onboarding flow — Check Out My Work

Delivered product value in under 2 minutes to scale Spoki 2M ARR, designing a conversational onboarding experience that reduced TTV by 40x

Summary

I redesigned Spoki's onboarding experience to accelerate time-to-value. By identifying friction points, validating the right "aha moment," and introducing an interactive QR code flow, I increased conversion by 50% and reduced time-to-activation by 40x; fundamentally changing how users experienced product value from their very first interaction.

Focus: Activation, Retention and Conversion

Role & Scope

Title: Founding UX/Product Designer, Growth & Adoption

I established the design process from the ground up, leading end-to-end discovery, prototyping, validation, and measurement. I partnered closely with product, engineering, and sales teams to define solutions that balanced user needs with business outcomes.

Design challenge

Design a scalable onboarding experience for an "aha moment" faster — turning passive exploration into active product engagement within minutes. Help users experience product value immediately, before they churn. Navigatin uncertainty of betting on the wrong aha moment.

Outcomes

50% increase in conversion from aha moment to sign-up
40x faster time from aha moment to sign-up (97% reduction in average time)
6.83% increase in total conversion from aha moment → sign-up → purchase

Context

Spoki experienced explosive growth between 2021 and 2024, doubling revenue year-over-year and raising €5.5 million in 2025 from Blacksheep and CDP VC.

But by late 2024, acquisition and activation rates began declining significantly. This was a critical red flag: activation rates directly correlate with retention and long-term revenue. If users didn't activate, we risked losing future monetization opportunities.

The problem wasn't top-of-funnel. Marketing was crushing it, driving strong traffic and healthy sign-up volume. But users weren't converting. They'd land in the platform, click around briefly, then drop off without understanding what Spoki could do for them.

Key Responsibilities

Mapped end-to-end onboarding flow and identified friction points
Partnered with product, engineering, and sales to align on user needs and business goals
Facilitated cross-functional workshops to co-define solutions and validate concepts
Designed and tested QR code-based activation flow to accelerate time-to-aha moment
Led A/B testing and post-launch analytics to measure impact and inform iteration

Problem Details

Activation & Retention Dropping

Spoki's growth trajectory depended on converting new sign-ups into active, paying customers. But declining activation rates threatened future revenue and retention. For a high-growth startup post-funding, every lost user represented revenue we couldn't afford to waste. Fixing onboarding wasn't just a UX improvement — it was a business-critical lever for sustainable growth.

No Upfront Value

From an acquisition perspective, performance was strong. But users failed to activate because they couldn't feel Spoki's value quickly enough.

Why It Mattered

Spoki's core value was enabling businesses to automate WhatsApp conversations at scale. But if users didn't experience that automation live and in real-time, they'd never understand the product's potential.

By accelerating time-to-value and reducing friction, we could:

High drop-off rates post-sign-up despite strong top-of-funnel metrics
Lost revenue from leaked prospects every day the friction persisted
Risk of compounding retention issues as inactive users churned

Goals

Increase newly registered customers and set users up for long-term retention
Reduce time from sign-up to first value interaction
Unlock faster monetization as users moved from aha moment to purchase
De-risk growth strategy by ensuring acquisition efforts converted into paying customers

Core Onboarding Experience

Journey mapping revealed onboarding gaps, which I used to informed future backlog priorities and opportunities.

Marketing team asks for redundant informations
I focused on enables faster value during the realization phase
Dead end post-registration causes users to drop off the whole product

Previous Design

I started by walking through the end-to-end sign-up experience, evaluating each step for friction and motivation impact.

Using the Psych Score framework — a method for measuring users' emotional energy throughout a flow — I rated each interaction to see how it affected their willingness to continue.

Friction Points

Cluttered interfaces and unclear navigation forced users to think harder, leading to fatigue and frustration
Poor button placement, inaccessible elements, and unclear steps disrupted the journey — especially critical during onboarding
Missing keyboard navigation, low contrast, and poor affordances excluded users with disabilities or assistive technologies

The Discovery Process

Data

The sign-up flow itself performed reasonably well
Most drop-off occurred between the first and second steps
But users weren't reaching their "aha moment" after completing sign-up

Activation is linked to retention and monetization — the end business outcomes we cared about. If users didn't experience value post-sign-up, they'd churn before converting. The data confirmed our focus: optimize sign-up and accelerate the aha moment.

Attempted Surveys

I partnered with the sales team to send surveys to leads and deals, asking which benefits mattered most to them. Unfortunately, response rates were too low to provide meaningful data.

Cross-functional Collaboration

I used cross-functional team members as a resource. Since they interacted daily with customers, leads, and deals, I asked them to advocate for users and vote on which actions best represented the "aha moment."

Conversational Chat

The most-voted action was conversations — confirming that experiencing a live WhatsApp interaction was the right aha moment to optimize for.

Design & Validation

Design Sprints & Workshops

After discovery, I had clearer insights into user and business needs. I ran a workshop to ignite creativity and align the team around potential solutions.

Using early sketches, we explored ideas together, weighing pros and cons and discussing why certain steps made sense in the user journey.

Solutions Identified

Motivate users to send the first message to reach the aha moment faster
Introduce an interactive onboarding process before the sign-up page
Develop a JTBD (Jobs-to-be-Done) onboarding flow to help users recognize value sooner

Final Designs

How It Worked

Users reached the onboarding step and saw a unique QR code tied to their session
They scanned it with their phone, opening WhatsApp with a pre-populated message
Sending the message triggered our WhatsApp Business API and activated a pre-built automation
Users received an instant automated response — experiencing Spoki's core value live, within seconds

Why This Worked

Users experienced the product's value, not just read about it
The pattern was familiar (analogous to WhatsApp Web QR login)
It differentiated Spoki's onboarding from competitors' form-based flows
It created immediate motivation to continue exploring the platform

Outcome

We fundamentally changed how users valued the product from their very first interaction. This was a case where investing more upfront in a validated, high-impact concept paid off immediately — and set a foundation for sustainable growth.

50% increase in conversion from aha moment to sign-up
40x faster time from aha moment to sign-up (97% reduction in average time)
6.83% increase in total conversion from aha moment → sign-up → purchase

Reflection

Designing in a fast-paced startup requires balancing speed with rigor. Trust comes from shipping smart, not just fast. By combining lightweight validation, cross-functional collaboration, and disciplined post-launch tracking, we turned a higher-effort concept into a high-confidence bet that delivered measurable impact.

Potential Q&A

How Do You Balanced Discovery And Delivery?

I believe working in a continuous discovery setup really helps build better solutions for customers. It's kind of a weapon to de-risk building the wrong thing as a team — and it's a solid way to form assumptions and translate them into clearer requirements for a better product.

After we shipped the new onboarding flow at Spoki, I stayed involved to monitor what was actually happening in production. I watched session recordings, took notes, and looked for any tweaks or opportunities that could push the experience even further.

Sign-ups were definitely improving — we were getting more people through the initial flow. But users were still kind of lost once they landed in the main platform. We'd introduced them to their first "superpower" — experiencing conversations through the platform during onboarding — but we totally missed the chance to guide them toward the next meaningful action.

It was like we opened the door, showed them something cool, and then just left them standing there.

The Problem: This was a critical gap. We were missing that crucial next step in the overall journey, which meant we probably weren't actually moving the needle on our main goal: influencing conversion to paid users.

Bringing It to the Team: During one of our weekly sessions — where we usually share discovery findings and insights — I brought this up to the team. I suggested creating a simple welcome page that would show up right after sign-up to guide users toward a set of key actions to complete as a next step.

The Impact: This small change in the grand scheme of the overall onboarding journey had the potential to boost product conversion. The more benefits users experienced, the more likely they were to integrate the product into their daily life. And once the product became essential, the path to becoming a paid user was way clearer.

Outcome: We set that welcome page as one of our team priorities. After implementing it, I kept watching the outcome — and the majority of new users completed the tasks. This demonstrated there was real demand for better guidance on what to do next.

How do you handle disagreements with PM/ENG?

Disagreements often came from the team having different sources of information. That's why I believe having solid methodologies and clear ways of working really helps the team stay aligned and move faster.

When everyone shares the same data and context, alignment is much easier to maintain. Ideas and decisions are evaluated for usability alongside feasibility and viability — not just one or the other. When all three work together, everyone stays on the same page and decisions are higher in quality.

Context: We were working on the onboarding flow at Spoki, and there was a pretty clear problem around drop-off during sign-up. People were starting the process but not finishing it.

The Existing Solution: We already had a modal workflow in place — it was built and shipped. The team had invested time in it.

What I Discovered: When I started reviewing session recordings and behavioral data post-launch, I noticed a really clear pattern: users were actively trying to skip the modal or close it as fast as possible. They'd see it pop up and immediately look for the X button or click outside of it to dismiss it.

So even though the team had invested in building it and it looked fine in theory, in practice it was actually slowing people down and hurting conversion. Users were dismissing it without engaging or feeling annoyed that it was blocking their exploration of the product.

The Tension: I brought this to the PM and proposed something pretty disruptive: scrapping the modal entirely and building a full-page onboarding flow instead.

There was immediate pushback — understandably so. The team was like, "Wait, we just built this modal. Now you're saying we need to change the entire layout? That's going to cost us significant dev effort for what looks like a pretty small tweak that might not even be worth it."

How I Influenced the Decision: I walked the team through the data — the session recordings showing users closing the modal within seconds, the drop-off rates, the patterns of dismissal. I showed them that this wasn't a small problem — it was a fundamental issue with the approach.

Then I explained why a full-page flow could actually work better: it would reduce cognitive load by giving users a single, focused path forward instead of making them choose between exploring the app and completing setup.

I basically positioned it as: "We can keep iterating on something that's fundamentally not working, or we can invest properly in fixing it the right way, even if that means rebuilding."

The Outcome: We aligned on testing it as an A/B test first — that helped de-risk the decision. We'd run the full-page flow against the existing modal and let the data decide.

We shipped it, and the results were really clear. The full-page flow significantly improved both completion rates and activation. Users who went through it were way more likely to finish onboarding and actually start using the product.

Looking back, it validated the decision. Yeah, we had to rebuild something we'd already invested in, but keeping a solution that wasn't working just because we'd built it would've been way more costly in the long run.

I'm excited to work together!
Say hi to drsimone.pulvirenti@gmail.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonepulvirenti/