In partnership with
Hey, {{first_name | product-preneur}}!
Your onboarding is bleeding users and every millisecond counts. No, your product isn’t broken, but because you're making them think too much before they see value.
I watched this happen in real-time while working with a client. We built an AI-powered onboarding flow designed to be our "aha moment", they believed that this would finally fix our churn problem.
My job was to design it. My boss's job, apparently, was to add questions to it.
Every extra field. Every additional screen. Every "while we're at it, let's also ask about..." suggestion pushed users further from experiencing what our product actually did. We were suffocating the thing we wanted them to see.
Introducing the first AI-native CRM
Connect your email, and you’ll instantly get a CRM with enriched customer insights and a platform that grows with your business.
With AI at the core, Attio lets you:
Prospect and route leads with research agents
Get real-time insights during customer calls
Build powerful automations for your complex workflows
Join industry leaders like Granola, Taskrabbit, Flatfile and more.
Potion of the Week
Hick's Law: More Options = Slower Decisions = More Drop-Off
Anchor to one painful problem that your customers feel during their current week. Not last month, or casual a nice-to-have. Especially not a theoretical improvement from ChatGPT. You need a problem that burns a hole straight into their brains right now.
This is why you focus and anchor: loss aversion and cognitive load reduction work together when you focus on a single, sharp pain point. Your customers are hunting to stop bleeding revenue, users, time, or credibility. That urgency is your weapon.
One painful problem simplifies your messaging, your product, and your path to revenue. Stop adding more features, more ideas, or more angles. Anchor to the one thing that actually hurts, and everything else gets easier.
🧠 UX Psychology: Hick's Law shows that decision time increases logarithmically with the number of choices. Every extra field, question, or feature you add creates measurable friction that drives users away before they experience your core value. Products that reduce cognitive load win.
Next, let's look at exactly how we applied this to cut onboarding time by 60%+ and get users to value in under a minute.
Magic Sauce
Onboarding flow for a SaaS client
The Case Study: 11 Fields to 3 Confirmations
Here's what we did: instead of forcing new users through a full profile setup (name, role, company, team size, use case, goals, preferences, you know the drill), we cut it to three confirmation screens.
Our AI pre-filled everything it could find: LinkedIn data, company website info, anything pulled during the verification they'd already completed. Users just confirmed or corrected three key fields, then hit one final check.
Result: We cut onboarding time by 60%+ and got users to their first interaction with the core product in under a minute.
That's the play. Get people to a quick win before they have time to reconsider. If your core offer solves a real problem, prove it immediately. Speed to first value beats a “comprehensive” setup every time.
How This Applies If You're Selling a Service
You don't need an app to apply this principle. Most service providers are making the same mistake: overcomplicating the first interaction.
Make your landing page deadly simple. What people see first determines if they stay. One clear promise. One pain point. One solution.
Give them one decision. Not three CTAs, not "explore our services," not a navigation menu with 8 options. One action: submit an email, download a resource, or book a call. Stick with one thing (I dare you).
Turn your service into a clear product. Show exactly what someone gets, how you deliver it, why it works, and what it costs. No vague "let's discuss your needs" language.
Clarity converts, and psychology proves it.
The pattern is identical whether you're onboarding app users or landing service clients: reduce thinking, shorten the path to value, make the next step stupidly obvious.
Let’s Join Forces
Build a productized offer that’s easy to explain, easy to sell, and gets you paid faster.
Over 4 weeks, we’ll tighten your offer, message, and first-time experience so customers immediately understand the value.
👉 A simple, sellable productized offer
👉 A landing page framework that makes people say “Yep, that’s me”
👉 A plan to get your first 3 paying customers
Curious what this looks like? Read the breakdown from a previous post here.
Ready? Fill out the short intake and I’ll confirm if we're a fit. And if the first session isn't valuable, I’ll refund it.
Easy setup, easy money
Your time is better spent creating content, not managing ad campaigns. Google AdSense's automatic ad placement and optimization handles the heavy lifting for you, ensuring the highest-paying, most relevant ads appear on your site.
Corking Things Up
If you're fighting your boss, your client, or yourself over adding "just one more thing," you're fighting the right battle.
More is not better. Clearer is better.
Want to win that argument with data? I just updated my UX Psychology Cheatsheet, a free resource that covers the principles (like Hick's Law) that prove why simplicity converts. Use it to defend your decisions, cut the bloat, and build offers that actually convert.
If your offer feels complicated to explain, it's complicated to buy. Start there.
👋 I’ll see ya next week! — Dana
P.S. If you enjoy my emails, move them to your primary inbox and let me know by sending a reply or clicking the poll below.
I respond to every reply. Let’s make this community about YOU!
