There are some stories I keep coming back to, because they surprise people every single time.
They don’t start with a viral campaign or a million-dollar experiment.
They start with something quieter — a spreadsheet, a late-night analysis, and one stubborn data point that rewired the way I thought about growth forever.
This story begins (improbably enough) with onboarding.
The spreadsheet that changed everything
Back in 2018, I was sitting at my desk, convinced I already understood how users behave, until the numbers quietly dismantled everything I thought I knew.
I was mapping conversion windows for an app, tracking the exact moment people decided to pay.
It was slow, manual work: scribbling timestamps on paper, transferring data cell by cell, building the story line by line. The kind of task that feels like punishment when you start, but is so satisfying when you finish because you’ve built something solid with your own hands.
I expected the numbers to confirm a story I’d told myself for years: users arrive, explore, find their aha! moment, and only then decide to subscribe.
The truth? They didn’t.
Over 80% of all subscriptions happened within two minutes of download. Not day two. Not three hours in. Two minutes.
That’s before they’d even experienced the product. Before any of the features we obsessed over had the chance to matter.
They downloaded, flowed through onboarding, hit the paywall, and made a decision. No feature use. No deep exploration. Just a feeling, a pitch, and a choice.
And it turns out, this wasn’t an anomaly.
Fast-forward to 2025: RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps report shows the same pattern at scale: across all categories, 82% of subscription app trial starts still happen on day zero.
In other words, for most subscription products, your window to convert someone has never been smaller.
The illusion of the aha! moment in app marketing
Realising that those first two minutes decide the fate of almost every subscription app, I couldn’t stop thinking about what that really meant.
If people were committing before they’d even experienced the product, what did that say about everything we’d built to be discovered later?
The gradual build-up. The elegant flow toward the aha! moment. The free-will discovery we imagined users would stumble into somewhere in the middle of the journey.
What if that moment wasn’t waiting in the middle at all, but right there at the start?
Masterminds of audience engagement love the grand story arc, what many refer to as the Hero’s Journey: curiosity, exploration, enlightenment, decision. App marketers often borrow this structure for user funnels — the gradual build-up, the carefully sequenced onboarding, the climactic aha! moment that supposedly arrives once the user has explored enough.
But unfortunately, human behavior doesn’t always follow that script.
In reality, it’s shorter, sharper, and far more primal. People don’t wait to fall in love with your app; they make up their minds almost instantly.
We often treat onboarding as if it were the trailer before the movie. But for most users, onboarding is the movie. The opening scene IS the decision.
If you haven’t earned their hearts within the first few screens, you’ve already lost them.
There’s also what psychologists call the perception–experience lag: users don’t judge what the product is; they judge what it feels like it will be. That lag lasts only a few seconds, but in that brief window, your brand equity is either born or it dies.
A beautifully coded feature that solves a real pain point means nothing if the promise of that value doesn’t land first.
Humans are story-driven, not spec-driven.
They buy the narrative of progress long before they ever touch the proof. Once you truly understand what happens in those first two minutes, you stop treating onboarding as maintenance and start treating it as one of your most powerful growth levers.
Why funnel work beats retention work
Shifting from seeing onboarding as a supporting act to treating it as the stage itself changes everything. It reframes how you think about growth entirely; and where leverage truly lives.
In every growth meeting I’ve ever sat through, someone eventually says:
“If we can just improve 30-day retention by 5%…”
Yes, retention compounds, and that matters. But as we’ve already seen, about 80% of conversions still happen in the first session, regardless of your overall rate. The concentration doesn’t move; only the size of the pool does. That means the better your funnel performs, the more that 80% pays off.
A five-point improvement in onboarding can therefore create a far greater impact than the same lift in retention, because funnel gains apply to every new user you attract, while retention gains only benefit the ones you’ve already won.
This is the math most teams overlook.
They chase loyalty before they’ve earned belief. They optimise for longevity before they’ve secured commitment.
When you shift focus to the first touchpoint, the moment where intent crystallises or evaporates, you’re no longer just fixing drop-off. You’re compounding every dollar of acquisition that follows.
So when teams ask, “Where can we do the most impactful work?”, the answer is almost always the same: look at the very first touchpoint.
Example: Flo’s use of commitment psychology
If the first touchpoint is where growth truly lives, few companies embody that truth better than Flo, the period-tracking app. Without overstating it, it’s safe to say Flo turned its first two minutes of use into one of the most profitable pieces of real estate in the subscription economy. Here’s how…
Flo launched in 2015 as a simple period-tracking app and has since evolved into a full-scale health platform. Today, it reaches over 420 million users worldwide, and what’s most impressive isn’t the scale but how that scale was built.
When I interviewed Dmitry Gurski, co-founder of Flo, at an Aperture Sessions event in London, I asked him about experimentation at Flo. He explained that Flo doesn’t leave first impressions to chance. At the time, they were running more than 15,000 tests a year, not focused on adding shiny new features but on refining how people feel in those first two minutes.
Dmitry told me that when Flo first launched, monetisation wasn’t a focus. For years, they grew without it through millions of installs and steady chart positions driven almost entirely by word of mouth and the gravitational pull of late-2010s App Store feature spots (remember those days?).
By the time they decided to switch on monetisation, their data team modelled what ‘good’ might look like for a subscription app. The target was ambitious yet achievable.
And then they blew past it by multiples.
Flo now monetises around 25% of its US audience. Read that again: roughly one-in-four American users chooses to pay. That’s wild.
One of the subtle levers that helped get them there, which sits quietly inside the onboarding flow, was the commitment screen.
I’ve loved this tactic for years, and Flo’s execution is almost textbook. Before users see the paywall, they’re asked to affirm intent: a soft, psychologically-charged moment that converts self-reflection into micro-commitment.
They’re not alone. Headway uses it. Duolingo uses it. Many others follow the pattern.
The interface differs: Hold down your thumb. I’m committing. Sign your name. Answer a pledge question.
The design changes, but the psychology doesn’t.
Even something as trivial as tapping a button can trigger that deep, almost irrational human need to stay consistent with what we’ve already declared.
As Robert Cialdini explains in his classic book Influence, the psychology of commitment is one of the most reliable forces in human behavior: once people take even a small stand, they feel compelled to stay consistent with it.
Before you ever see Flo’s paywall, you’ve already said to yourself: I’m ready. The decision shifts from ‘should I buy this?’ to ‘should I stop what I’ve already committed to?’
I’ve seen the same pattern play out firsthand in smaller products too.
A couple of years ago, I worked with a sustainability app that struggled with the same problem Flo solved on a much larger stage: high installs, low follow-through.
Users loved the idea but weren’t sticking around long enough to turn good intentions into habits.
So we tried something simple. We added a single commitment request screen during onboarding that asked users to confirm: “I’m committing to reducing my carbon footprint this month.”
One tap. No feature redesign. No new UX patterns. Just a moment of micro-ownership.
The result? Day-30 retention doubled. Not because of design, because of psychology.
Flo has a big team running 15,000 tests a year. This little sustainability app had a humble-sized team of five people.
Different scale, same instinct: action creates identity.
4 psychological levers behind the commitment tactics
What makes Flo’s onboarding powerful is the psychology behind it. The tap, the pledge, the quiet ‘I’m ready’ moment that reaches deeper than the interface. They capture the instant when interest turns into intent.
Across the best onboarding flows, Flo’s thumbprint pledge, Headway’s commitment pact, Duolingo’s playful badge, the same idea appears. Each uses subtle cues that guide people from curiosity to commitment.
1. Self-identification: this is who I am.
People don’t just use products; they use them to express something about themselves. Every small action, from pressing ‘yes’ to choosing a path or setting a goal, comes from a sense of self-identifying, and a quiet declaration of belonging.
2. Goal priming: this is what I want.
Good onboarding creates direction. It helps users look ahead and imagine who they’ll become by engaging, making progress feel personal rather than transactional.
3. Effort justification: I’ve already started, I can’t stop now.
Each tap or choice builds invisible momentum. The more people invest, the more they value the journey itself. Curiosity turns into ownership.
4. Consistency bias: I want to follow through.
As Robert Cialdini explains in Influence, once people take a stand, they feel an inner pull to stay true to it. A single decision can quietly evolve into a pattern of loyalty.
Beneath all of this lies a deeper mechanism called the self-perception theory. Psychologist Daryl Bem proposed that people infer who they are by observing what they do. Behaviour comes first, then identity follows.
When someone taps ‘I’m committed’, they’re not just acknowledging intent but rewriting their self-story: I’m the kind of person who follows through.
That’s why the sustainability app’s simple button worked and why Flo’s ‘I’m ready’ screen converts at scale. Both turn small actions into identity shifts. No one thinks, ‘I’m forming a contract with myself’, but that’s exactly what happens. It’s the same instinct that drives New Year’s resolutions, gym sign-ups, or finishing a half-read book: once we start, we want to follow through.
The best onboarding teams understand this and design moments that make users choose commitment, without feeling pushed into it.
When the funnel leak is at the start
For every app that masters the first two minutes, countless others never get around to fixing them. Not because they don’t see the leak, but because they underestimate where, and what, is dripping away.
I’ve seen this pattern again and again… brilliant products, talented teams, the right mission, all pointing in the right direction. And yet the growth never comes.
Earlier this year, we worked with one of those teams. We loved their product. We believed in their vision. We did what any disciplined growth partner would do: tightened targeting, ran creative tests, and found new efficiencies. We cut CPIs by over 80%. It’s the kind of result that usually unlocks the next phase of scale.
But it didn’t.
Because the app simply wouldn’t convert.
A year earlier, we’d already run an audit of their onboarding flow. We’d identified friction, mapped better sequencing, and outlined the fixes. The playbook was sitting there, ready. But new features, deadlines, competing priorities took over, and the everyday gravity that pulls teams toward what’s visible instead of what’s vital took hold.
In the end, all that cheaper traffic just flowed in instead — and flowed straight back out.
Better targeting couldn’t fix it. Better creatives couldn’t fix it. Better acquisition efficiency couldn’t fix it.
When the pipe leaks at the source, no amount of volume or pressure will ever fill the system. It will only waste more water. This is why app teams must fix their funnel and start from the first user moment then work forward.
Why teams still ignore the obvious
Stories like that stay with you. Once you’ve seen a great product leak at the start, you start spotting the same pattern everywhere.
From the outside, it’s baffling. You can literally see the cliff on the chart — the sharp drop-off right after signup. You can run the math and know exactly what a five-point lift in activation would mean for revenue, retention, even runway.
And still, most teams don’t move.
It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that the system rewards the wrong kind of motion.
Firstly, retention has better PR. It sounds noble; loyalty, community, long-term love. It photographs well in strategy decks.
Activation, on the other hand, doesn’t have the same reputation. The industry has turned it into a greedy checklist of forms, buttons, and paywalls. It’s seen as a process to complete rather than a moment to inspire.
So the story that sounds inspiring gets funded, while the one that could actually change an app’s fate gets ignored.
Then comes the aha! myth. I’m not saying this doesn’t exist at all in some form, but the way we think about aha! moments isn’t accurate. It’s an illusion: the idea that users will fall in love once they’ve seen enough. This magic moment doesn’t happen, because most never make it that far.
As Simon Sinek reminds us: people don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. That’s the core truth behind activation. You don’t sell the proof; you sell the promise. You don’t sell products; you sell stories. And if the story fails to land early, the proof never gets its chance.
And finally, bias builds that sends app teams the wrong signals.
Shipping something new feels like momentum. It wins applause. Iterating on something old feels like housekeeping. It doesn’t make headlines, even when it moves the needle more than a new feature ever will.
But every single customer you’ve ever won (and every one you’ve lost) has passed through that same onboarding flow.
So why wouldn’t you perfect the one experience everyone shares?
The revenue math most teams never do
Let’s make it tangible.
Say you bring in 100,000 installs each month. Around 10% of them start a trial. Of those, about 25% convert to paying users. That gives you roughly 2,500 paying users.
Now increase trial starts by just five points, from 10 to 15%. That small list adds 5,000 more trials. At the same 25% conversion rate, that’s 1,250 additional paying users — without increasing ad spend or changing the app itself.
This is the math most teams never do: the quiet compounding effect of fixing the front door instead of buying more visitors to walk through it.
On paper, everyone agrees this early conversion matters, but in practice, no one truly owns it. Product teams see it as a marketing problem. Marketing teams assume it’s a product issue. UX calls it ‘flow’ and moves on to the next sprint.
And while the org chart debates semantics, revenue quietly leaks away through the very first experience every customer has.
What great onboarding actually does
Once you’ve seen how much growth quietly leaks through the first two minutes, one question inevitably follows: what does great onboarding do that the rest doesn’t?
For a talk I gave last year, I asked ChatGPT a simple question: What makes a great first date?
It answered:
- Clear communication: be open about intentions
- Learn about each other: hare, ask, listen
- Tailor the experience: make it feel personal
- Create reliability: be honest and consistent
- Keep it interesting: maintain spark and momentum
It was, surprisingly, a perfect description of great onboarding.
The best onboarding flows don’t just explain features. Instead, they sell the future while building trust in the present. They distil the entire value proposition into a few moments that feel natural and earned.
Like a great first date, you’re not listing achievements but sharing a laugh, a small truth, a hint of what’s ahead. When it works, it feels effortless: the conversation flows, trust builds, and commitment starts to feel inevitable.
Did you catch it? There it is again — the same pattern of voluntary commitment I mentioned earlier, playing out once more.
The same quiet force behind Flo’s ‘I’m ready’ screen also drives QUITTR, a habit-breaking app created by Alex Slater, who scaled it to over $3m ARR within its first year.
That’s the genius of great onboarding. It doesn’t push people to commit, but makes them want to commit. Instead of overwhelming users with information, it sets the emotional tone, building a sense of safety and excitement that pulls them in naturally.
Apps like Flo, Duolingo, Headway, and Calm all understand this rhythm:
- Flo makes you feel understood
- Duolingo makes you laugh
- Headway makes you feel productive
- Calm makes you exhale
Each of them builds what’s called anticipatory trust — the feeling that this product really understands you. And that feeling, more than any feature or design trick, is what makes people pay and stay.
When I spoke with Alex Slater about QUITTR’s growth, he explained the same principle from another angle:
“The longer users spend during onboarding,” he said, “the higher the likelihood they are to convert. People want something back for the time they invest. It’s like the gamblers’ philosophy. They want a return for the time they spent losing.”
That insight shaped some of QUITTR’s best-performing flows. Rather than focusing on features, they invited users to see onboarding as an investment in themselves. One screen even asked people to sign their name as a personal promise — a simple gesture that taps into our instinct to stay true to what we’ve already chosen.
Every great product I’ve studied strikes the same balance: expectation, emotion, trust, a bit of friction, and momentum. When one is missing, the experience breaks. When they align, the first two minutes build belief.
Great teams treat onboarding as an ongoing habit rather than a finished project. They keep it on the roadmap, continuously testing sharper messages, subtle variations, and stronger emotional cues.
They know every user passes through this flow, making it the most powerful place to improve. When onboarding becomes a living system instead of a one-time launch, conversion grows and learning compounds.
That’s what separates an app that’s merely tested from one that’s truly trusted. Great onboarding defines the relationship with the user and keeps it growing.
What great onboarding doesn’t do: 4 mistakes to watch for
When onboarding falls flat, it’s rarely from neglect. More often, teams try too hard in the wrong places and lose commitment little by little.
- Burying the paywall: Hiding your core value behind too many steps drains energy. If users have to search for what matters, momentum is already gone
- Information overload: Too often, teams rush to show features when users are really searching for outcomes. They fall in love with what it does for them, not with what a product does
- Overuse of brand language: Teams sometimes rely too heavily on branded terms or feature names that mean little to new users. What feels distinctive internally can rather sound confusing or hollow to someone encountering the app for the first time.
- Skipping the emotion: Onboarding is a pitch. It should stir a sense of urgency, aspiration, or even the faint fear of missing out. Without that spark, it’s just another set of screens to swipe through.
Earlier this year, Aperture partnered with Mob, the UK App Store’s leading Food & Drink app, on a series of creatives, ads, and onboarding projects that all shared the same goal: making every interaction feel personal and human.
Rather than overwhelming new users with features, the onboarding was redesigned to show why Mob matters before showing what it does. A series of questions was introduced, turning onboarding into a dialogue to get to know the users. This meant that by the time users reached the paywall, they already felt a connection.
The results spoke for themselves: Mob became the #1 Food & Drink app in the UK, reached #3 overall in Australia, and saw trial opt-ins surge.
Want to start fixing your funnel? Start here
If you only do three things, start here:
- Audit your onboarding flow: Look at it with fresh eyes. Better yet, watch new users go through it in real time. Notice where they hesitate, where they drop off, and where they light up. The answers are usually right in front of you.
- Test one change a month: It doesn’t have to be huge. Reorder the steps. Rewrite the headline on the paywall. Try adding a commitment device. One controlled improvement every month is enough to build steady momentum.
- Measure aggressively: Track install-to-trial and trial-to-paid rates separately, and break them down by platform. Make your success metric the number of new paying users, not just percentage lifts that look good in slides but hide real performance.
Attention is expensive. Privacy shifts, higher CPIs, ad fatigue, and shorter patience make the first two minutes the most valuable space you own. You won’t outspend a leaky entry point or out-retain a weak first impression; your real advantage is how well you learn from that opening moment.
Most teams overlook where that learning lives: the small window between install and intent.
When I think back to those 2018 spreadsheets, I remember what they taught me — a great onboarding isn’t a trick or a tactic; it’s seeing what actually moves people forward.
We can ship all the features we want, but if most users never reach them, those features never do their job. The fastest progress comes from making the first two minutes impossible to abandon.
Fix the front door, and everything else you build finally starts to matter.