SaaS Revolution Show is a weekly podcast that brings insights and tactics from leading SaaS entrepreneurs and operators across the world. Hosted by Alex Theuma, the show is brought to you by SaaStock. You can subscribe on iTunesSpotifyStitcherOvercast

When Jonathan Kim, CEO and Founder of Appcues packed his bags in Hawaii to attend college in Massachusetts, he thought he was destined to be a journalist. He went for one of the best schools in the country for that and also the second most expensive one in the US. User onboarding, the thing Appcues does, was very far from his mind.

To pay his way through college, Jonathan began doing web design and programming on the side. The more he did it, the more Jonathan realised how much he enjoyed it. By the time he graduated, journalism was no longer the career he wanted to pursue. Instead Jonathan joined Performable, the company David Cancel and Elias Torres had founded together, which eventually got acquired by HubSpot.

A front-end engineer at HubSpot, Jonathan was increasingly frustrated by the fact that B2B companies such as HubSpot didn’t have the sort of seamless self-service onboarding that the likes of Facebook or Twitter had. Whether it was salespeople, account managers or customer success reps, they all did the same thing day in and day out of following the script and manually onboarding users.

Jonathan began looking for an alternative, a more automatic way of doing that.

Before long he decided to leave HubSpot and pursue finding the solution on his own, fulfilling his dream to be an entrepreneur. That was five years ago and Appcues was born. Today, the company based out of Boston has 55 employees and has just raised a Series A funding.

On this week’s episode of the SaaS Revolution Show, Jonathan talks about the user onboarding that acquires, wins and retains customers.

Listen on to hear:

  • Why user onboarding is important
  • How to go about creating great user onboarding
  • What are the effects of good user onboarding

Appcues Director of Marketing, Ty Magnin will be joining us on the SaaStock 18 growth stage where he will talk about product-led growth. For the three days of the conference, he will be joined by speakers such as Morten Primdahl, Co-founder, Zendesk; Heather Zynczak, CMO, Pluralsight, Corey Thomas, CEO Rapid7 and many more. Grab a ticket for the conference nowand sign up for the bootcamps and workshops we will be running on Monday the 15th, which are limited in capacity.

User onboarding is such an important part of any SaaS success that we are collaborating on the creation of the most extensive onboarding book to date. We will be presenting 30 case studies from companies like Intercom, Drift, Buffer, Clearbit and Typeform among others during SaaStock18. We still have a few more case study slots so if you are particularly proud of your user onboarding you should get in touch. Be quick and Send an email to irina@saastock.com stating your interest.

As always, if you like the podcast we are producing, please drop us a review wherever you get your podcast. It makes a huge difference to us.