Ensuring the Success of a Product-Led Transition – how UserGuiding helped Crunch

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:

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.

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:

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 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.

• 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: 👇🏻

• 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: 👇🏻

• 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: 👇🏻

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.

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 ability to engage with the first-time users of your platform and guide them to success.

In a matter of minutes, you can enable product growth by creating:

Give it a try yourself