Empty State in SaaS: A “must-have” feature
There are excellent articles on Medium like this one which talks about the importance of empty states or starting experiences for mobile apps. I think the same logic applies to SaaS products. SaaS providers need to pay attention to the empty state.
As a Product Manager I’m frequently exploring tools and services that can help us move the business forward. The #1 problem I find is that most SaaS products don’t think about the empty state by which I mean the sign-up state or specifically the post sign-up experience. Any new service I sign-up for I’m always greeted with a step-by-step integration guide, documentation and an empty slate.
No matter how powerful and useful the tools are they are only as good as the data/inputs they have to work with. So of course evaluating a product becomes incredibly hard if all the tools and features are available yet effectively disabled.
Most marketing videos, documentation and resources assume a deep level of engagement with the product at which point all of the features are actually useful.
It’s really hard to evaluate the benefits of a product if one can only use their imagination.
Creating a better first impression
Here’s what could be done with creating a better post sign-up experience:
- Provide an integration guide
- Guided walkthroughs
- Sample data — Most importantly, sample data to play around with. Surprisingly, this is something I could NOT find even major SaaS providers implementing. This leaves potentially high value customers from activating because there is an incomplete story for the product in mind.
Most importantly — provide sample data
Most providers are now doing a good job with #1 and #2, showing actionable next steps. While some of these will be hard for a non-developer to complete, it lights the path ahead.
Sample data is for some reason ignored. Imagine signing up for a new service and having some test data to play with.
Let’s take two examples —
- Analytics service (like Mixpanel.com) — After a customer signs up they could provide a test app with tons of metrics available. Customer can easily now segment, view funnels, cohorts etc. They already have a demo video on the dashboard, why not just make that same app made from the demo video available to the new customer. The guided walkthrough can then be more powerful now that there is real data to interact with.
- A/B testing service (like Optimizely.com) — After a customer signs up show them a dummy homepage hosted by the service and setup one simple A/B test experiment. Provide fake data about user interactions and metrics. The customer can now actually play around with real data and realize the power of the tools and features in the right context.
The benefit of sample data is that the customer can get a complete experience of the product, as if they’ve been an engaged user for a while. It provides a glimpse into the future which makes it a compelling sell.
Create a Win-Win situation with sample data
For customers this helps with—
- Deeper understanding of the features product.
- Better handle of how to adopt the product using the sample data as a handy reference.
- Faster on-boarding process.
For the provider this helps with -
- Higher customer activations and lesser dropoffs.
- Fewer contacts from confused or lost customers.
- Pushing and explaining a standardized best practices and methodology.
- Also, as a product manager/owner a recording of the first impressions and interactions is useful to develop insights into new customer behavior.
Conclusion
I’ll be glad and huge fan of any SaaS provider that will do this. If you know of a service that already does this please let me know and I’ll make sure to call them out!
Thanks for reading this! If you’ve found this useful, please let me know your thoughts.
A side story: The day I started writing this post I met an engineer from Mixpanel on the bus, who was also an ex-Googler and lives in the same area. To my pleasure, he was very happy with this feedback :)
