UserGuiding was very intuitive and easy to install. We needed the ability to create content quickly, sometimes based on demand, and UserGuiding provides us with that option.“
Dan Harris
Product Lead @Crunch
FOUNDED
2009
COUNTRY
England
SIZE
51-200
MARKET
Financial Services
COMPANY
Crunch is a UK-based accounting platform that provides accountancy software to contractors, freelancers, and small businesses that want to get the job done without the hassle.
RESULTS
Increased add-on purchases and upgrades
FEATURES USED
Product Tours & Onboarding Checklists
WITH USERGUDING SINCE
2021
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Crunch

Ensuring the success of a product-led transition – how UserGuiding helped Crunch

Selman Gokce
Content Marketing Lead
/
November 29, 2024
min read
Summary
Crunch is an accountancy software that recently launched a freemium tier for their product based on a product-led growth approach.
Engagement and conversions in freemium users were lower than expected, so they started looking for ways to automate an interactive onboarding to guide users to value.
They used UserGuiding’s onboarding checklists, product tours, hotspots, and announcement modals to educate, engage, guide, convert, and upsell users.
After implementing UserGuiding, they’ve seen an increase in the number of add-on purchases and upgrades which was the result of improved user engagement.

Crunch is an accountancy software that improved freemium user activation and conversions with UserGuiding automated interactive elements.

Their road to success starts with the most popular growth strategy in SaaS and software.

Here’s Crunch‘s and Dan‘s, the Product Lead of Crunch, journey with UserGuiding:

Adopting Product-Led Growth

Product-led growth is a GTM strategy that heavily relies on removing friction and barriers between your users and the value of your products or services.

By making it easier and more accessible for your users to use or sample your product, you can display the value of your product to significantly more users with less marketing/outreach.

Most software businesses achieve this by offering free trial versions of their product ⏳ and the remaining products just have free-forever plans with fewer or limited features. ⚡

The team at Crunch already had a free trial model set up, they also wanted to try the freemium model: a basic version of their capable platform that they could offer to everyone for free.

Challenges of a freemium model

Compared to the free trial model, which Crunch already had for the paid tier users, the freemium model brings in more product-qualified leads, gives you access to data from a ton of new users every week, and can create a loyal user base even if your conversions are low.

But removing all of the barriers between your users and your product does come with its own challenges, the biggest of all being user engagement:

The main problem that we had to tackle was user engagement, to get our free tier clients to actually use the product.”

It is very common for freemium users to be less qualified and engaged than free trial users and actual customers.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to ensure you’re getting the best engagement out of the freemium users and turning them into product-qualified leads.

The first step to doing so is to provide them with proper education about the product and tell them about the first steps they need to take and eliminate the confusion.

Now Crunch was accomplishing this task for their paid users and trial users by providing them with optional 1:1 onboarding calls with client managers.

From a video recording for getting started with Crunch

In these meetings, the client managers would go over different sections of the software, explain how each feature works, and show how to complete basic tasks. It would get a new user from a point where they didn’t know how to use to product to a point where they could acquire value from it on their own.

🎯 However, when you start offering a premium plan and hundreds of new users start signing up for your product each week, comes the problem of scalability in the 1:1 video call method:

There was no way we could scale 1:1 walkthroughs, so we thought ‘well, we need something to help with the onboarding process’.”

Hiring more client managers and keeping up with the live demo requests is doable, but not at all cost-effective or scalable.

So you need a way to automate this. You need to provide users with automated content that provides similar if not the same value as 1:1 onboarding calls.

So Dan, who has used enough software products to be aware of interactive walkthroughs and other in-app content, started looking for an easy way to create these:

They've found UserGuiding

Dan and the team came across and tried a number of different digital adoption and user onboarding platforms.

After a period of testing different tools, they decided to use UserGuiding because it was “very intuitive and easy to install” and provided good value for their money.

They’ve created different user journeys that included product tours, tooltips, hotspots, and onboarding checklists; based on the users’ needs and backgrounds.

When going through a 1:1 walkthrough, our client managers followed a script that guided the client on the other end with the key features. What we did was replicate the script with UserGuiding and create guides for each task.”
  • The first thing they did was create interactive walkthroughs for every different task a new user should go through. They used the data and the script from the 1:1 onboarding calls to easily create seamless tours.
  • Then, they gathered all these different guides in checklists that were personalized based on the account type of the user, so they knew the next steps in their journeys.
Our goal was to get free tier clients to buy add-ons or upgrades, and UserGuiding definitely did the trick and achieved what we needed it to achieve.”
  • They also utilized UserGuiding’s hotspots to provide information on limited spaces in the UI. Here are two hotspots that inform the user about the changes/options in their UI.
Different teams at Crunch utilize the UserGuiding platform: our client experience team creates journeys for the onboarding of our free-tier users while the product team creates content for upselling or personalized reminders.”
  • They didn’t only use UserGuiding for user education, but they also wanted to try and make users take certain actions. Here are two beautiful announcement modals that aim to upsell or have the user participate in their referral program: 👇🏻
userguiding crunch announcement modal upsell

userguiding crunch announcement modal referral

Also, for Crunch, user onboarding and in-app marketing aren’t one-off tasks.They have integrated UserGuiding with their product analytics platform, Mixpanel, to provide data to and from UserGuiding.This way, they can see how the guides perform, how a certain user’s experience with their onboarding content is, and what they can do to improve.

We compared the data before and after UserGuiding content was introduced, and we saw a significant uplift in upgrades and purchases of add-ons.”

Visible growth with UserGuiding

Crunch was able to achieve better results from their product-led growth transition.

With UserGuiding, they were able to offer automated and personalized onboarding experiences at the fracture of the cost of 1:1 onboarding calls.

UserGuiding helped Crunch improve user engagement among their freemium users, and push more upgrades and add-on purchases.

Ready to achieve product-led success, just like Crunch did? 🚀

UserGuiding, as a no-code user onboarding platform, gives you the power to eliminate the need for developers in creating interactive content that boosts user engagement and conversions.

In a matter of minutes, UserGuiding lets you can create:

  • interactive product tours,
  • tooltips,
  • hotspots,
  • user onboarding checklists,
  • in-app resource centers,
  • and NPS surveys.

Don’t believe me?

Give it a try yourself.

%
Increase of add-on purchases and upgrades
Our goal was to get free tier clients to buy add-ons or upgrades, and UserGuiding definitely did the trick and achieved what we needed it to achieve.”

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