Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Last year, I was brought in as a freelance consultant for a B2B SaaS that was drowning in signups but starving for paying customers. Their metrics told a frustrating story: lots of new users daily, most using the product for exactly one day, then vanishing. Almost no conversions after the free trial.
The marketing team was celebrating their "success" — popups, aggressive CTAs, and paid ads were driving signup numbers up. But I knew we were optimizing for the wrong thing. This is the story every SaaS founder knows: great signup metrics, terrible retention.
What I discovered changed everything I thought I knew about onboarding. Sometimes, the best onboarding strategy isn't making things easier — it's making them deliberately harder. Here's what you'll learn from my counterintuitive approach:
Why friction can be your friend in user acquisition
The real difference between onboarding and activation
How to qualify users before they even sign up
Why most SaaS companies are optimizing for the wrong metrics
A framework that actually improves trial-to-paid conversion
This isn't about making your product harder to use. It's about making sure the right people are using it in the first place. Let me show you how strategic friction can transform your onboarding process.
Industry Reality
What every growth expert tells you about onboarding
Open any growth playbook and you'll see the same advice repeated everywhere: reduce friction, simplify the process, get users to their "aha moment" as fast as possible. The conventional wisdom looks something like this:
Minimize form fields — ask for name and email only
Remove credit card requirements — eliminate any barrier to trial
Automate everything — reduce time to first value
Progressive onboarding — reveal features gradually
Social proof — show testimonials and user counts
This advice exists because it works — for the right type of product. Consumer apps with millions of users can afford to cast a wide net. If 99% of signups churn but you still get 10,000 active users from a million signups, you win.
But here's where it falls apart: B2B SaaS doesn't operate on consumer app math. When your average contract value is $500/month and your sales cycle involves actual humans making purchasing decisions, optimizing for maximum signups often optimizes for maximum waste.
The problem with frictionless onboarding is that it attracts everyone — including people who will never, ever pay for your product. You end up with vanity metrics that look great in board meetings but terrible unit economics that kill your business.
Most companies realize this too late, after they've built entire funnels around unqualified traffic. They're stuck treating symptoms instead of addressing the core issue: they're solving the wrong problem for the wrong people.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I first looked at this client's data, the numbers told a clear story. They were getting 500+ signups per week, but only 3-4% were converting to paid plans. Worse, most users were abandoning the product after their first session.
My client was a B2B productivity tool targeting small teams. The product was solid — I'd used it myself and could see the value immediately. But something was fundamentally broken in their acquisition funnel.
Like most product consultants, I started with the obvious solution: improve the onboarding experience. We built an interactive product tour, simplified the UX, reduced friction points. The engagement improved a bit — nothing crazy. The core problem remained untouched.
That's when I realized we were treating symptoms, not the disease. The issue wasn't post-signup onboarding — it was pre-signup qualification. Most users came from cold traffic: paid ads and SEO. They had no idea what they were signing up for.
The aggressive conversion tactics meant anyone with a pulse and an email address could sign up. We were optimizing for quantity when we needed to optimize for quality. The marketing team was hitting their MQL targets while the product team struggled with terrible activation rates.
It was a classic case of departmental misalignment. Marketing measured signups. Product measured activation. Sales measured conversions. But nobody was measuring the right thing: qualified user acquisition.
The "bloodbath" wasn't just in the metrics — it was in team morale. The support team was overwhelmed with confused users. The product team was constantly firefighting instead of building features. The sales team was chasing leads that would never close.
Something had to change, and it wasn't going to be another interactive tutorial.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
I proposed something that made my client almost fire me: make signup harder. Instead of removing friction, we were going to add it strategically. Here's exactly what we implemented:
Step 1: Credit Card Requirement Upfront
We added credit card collection during the signup process, not at trial expiration. This immediately filtered out casual browsers and tire-kickers. Yes, signups dropped 60%. But the people who signed up were serious about evaluating the product.
Step 2: Qualifying Questions
We lengthened the onboarding flow with specific questions about team size, current tools, and use cases. This wasn't just data collection — it was a qualification gate. Users who wouldn't answer detailed questions about their needs probably weren't ready to buy anything.
Step 3: Company Information Requirements
We required company name, role, and team size. Personal Gmail accounts couldn't sign up without additional verification. This eliminated students, job seekers, and competitors doing "research."
Step 4: Use Case Selection
Instead of showing all features to everyone, we created three distinct onboarding paths based on primary use case. Users had to commit to a specific workflow before accessing the product. No more "just browsing" mentality.
Step 5: Expectation Setting
We added a clear timeline: "Your trial evaluation will take 2-3 hours across 7 days to see meaningful results." This set proper expectations about the commitment required.
The psychological effect was powerful. When people invest time and information to access something, they value it more. We were applying the IKEA effect to software onboarding.
But here's the crucial part: we didn't make the product harder to use. Once qualified users were inside, we removed friction everywhere. The product tour was more focused. Support was more responsive. Everything was optimized for the people who belonged there.
We essentially built a velvet rope policy for our SaaS product. Not everyone gets in, but those who do get the VIP experience.
Psychological Barriers
Using friction as a qualification filter leverages loss aversion and commitment bias to attract serious evaluators while deterring casual browsers.
Focused Onboarding
Once qualified users enter, remove all internal friction and create hyper-personalized experiences based on their stated use case and goals.
Data-Driven Qualification
Use qualifying questions not just for segmentation but as actual barriers that filter out unqualified prospects before they consume resources.
Revenue Focus
Optimize for trial-to-paid conversion rates and customer lifetime value rather than raw signup volumes and vanity metrics.
The results spoke for themselves, though it took my client a while to appreciate them:
Immediate Impact (First 30 Days):
Signups dropped from 500/week to 200/week
Trial-to-paid conversion jumped from 3.4% to 12.8%
Average session duration increased 340%
Support tickets per user decreased 67%
Long-term Impact (6 Months):
Monthly recurring revenue increased 180% despite fewer signups
Customer acquisition cost dropped 45%
Net revenue retention improved to 115%
Sales cycle shortened by 3 weeks on average
But the most surprising result? We finally had engaged users who actually used the product. Feature adoption rates tripled. Users were completing multi-step workflows. They were inviting teammates. They were behaving like customers, not tire-kickers.
The support team went from firefighting to proactive success management. The product team could focus on building instead of constantly optimizing for confused users who would never convert anyway.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me that most B2B onboarding strategies fail because they're optimizing for the wrong metrics. Here are the key lessons that changed how I approach user acquisition:
Signups are a vanity metric — What matters is qualified signups who have a real problem your product solves
Friction can be strategic — The right barriers filter out wrong-fit users while attracting serious evaluators
Psychology beats features — Users who invest effort to access your product value it more than those who get instant access
Alignment is everything — Marketing, product, and sales must optimize for the same ultimate metric: revenue
Context matters — Consumer app advice doesn't apply to B2B SaaS with complex sales cycles
Quality beats quantity — 100 qualified users who convert at 15% beats 1000 unqualified users who convert at 2%
Onboarding starts before signup — The most important qualification happens in your marketing, not your product
The counterintuitive truth: Sometimes the best onboarding strategy is to prevent the wrong people from signing up in the first place. Build walls, not just bridges.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups implementing strategic friction:
Require credit cards for trials when ACV > $100/month
Add qualifying questions about team size and current tools
Create use case-specific onboarding paths
Track trial-to-paid conversion over signup volume
For your Ecommerce store
For ecommerce stores using friction strategically:
Use progressive profiling for account creation
Require phone verification for high-value promotions
Add qualifying questions for B2B wholesale inquiries
Gate premium content behind meaningful form completion