#23 How Threads App Nailed Onboarding
Like the other 30 million “early adopters” I joined Meta’s new app, Threads, on day 1 this week. And after I onboarded in less than 30 seconds I thought… damn, this is how it’s done.
But before I get into what made the experience so good, here’s why every step of your onboarding matters– (hint: reduced steps isn’t always the answer).
When I was Head of Product at bossbabe I set a goal to reduce the refund rate of our flagship course. This course ran on evergreen, meaning there were new students onboarding each week.
It was our highest-ticket product and the refund rate was a couple points above industry standard and so I knew we had room to improve.
We had the receipts. Our students had incredible results from this course. But when you’re starting, the curriculum could feel overwhelming.
I had a hypothesis that the leaky bucket was in giving our students the confidence that they could achieve the winning results that sold them on the course in the first place.
The solution we tested was to add an orientation call in their first week before they were able to join the live coaching calls.
During these calls our community manager (not the course teachers) gave an overview of the curriculum, what to expect, and how to get the most out of their experience.
Then she asked each person to share why they joined the course. This call immediately created a sense of community, belonging and a knowing that they were not alone in their goals and journey.
This resulted in a 6% reduction in refund requests. That’s a lot of cash.
How Threads App Nailed Onboarding
They created exclusivity + mystery
It was publicly known that Threads was launching Thursday, July 6, but on Wednesday people were sharing their threads posts back to Instagram which left their Instagram followers curious…
how do I get early access?
It was simple – the app was already available for download on the App Store. And this mystery + discovery was fun like a game to explore and find the treasure.
They made onboarding mindless
It was so stupid easy to onboard to this app that it’s now the most rapidly downloaded app in history with 30M users in the first 24 hours it was available.
It was so easy and painless that a new user very quickly got to the point of posting a thread and sharing it back to other social platforms allowing the growth flywheel to spin faster and faster.
Here were the onboarding steps:
STEP 01: Download from the app store
Search for “Threads” and you’ll find the logo you’re recognizing across social – a fun graphic representing a metaphorical thread. It’s free and therefore one click to download. Painless.
STEP 02: Create account (but way easier)
Threads is connected to your Instagram account meaning you don’t have to create any new passwords to forget later.
If you have multiple Instagram profiles it lets you choose which you’re logging in with. But it defaulted for you to whatever you were logged into on Instagram already making it super fast to press ‘next’.
STEP 03: Profile details
One of the largest barriers to entry of any new social app is the need to create a profile.
Crafting the perfect sentence that describes who you are and what you create on that platform can feel paralyzing, especially for creators and entrepreneurs.
Threads made this mindless by allowing you to auto-populate the carefully crafted bio you already have on Instagram. This allowed you to jump right into the app experience.
STEP 04: Follow your people
Another barrier to entry of joining a new social app is starting from scratch to find your friends and build an audience.
Threads gives you the option to opt to auto-follow who you follow on Instagram removing this barrier to entry completely (at least for Insta users).
That’s it that’s the whole onboarding process – 4 simple steps.
There are a few key takeaways:
Auto-populate information wherever possible
Make it fun and playful where you can
Remove the biggest barriers to entry
The flywheel is brilliant
The ability to share back to Instagram with a beautiful, Threads branded design (what we expect on Instagram) naturally brings more and more people to the app.
Example of an Instagram post autogenerated by Threads
They also send a notification to your Instagram followers when you make your first Threads post, increasing the ‘word of mouth’ that people you know have joined the platform. This makes a user more curious and trusting that maybe this new platform is for them, too.
Meta is taking serious advantage of their distribution opportunity and allowing Instagram to pour over into this new app.
For now you can also share your threads to Twitter too – which is where the audience is for this app. The active users of Twitter already love a text based social media app.
Now all Threads has to do is provide a better experience to get them to switch… but that is no easy feat.
Threads Biggest Risk
The biggest question (and threads topic ironically lol) is … will it last?
This feels eerily similar to Google’s attempt at competing with Facebook by launching Google+. They had millions of users immediately but no one stayed. When they decided to sunset the platform users spent an average of 8 mins per month on the platform versus 8 hours on Facebook. Ouch.
There wasn’t enough of a differentiating factor to get them to move their social identity that lived within Facebook as historic posts, friends, images and content.
It was too hard and not worth it to change their behavior.
I don’t know if the collective displeasure with Elon Musk’s behavior and business decision-making will be enough to push people to leave the platform– but the right innovation and unique functionality and experience certainly would.
It’s a race to create a better experience.
Once you download and join the app, you can’t delete your Threads profile without deleting your Instagram profile. So this has me wondering how many “users” will go dormant because they joined out of curiosity leading to “number of users” vanity metrics.
I’m more interested in number of active users.
Only time will tell! But for now I am spending more time on Threads than Twitter. See you there?
Your Action List
In your onboarding flow is there anywhere that people drop off? This is your “leaky bucket” – how can you improve the step before so that they make it further in the process.
Give it a critique - How easy or hard is it to join? Could you reduce the number of steps? (See critique vs QA in how to become the customer)
Is there any information you’re asking for that you could get from somewhere else? Like their name and email? The less repetitive questions the better. (Think: auto-populating profile details)
How can you make onboarding more fun and light? The delightful moments (like a hidden “ticket” to join) are what make experiences worth sharing, increasing your growth flywheel.
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