Aha Moments - Understand and amplify your product’s magic
Many start-ups struggle to understand why some users fall in love with their product, become loyal users and refer friends and family, while others use the product a few times and then churn. The key to unlocking this is Aha Moments.
Aha moments are the point at which a user understands the value of your product, and is therefore more likely to become a loyal customer. It’s like a magic moment when your customer can suddenly see the value your product provides. You want as many of your customers to get to this moment of magic as possible.
Each business will have their own individual Aha moment. For Facebook it was getting users to 7 friends in 10 days, this was a northstar metric which the entire company tracked and obsessed over. At Slack their focus was getting teams to send 2,000 messages to each other, at which point only 7% of the teams would churn.
In the early days at Skype we spent a lot of time analysing the new user journey, as we had high churn in the first week and month of usage. By analysing user data and reviewing cohorts we realised that the key indicators of stickiness vs churn was getting users to 5 contacts, getting them to make their first Skype call and testing that their headset and microphone actually worked (this was the dark ages when we couldn’t rely on all laptops having working microphones and speakers built in!).
Why do Aha Moments matter and how can you use them?
By understanding your product’s Aha moments you can optimise your product, marketing and onboarding experience to ensure that more people become loyal and sticky, thus reducing churn and improving growth.
Identifying your Aha Moments
To understand your Aha moments we need to identify which actions separate retained customers from churned ones.
Understand what actions users who become sticky and loyal (and drive revenues) take which could lead to their increased retention, and understand how this differs from users who churn.
Start by creating cohorts of your most loyal customers, and a cohort of users who churned over a similar period of time to allow us to compare them*. Look at the most loyal users and their feature usage and behaviour, and compare this to the churned users to understand how they differ. By comparing the two cohorts based on their behaviours we can see where the highest and lowest correlations are and understand which of the behaviours are most strongly correlated to being loyal and sticky:
Behaviour exhibited by most retained users AND by most churned users = no correlation
Behaviour exhibited by few retained users AND by few churned users = no correlation
Behaviour exhibited by most retained users AND by few churned users = correlation.
Putting your Aha Moments into action
Now that you understand what makes users more likely to be sticky, you’ll want to do everything you can to get more users to the Aha moments, faster.
Map out the current user journey and look at how you can reduce friction, and also brainstorm ways in which you can completely reimagine the user journey, communications, product flow to help as many users to get to the moment of magic as possible. Consider ways in which you can AB test changes and get improvements in motion as quickly as possible. You might want to consider your in-product journey, timed and triggered onboarding emails and communications, incentives to drive users to take certain actions (for example a discount to drive a 2nd purchase for an eCommerce store).
For Skype this meant reviewing the product onboarding journey to handhold users by creating a Getting Started Wizard’ which walked users through a 3 step process after sign up:
Importing contacts from their email client (this sounds so simple nowadays but back then we had to create this from scratch and not just integrate it off the shelf)
Created the Skype test call to understand if the user’s computer had a working microphone and speaker (and directing them to our store if not)
Encouraging them to make their first call to either another Skype user, or a regular phone (this had the knock on impact of improving conversion to paid also)
We also looked at how we were getting in our own way, and reviewed all of our email and in-app messaging to stop talking to users about anything which wasn’t essential to getting them to the Aha Moment.
Get the whole team on board
In order to make Aha Moments truly powerful you need to make sure you can describe them simply and in a measurable way. Your Aha Moments should be widely understood by your whole team, from marketing to product to customer success, so that everyone can focus on how they can reduce friction to help get more customers to the magic, making them successful and sticky. Plus make it visible and measurable as a northstar metric so that it stays front of mind for everyone, and that you can see improvements (or deteriorations) in the metrics, allowing the whole team to see the impact of their work.
