Your best customers are quitting in the first 5 minutes

You're losing customers before they even understand what you built.

Not because your product sucks. Not because your pricing is wrong.

Because you're asking them to think too hard, and you may be surprised how tiny of a decision adds up.

Every extra decision point in those first 5 minutes is a silent exit ramp. Your brain is wired to conserve energy, so when faced with complexity, it just... bails. ✌️

Most founders think conversion problems live in their copy or their CTA buttons.

They don't.

They live in the 47 micro-decisions users have to make before they see any value.

Why it matters: People buy up to 10x more when choices are limited. In a consumer study buying jam, 24 options converted at 3%, while just 6 converted at 30%. If your onboarding feels overwhelming, you’re running the 24-jam table.

In today's newsletter, I'll discuss what to remove in onboarding and provide a 5-step rubric to audit a product's early moments in 20 minutes to identify conversion issues.

Save your spot now: I have one February spot left for a free 30min discovery call. If your product has traffic but low conversions, grab it while it’s available.

Watch this to see how Netflix uses 3 psychological traps: They use these tools to keep users interested, and you can use the same methods to make people stay and buy more in your own product.

Read this if “we do a little bit of everything” is killing your sales: The fastest way to make money isn’t adding more services, it’s packaging one painful problem into something people instantly say yes to.

First time reading?

Decision fatigue is the deteriorating quality of decisions made after a long session of decision-making.

I’ve noticed lots of founders missing this point here: it doesn't take a "long session" to trigger it. It happens in seconds.

Every input field, every dropdown menu, every "optional but recommended" step, they all burn mental calories your user doesn't want to spend yet.

They haven't gotten value. Why would they invest energy?

The pattern: Founders mistake "comprehensive onboarding" for good UX. They want to collect data, set preferences, explain features, showcase integrations.

All before the user has a single win.

That's not onboarding. That's a straight up interrogation.

Check out the example below! 👇

The hesitation: Asking users to make choices before they understand the value.

The fix: Sequence decisions AFTER the first win, not before it.

Look at your onboarding flow. Count every decision point before a user gets their first "aha" moment.

Check out Alma's mobile app onboarding, they could’ve removed six screens to get their users hooked:

The principle is simple: default everything you can, defer everything else.

Your job isn't to give users control immediately. It's to give them a win immediately.

Control comes after trust. Trust comes after value.

I help you fix the first 5 minutes of your product so more users reach their first win, conversions go up, and revenue leaks stop for good.

Start with a free call first to see if it’s a fit. 👇

Complexity isn't a feature set problem. It's a sequencing problem.

You don't need to remove the questions, you need to move them to after the user cares enough to answer them.

Stop front-loading friction and wondering why people don't convert.

Start with the win. Everything else can wait.

Bonus: I put together a Time to First Win (TTFW) Rubric that walks through exactly how I audit onboarding flows for friction points. It's 5 steps you can run through in 20 minutes to find where you're bleeding conversions.

Grab it here:

👋 I’ll see ya next week! — Dana

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