One Epiphany at a Time: Brainscape’s Founder Dishes on User Onboarding
For the past few years, my company has had the pleasure of working with Andrew Cohen, the founder of Brainscape. Since Brainscape launched, it’s seen enormous growth, and now has a suite of 40 apps with over seven million users.
We think Brainscape does a great job at user onboarding, so our marketing director, Kelly Drill, sat down with Andrew to get his advice for first-time startup founders on how to get it right.
KD: Where do you think startups tend to go wrong when it comes to user onboarding?
AC: I think that the lack of a fundamental understanding of new customers versus returning customers is where most companies fail. It costs 80% less to market to existing customers and retain them than it does to get new customers.
It costs 80% less to market to existing customers and retain them than it does to get new customers. [tweet this]
When you realize that a very large percentage of your customer base is made up of new customers because you’re not retaining the ones you already have, then you know you have to start working on getting that initial user experience right.
I teach a class at General Assembly about creating a metrics-driven culture, and having a monthly dashboard that the whole team has access to, and constantly looking at the funnel of users from the very front door to when they’re engaged and sharing the product with other people. A very surprising number of companies just don’t do that.
KD: What about Brainscape? Do you think you got onboarding right from the beginning or is it something you’ve had to learn the hard way?
AC: We definitely learned the hard way, and I think we still have improvement to make there. But there’s a culture of constant iteration here — we use the metrics to figure out where we’re losing people, and then we focus on those things.
But there’s a culture of constant iteration here — we use the metrics to figure out where we’re losing people, and then we focus on those things.
KD: How much does user feedback impact the changes you make to Brainscape’s onboarding?
AC: In our monthly review of metrics, we combine the analysis of our dashboard with our assessment of the most prevalent customer service queries of the month. We use those insights together to determine what to work on next, and the person on the team who’s usually in charge of that is our head of product.
KD: You work with lots of startups as a mentor. What do you see them struggling with the most in terms of user experience?
AC: Simplicity. Everybody, including Brainscape, thinks early on that they’re going to be all things to all people. We’re afraid that if we say, for example, that we’re only for medical students or only for learning Spanish, it makes for a weaker investor story. But what you should tell an investor is, “Eventually, we’re going to do all of these things, but we’re first going to focus on this one type of user experience.” Stripping everything else away and just focusing on one type of user persona is something that’s really hard for first-time founders to do.
KD: So, for a first-time founder building a product from the ground up, how much of their attention should they be giving to user experience?
AC: A hundred percent.
KD: And what’s the best way to create a great experience for new users?
AC: You need to reveal one very small epiphany at a time and give users almost no choice up front, or make the choice incredibly simple: do you want path A or B? The human brain is usually a lot happier with being spoon-fed epiphanies one little piece at a time.
The human brain is usually a lot happier with being spoon-fed epiphanies one little piece at a time.
Do you use mouse-overs, pop-up bubbles or five-second video tutorials with a talking head? I don’t know. That’s totally based on your brand, the type of product and the medium you’re using. But the concept of revealing just bite-sized epiphanies one at a time is really key.
KD: What’s next for Brainscape?
AC: Brainscape is creating a fundamentally better way to study. There are six hundred million people in the world right now who are studying something, whether they’re in elementary school or medical school or anywhere in between. And they’re doing it inefficiently, they’re forgetting lots of what they’ve learned right after a test, they’re having less fun doing it, and teachers are not having visibility into how their students are studying and what they’re struggling with. We’re solving all those problems at once with something that’s very simple, something that’s growing fast and has an inherent organic growth dynamic, and that has a proven and increasingly proven revenue model. We’re really excited about the years ahead.
