onboarding is more passive like Inception you try to put thoughts in your head so if you do it the right way you manipulate the user essentially yeah it's like some some like you see in psychology it does work right um so yeah I've seen also on body like a good strategy um folks using on boarding sometimes especially for Enterprise uh products without a free tier is to offer a money back guarantee ah right okay yeah so this is basically playing the trust card that says yeah yeah I trust my product that I trusted enough that you're going to find extreme value from it and if you do not it's okay I'm going to give you back your money right and that also converts but to do that obviously you need to you need to trust the product enough and you need to there needs to be you know a clear way to measure value so that it's not subjective right oh yeah you're not going to give money back very soon as it says so I imagine yeah you really want to get that anyways um the time is flying is there any last thought that you have that you might want to share and if not where can people find you so where do we go so I I think the the only the last words I would have is a you know I'm very big on like analytics and understanding like user training so whatever you know system whatever process you go with on you know with like onboarding and um um pricing so long as there is you know some way to understand you know what the users want uh how the users behave on the application I think that's great that's something that should be considered first even before you start building out the flow in my opinion okay yeah um yeah last words and then uh we had to find me yeah I'm always hanging out on on Twitter yeah I see it in your username I always have to like oh yeah here oh oh yeah it's yeah you have it in the exactly perfect it's pretty hard to get that right I always miss it I do this a lot right yeah I guess if you just raise your hand up you find out like where it is exactly yeah all right but yeah you can find me on Twitter at I trulo and uh this has been you know has been amazing to be on the Stream you know what this might be the stream where I learned the most while I work at the industry that you're teaching me about so this is good stuff thank you very much for your time dude I appreciate it yeah thank you so much for having me team all right um and we're ending the stream with the most viewers how about that we're ending in a high note thank you so much dude yes nice one man oh wait wait wait before we end we have yeah we have Ilyas saying go William thanks dude exactly uh cheers everyone have a good one and I'll see you next week all right thanks see you bye-bye