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TL;DR
Steven Cravotta on why the onboarding is the sales pitch: a deliberately long onboarding educates the user, collects data, and walks them through their own problem so they’re primed to pay when they hit the hard paywall. This flow helped Puff Count reach $40k/mo and $500k ARR.
What an onboarding is
- The user’s first experience — reaffirm their decision (“congratulations, you’re on the way to a healthier lifestyle”), explain features, drop social proof (500k+ users), run a survey, more social proof, then the paywall.
- Three jobs: educate, gather data (email/phone/demographics for later marketing), and prime the brain to think “I need this.”
- Make it long on purpose — users build value for themselves and invest time (sunk cost). Throwing them straight at a paywall = no conversion.
Research & build
- Study competitor onboardings on Mobbin (browse real apps’ onboarding + subscription screens).
- Ask what data is useful for product + marketing: “what brings you to the app?”, side effects, spend, frequency — this segments who’s likely to pay.
- Walk users through their own problem via strategically ordered survey questions (Cravotta hired a behavioral scientist; pulled questions from National Drug Strategy surveys for validity).
- Push the harder/more intense questions toward the end — the user has already committed time and is more likely to answer.
- Design via 99designs (same designer Zach who built the paywall).
Optimize
- Track per-step completion with Mixpanel; move/cut screens to maximize completion rate and conversion-to-paid. (~7% drop-off per problem step is normal.)
- Always make decisions on data.
Related
- mobile-app-monetization · paywalls-that-print-44k — onboarding + paywall are one funnel
- studied-100-viral-ai-apps-printing — Cal AI’s 3-minute onboarding as the template
- steven-cravotta