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.
What happened next goes against everything you've been taught about user-centric MVP design. Instead of making signup easier, I made it harder. Instead of reducing friction, I added more. And the results? We finally got users who actually stuck around.
Here's what you'll learn from this experience:
Why "user-centric" doesn't mean "frictionless"
How to design MVPs that attract the right users, not just more users
The counterintuitive onboarding strategy that improved conversion rates
When to ignore user feedback and trust your data instead
How to build qualifying mechanisms into your MVP from day one
This isn't another "reduce friction at all costs" playbook. This is about building products that work for the users who actually matter. Check out our growth strategies for more unconventional approaches.
Industry Reality
What Every Product Manager Has Been Taught
Walk into any product management course or read any MVP guide, and you'll hear the same mantras repeated like gospel:
"Remove all friction from your user experience." The idea is simple: every additional step, every extra form field, every moment of hesitation is a barrier between you and user adoption. The goal becomes creating the smoothest, most frictionless path possible.
"User-centric design means making everything easy." We're told to obsess over user convenience. One-click signups, social logins, pre-filled forms — anything to get users into your product faster.
"Optimize for maximum signups." More users equals more potential customers, right? The conversion will happen later through great product experience and nurturing.
"Follow user feedback religiously." If users say something is too complicated or takes too long, simplify it immediately. The customer is always right.
"Test and iterate toward lower friction." A/B test everything to reduce drop-off rates. Every optimization should make the flow smoother and faster.
This conventional wisdom exists because it works — sometimes. In e-commerce, reducing checkout friction absolutely increases conversions. For content platforms, easier signup means more engagement. For consumer apps, smooth onboarding drives adoption.
But here's where this approach falls apart: when you're building a B2B SaaS that requires genuine commitment and integration into someone's workflow. When your product isn't just a quick purchase or casual engagement, but a tool that needs to become part of someone's daily routine.
The problem isn't the advice itself — it's applying it blindly without understanding your specific user context.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
When I started working with this B2B SaaS client, the situation looked textbook perfect on the surface. They had a solid product that solved a real problem for project management teams. Their marketing was working — traffic was coming in, signups were happening, and their funnel looked healthy from a distance.
But when I dug into the actual user behavior data, the story was completely different. Users would sign up, maybe click around on their first day, then disappear forever. We're talking about 90%+ of users never coming back after day one.
The client was convinced they had a product problem. "Maybe our onboarding is confusing," they said. "Maybe we need better tutorials." 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.
That's when I realized we were treating symptoms, not the disease. The real problem wasn't what happened after signup — it was who was signing up in the first place.
Most of these 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 should have been optimizing for quality.
I analyzed the 10% of users who actually stuck around and found something interesting: they all had one thing in common. They'd either been referred by existing customers, found us through industry-specific content, or had spent significant time researching the problem we solved. They came in warm, not cold.
The lightbulb moment: we weren't getting the wrong kind of user experience — we were getting the wrong kind of users.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Here's what I proposed to my client, and why they almost fired me for it: make signup harder.
Instead of the typical "enter your email and you're in" approach, I designed what I called a "qualification funnel." Here's exactly what we implemented:
Step 1: Added credit card requirements upfront. No more "free trial, no strings attached." If someone wanted to try the product, they had to be willing to put payment information down. This single change eliminated 70% of our previous signups.
Step 2: Lengthened the onboarding flow with qualifying questions. Instead of rushing users into the product, we asked about their team size, current project management challenges, and implementation timeline. This took 3-5 minutes instead of 30 seconds.
Step 3: Required a brief "commitment statement". Users had to select which specific problem they were trying to solve and acknowledge they understood this was a tool that required team adoption and workflow changes.
Step 4: Added a calendar booking step for larger teams. Instead of letting enterprise users wander around the product confused, we required a brief onboarding call. This felt like more friction, but it meant these users got proper setup.
My client's initial reaction was panic. "We're going to lose 80% of our signups!" And they were right — we did. Signups dropped significantly. But here's what happened next:
Users who made it through the new qualification process actually used the product. Instead of one-day wonders, we had users who logged in consistently, invited team members, and set up real projects.
The secret wasn't making the product easier to use — it was making it harder to sign up for. We built a self-selection mechanism that filtered out tire-kickers and attracted people who were serious about solving their project management problems.
This connects to our SaaS trial optimization strategies where we dive deeper into qualification techniques.
Qualification Design
Build friction that filters for intent, not convenience
User Segmentation
Separate casual browsers from serious prospects early
Data-Driven Decisions
Let user behavior guide design, not opinions
Commitment Mechanisms
Require investment to increase engagement probability
The results were immediate and dramatic, though not in the way most people measure "success."
Signups dropped by 73% — from about 200 new users per week to roughly 55. My client was sweating bullets during the first month, convinced we'd destroyed their growth.
But activation rates jumped from 8% to 34%. Instead of 16 users actually engaging with the product weekly, we had 19 — and they were much more engaged.
Trial-to-paid conversion improved from 2.1% to 12.8%. We went from converting 4 users per week to 7, but these users had much higher lifetime value.
Support ticket volume increased by 60% — which sounds bad until you realize this meant people cared enough to ask questions instead of just abandoning the product.
Six months later, monthly recurring revenue had grown 89% despite having fewer total users. We'd fundamentally changed the quality of our user base.
The unexpected side effect? Word-of-mouth referrals increased dramatically. When you have users who are genuinely committed to your product, they become advocates. Our customer acquisition cost actually decreased over time as more signups came from referrals rather than paid ads.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
This experience taught me that most of what we call "user-centric design" is actually "acquisition-centric design" in disguise. Here are the key lessons:
1. Friction isn't always the enemy. Strategic friction can be your friend when it filters for the right users. The goal isn't to eliminate all barriers — it's to eliminate the wrong barriers while keeping the useful ones.
2. User-centric means understanding user context, not just user preferences. Users will always say they want things to be easier and faster. But what they really want is to solve their problem effectively, even if that requires some upfront investment.
3. Optimize for engagement, not just acquisition. A smaller group of highly engaged users will always outperform a large group of disengaged ones, especially in B2B SaaS where success depends on adoption and retention.
4. Your MVP should reflect your business model. If you're building something that requires commitment and behavior change, your onboarding should prepare users for that reality, not hide it.
5. Question departmental KPIs. Marketing optimizing for signups while product optimizes for engagement creates misaligned incentives. Sometimes the best thing for the product is fewer, better users.
6. Cold traffic needs different treatment than warm traffic. Users who find you through paid ads need more qualification than users who found you through referrals or targeted content.
7. Test controversial changes gradually. We didn't implement all these changes at once. We tested each element separately to understand what was driving the improvements.
The biggest lesson? Sometimes the best onboarding strategy is to prevent the wrong people from signing up in the first place. Find related insights in our SaaS onboarding optimization playbook.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
Implement qualification questions during signup to filter serious prospects
Require credit card upfront for trial access to increase commitment
Track activation metrics alongside acquisition to measure real engagement
Design onboarding that prepares users for the commitment your product requires
For your Ecommerce store
Add product quizzes to guide customers to the right solutions
Require account creation before allowing checkout to build customer relationships
Use progressive profiling to learn about customer needs over time
Implement email verification to ensure quality contact information