Turning trial users into paying customers for Northpeak SaaS
Onboarding redesign focused on the moment users decide whether to stay or churn
Client
Northpeak SaaS
Sector
B2B SaaS · Productivity
Type
Product UX & Growth
Overview
Northpeak had a capable product and steady inbound trials, but conversion stalled. Analytics showed a sharp cliff: most users who reached the first “aha” screen did so only after a long setup path, and many never got there. The growth team suspected onboarding was the bottleneck - not pricing, not positioning.
We partnered on a six-week engagement to redesign the first-run experience end to end: fewer mandatory steps, clearer value framing, and instrumentation so every change could be measured against trial-to-paid and time-to-value.
The Problem
The product worked - the first session did not.
New workspaces were asked to configure integrations, invite teammates, and import data before they had seen a single meaningful outcome. Support tickets clustered around “what do I do next?” and session replays showed repeated back-and-forth between settings and an empty dashboard.
Trial-to-paid sat around eleven percent. Onboarding averaged fourteen minutes to the first completed workflow. The team had iterated on feature copy, but the structural flow still treated every user like a power admin on day one.
The Solution
A guided path to one undeniable win, then depth on demand.
We collapsed the critical path to a single guided task that produces a visible result in the product’s core object model - then surfaced integrations and collaboration as optional next steps with contextual prompts instead of upfront gates.
We rebuilt empty states, progress cues, and error recovery so users rarely dead-ended. Product and engineering shipped behind feature flags; we ran staged rollouts and compared funnels cohort by cohort until the new flow was the default for all trials.
How It Worked
From diagnosis to shipped onboarding in six weeks.
Map the drop-off
We aligned funnels, session data, and support themes to pinpoint where intent broke - not just which screen, but which decisions confused people.
Prototype the new path
Low-fidelity flows and clickable prototypes let us test ordering, language, and progressive disclosure before engineering committed to schema changes.
Implement with flags
The team shipped incrementally behind flags, with server-side events so we could compare trial segments without waiting for a big-bang release.
Tune and lock in
We iterated on edge cases (partial imports, single-user workspaces) until metrics held steady, then made the flow canonical and updated in-app help accordingly.
The Outcome
Higher conversion without a louder sales pitch.
Trial-to-paid more than doubled within the measurement window, and median time to the first completed workflow dropped sharply - fewer users bounced in the first session, and those who stayed activated faster.
Support volume on onboarding topics fell as a share of new trials. The growth team could finally run experiments on pricing and packaging on top of a funnel that no longer leaked at step one.
"The best growth work often looks boring: remove friction until the product speaks for itself in the first five minutes."
- Lunova Digital
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