Perfecting Onboarding & Activation with Aaron Krall @ SaaS Growth Hacks - Escape Velocity Show #42

About this video

Dan Martell interviews Aaron Krall, founder of the SaaS Growth Hacks Facebook group and a trial-conversion and onboarding specialist. Krall recounts graduating from BYU in advertising, a roughly six-month L’Oreal internship in New York that ended badly after a presentation, a period on food stamps, agency and video work in Spokane, and burnout from serving everyone. On a mentor’s suggestion he entered SaaS without knowing the problem he would solve, started the Facebook group, and asked every joiner their number-one problem; the answers pointed him to onboarding and free-trial conversion, where his copywriting and video background helped. He says the group reached about 16,000 members, adding roughly 150-200 a week while turning many applicants away to preserve quality, and that he originally offered clients a pay-for-results approach with a refund if he could not solve the problem. His method is synthesis: pulling raw material from books, courses, mentors and other industries — including a large book of direct-mail copy — and turning it into tested frameworks for SaaS. The onboarding discussion praises Superhuman’s application, rejection of poor-fit users, forced demo and pain-led drip emails teaching one feature at a time, and Noom’s gamified, one-action-at-a-time process that repeatedly asks users why they want to lose weight. Krall closes on detaching identity and self-worth from results.

Key takeaways

• Enter a niche before you know the exact problem, then find the problem by asking every new community member their number-one problem.
• Focus and start narrow to get traction; you can expand later, rather than trying to solve everyone’s problems.
• Build frameworks by importing proven ideas from other industries and testing them in your own market.
• Good onboarding pre-qualifies for fit, forces a guided first experience, and teaches features through pain-led, triggered or drip emails one at a time.
• Detach your identity from results: a failed experiment is information to change, not a verdict on your worth.

Episode details: published December 3, 2020 · 53:45 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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