Decrease time to value

Learn from growth expert, Ekaterina Gamsriegler

Jacob Rushfinn

Oct 29, 2024

Hey there, it’s Jacob at Retention.Blog 👋

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

The issue with most apps isn't a lack of value.

The issue is that users have no idea what the value is!

Or, equally as problematic, it takes way too long to find that value.

How long does it take a user to get to your app's core value? To reach the a-ha moment?

It might take a couple of minutes (think hypercasual games), or weeks and months (think investment and trading apps where it takes a while to set up an account).

I decided to get some help on this topic from Ekaterina Gamsriegler.

Ekaterina leads Marketing and Growth at Mimo and was recognized by Amplitude as one of the top 50 best product growth leaders in 2024.

💥 Also, she has an amazing live course starting on November, 4, called Unlock Your App's Growth and Maximize Revenues.

There, she teaches how to apply Product-led & Marketing-led Growth tactics and zooms out, to help learners build the growth strategy and become less random about it, by consistently creating value for users and the business.

Just between you and me, I may be appearing as a guest speaker…shhh, don’t tell anyone!

➡️ Here is a link to the course, but I’ll also share more details at the bottom of this newsletter.

When we promote our apps, we "promise” (by using the thoughtful messaging and USPs we've come up with) that it's the right tool for the "job".

However, we all have a limited amount of attention and energy to devote to figuring out if these promises match reality.

Helping users see the benefits of a product faster can lead to higher activation rates and, hence, better retention.

It can help us lift this part of the curve👇

What are some quick tips on how we can decrease time to value?

Most of the tactics I come across revolve around optimizing onboarding.

It’s a solid lever but the choice of tactics is wider.

I'd split them into 3 categories:

Improving Product-led activation
Improving Marketing-led activation
Improving Marketing-led acquisition

Product-Led Activation:

Improve the user onboarding in the product and remove anything blocking the user's journey to value.

For example:

Don't ask for extra personal information 'just in case'.

It's tempting to collect all the data we can. Who knows what kind of insights we can discover?

But asking for personal information that doesn't help personalize the product can be off-putting for our users.

Address your user's concerns upfront

Take a walk in their shoes. What would bother them?

This will often be specific to your product, but a few persistent ones are, “How will you use my data?” and, “How long will this take?”

Clarify how you’ll use the personal information to decrease friction for users who aren’t sure if they should share it.
- Examples: disclaimers at the bottom, 'no spam’ promises, explanations for why you need specific data, etc.
Add a progress bar showing the time to value

Ask for permission when the time is right

More often than not, you don't need multiple permissions from the user right away, so it's better to time the prompts right, to actually get a “Yes”.

For example, in financial apps, we can usually send money to other users. However, asking for access to Contacts doesn't need to happen right in onboarding because a user needs to add funds to their account first.

Only after they topped up their balance, they can transfer funds to friends, and this is a good time for the prompt.

However, you should ask users for permissions right in onboarding IF this is needed for them to experience the value of your app.

And further improve your opt-in rates by mentioning clear benefits of granting the permission. Here's how Headspace and Mimo do it:

Reconsider ‘hard’ signup or account creation

Is asking to sign up always a required step to experiencing value? And if yes, when should it happen?

By making the signup in onboarding optional, you can decrease time to value and, potentially, get more users to reach the a-ha moment. Especially if privacy is a concern for your target audience.

In apps like Babbel, Flo, Duolingo, and Mimo, you can skip the account creation in onboarding and get to the app's core functionality faster.

Here’s how these user journeys could look:

I really like how fast Tangerine gets you to record your first entry in the app. It’s literally three steps!

You can always ask users to sign up later.

Users can be more willing to create an account in order to save their progress, data, or access a personalized plan.

Using a "soft” signup can help you decrease the time to value and improve the activation rates.

But there are a couple of things to watch out for:

By making the signup optional, you might lose out on a portion of your users’ emails. This means, by improving your product-led activation, your marketing-led activation strategy (via email onboarding sequences, for example) might take a hit.
One can also argue that if users are not willing to commit to creating an account, they might not be that motivated to use your app.

So if you're not up for testing a softer signup - I understand.

If you are asking users to verify their email, at least let them explore the app while they are waiting for the verification email or are not ready to verify it right away.

Enable faster signup and future login through third-party services

Use multiple signup options like Facebook, Apple, Google, email, or even the phone number. A lot of app developers stop there. To keep on optimizing, monitor the stats and remove the unused options to make sure your users don't face the “paradox of choice”.

💬 Jacob’s Note:
Signup and login optimization can feel small, but they can have an outsized impact on users making it into your product.

Don't measure time to value in the number of screens

Our goal is not to get rid of all the friction, our goal is to show the user as early as possible that your app is the best tool for the "job” and that they've made the right choice.

Try to drop little value nuggets before the a-ha moment to keep users engaged.

Reassure users about the value, educate them, or help personalize the product to create more relevance to individual users.

This is why even really long onboarding funnels can do well. Noom is doing an amazing job here.

They provide education:

Reassurance:

And personalization:

Full disclosure:

Trying to shorten the time to value by tweaking the onboarding might not end up being your silver bullet.

The scale of your optimizations depends on the user's path to the a-ha moment, which depends on the type of your app and the vertical you're in.

Story time:

I used to work for a trading app back in the day.

And creating an account in a trading app is not simple. A user needs to provide a lot of information and, sometimes, is even required to send the documents via post.

The path to the a-ha moment is long and tedious.

A user needs to fill in long signup forms, verify documents, link a payment method, add funds, decide what to buy/sell/bet on, find the courage to risk it, and make the trade or bet.

No matter how much we'd be optimizing the onboarding flow and splitting the fields in the signup form between screens, we wouldn't be able to turn the hours (or days) till the a-ha moment, into minutes.

What can you do? Zoom out, look at your user journey holistically, and think how else you can onboard users.

Our product team decided to completely change the flow.

They started providing users with free demo accounts and demo money so that they could practice trading risk-free. And would only later nudge them to create live accounts.

This significantly decreased the time to value and allowed more new users to get to the a-ha moment.

Next, let’s see what marketing-led tactics can improve activation.

Marketing-Led Activation

This is about lifecycle marketing.

While this function typically lies in the Marketing team, it's essential that the Product team provides guidance on what features need to be a part of the communication and how soon users need to get nudged and introduced to certain functionalities.

It's a great lever to increase the adoption of features.

Check what user actions lead to users experiencing value and set up push notifications, in-app messages, or emails that might help users get to the value faster.

I won't go into details here about setting up all the lifecycle messaging. But I recommend you start with Jacob's push notifications quick start guide.

Some extra tips:

After nailing the basic setup, test a multi-channel approach

Customer.io, in their State of Messaging report from 2023, say that their clients that use a mix of channels like push notifications, in-app messages, SMS, and email, see, on average, a 63% better performance, compared to using just one channel.

Of course, one company's clients are not the best sample so I'd take it with a grain of salt. But I also see multi-channel campaigns being more efficient.

After all, just like with every marketing activity, we want to send the right message at the right time, to the right audience. And this is exactly what multi-channel messaging enables us to do.

Use deep links in emails, in-app messages, and push notifications

Deep links in emails can often be overlooked because they take a bit of setup and/or a 3rd party tool to manage the integration.

But using deep links for new users who haven’t reached your activation point yet, pays off. You can use the data you've collected during onboarding, and link users directly to the content or features that they’ll be most interested in.

Supercharge your lifecycle marketing with ML

Speaking of the importance of sending the right message at the right time… These days, there are several tools and SDKs (like Aampe) that can help you reach users when they are in the right context with more personalized messaging. (They are pricey but, depending on your scale, the investment might pay off.)

Last, but not least:

Marketing-Led Acquisition

Finally, let’s see what we can do at the very top of the funnel, to decrease time to value.

Adjust your new users’ experience based on their goals

By the time we start onboarding new users, we might already know a lot about them. Especially if they are not iOS users 😀.

We might know what channel they came from, what Apple Search Ads campaign they were a part of, or the creative they engaged with.

At UA Brewmasters back in 2023, David Sánchez-Camacho García shared that at Sololearn they managed to get >5% more users to finish their onboarding by adjusting it based on the acquisition data.

When they knew what advertising campaign a user had come from, they would display more relevant courses in onboarding.

Caveat: This approach won't work for most iOS channels.

It might be still worth a shot if you're running Android and/or web funnel campaigns at scale. But estimate it critically. The implementation takes effort, so the juice might not be worth the squeeze for smaller apps.

Use Custom Product Pages and Custom Store Listings

You can direct users to custom store listings, based on what advertising campaign they came from or what they searched for in the store. Use the intent signals to tailor the experience to your users’ interests.

I see CPPs and CSLs boosting conversion rates to download by 20%-40%. You can see a decrease in CPI when using them in paid campaigns and more organic downloads if you're also using CSLs to target organic search queries.

Check if your user acquisition strategy impacts time to value

The level of intent differs across marketing channels.

Usually, we can't expect paid social media like TikTok (where users typically go to get distracted) to bring in users with a level of intent similar to Apple Search Ads, where users are actively searching for your product or a similar one.

Why does it matter?

Because if it takes a long time to get value out of your app and requires a lot of motivation, channels with lower-intent audiences might not perform well for your app.

And the shorter the time to value, the lower level of intent from your users is required.

Make sure that the level of intent of potential users matches the time to value and your app’s complexity.

Try playable ads

In some channels, you can use formats like playable ads.

While they are typically used by games, I also saw them working well for a subscription app back in the day.

Users can engage with the ad and see your app in action before they download it. They can experience value very early in the process and stay engaged enough to get to the a-ha moment.

5 years ago for Runtastic, we saw a 10% decrease in CPI, a 10% increase in CTR, and a 5% increase in conversion to purchase from users viewing playable ads vs regular video ads.

I'd love to know if any readers have a more recent experience with playables!

(Click to play the video ☝️)

💬 One last tip from Jacob:
I often see products have a very nice onboarding flow, but then they just drop users on the home screen of the app which is cluttered, complex, and/or overwhelming.
You expect users to be able to intuit the next right action. (and no, putting a red notification dot over a feature is not enough!)
But you can create a new user flow that continues after your paywall that's either a simpler version of the home screen or bypasses the home screen altogether and gets them right into the core of the product.
I like how Impulse does this:

To sum it up:

Time to value isn’t just how fast you can get someone into your product.

It’s how fast you can get them to what they expect to get done, so they have enough motivation to actually put in the effort!

Things to ask yourself:

How long does it take my users to experience value after the first touch with the product, be it a tap on the ad or a search in the store?
- Go through the flow yourself. And do this kind of "dogfooding” on a regular basis.
Can I offer tidbits of value before they get to the core experience?
- Address your users’ concerns, educate, and reassure them
Are there quick conversion optimizations I can make to reduce the friction in my flow?
- Remember, not all friction is bad. If you make your flow longer, but in the process educate your users, or provide value in other ways, you might still be decreasing time to value.
- But don't neglect small optimizations either. For example, automatically adding the SMS code for phone number confirmation can already decrease the % of users leaving your app for good.
Are there bigger changes in the user journey I can make that will decrease time to value?
- This could be something like creating a new user experience that guides people after the paywall so they don’t get lost in your app, or adding tooltips.
- Or creating a different customer journey, like granting access to demo accounts where users can experience the a-ha moment.
Can I improve my user acquisition and lifecycle marketing strategies, to decrease time to value?
- Use a multi-channel approach in your lifecycle messages
- Set up custom product pages / custom store listings.
- Product/channel fit: make sure your channels’ context match the users’ intent levels.

💬 Jacob’s Note:
Want more on Product/channel fit? Read Brian Balfour’s essay here.

Good luck!

- Ekaterina

If you've read this far and found it interesting, you will love Ekaterina's course!

The course starts on November, 4, and runs for 2.5 weeks. There'll be 5 live workshops, a lot of content that you can explore at your own pace, and templates to apply to your apps right away.

She is truly a wealth of knowledge in marketing and product growth and there is no chance you take her course without learning anything.

Learn More Here →

🎓 Real feedback from course graduates :

“Really an amazing course and helped me clearly understand what to do next to grow my business. Ekaterina is not only a true expert in the course's topics but also cares about her students and their success throughout the course. I highly recommend.”

“It's rare to find such a high quality course in a niche area like subscription app growth & monetization. Ekaterina delivered the perfect mix of growth ideas, tactics, and tools - plus advice on how to apply them. The workshop format was great and it helped me figure out where we should focus our growth efforts. If you're growing an app business, this course is a fantastic investment.”

“I loved every second of it. The best course I’ve ever taken in mobile marketing. Ekaterina is a real pro, she was very responsive and made sure to give tons of examples and useful frameworks. Highly recommended for every marketer and developer”

👉 Get access to her course here!