Otter Growth
    Advisory
    All audits

    Onboarding Audit.

    Everything between signup and first real value, and what it costs you.

    A step-by-step teardown of your signup flow through the first session. We walk what you send us, count what each screen asks and what it gives back, and mark where first value actually lands relative to every account, payment, and permission ask in front of it.

    Activation is a lens inside this audit rather than a separate product. The same walkthrough that shows the steps shows whether the moment you call activation is reachable, so we read both in one pass.

    The one rule that shapes it: we only make claims about steps we were shown. Anything the walkthrough does not cover gets named as unobserved rather than inferred, which is why the audit tells you what to go capture as often as it tells you what to change.

    What you get back

    • The observed step table, with what each step asks and returns
    • The prioritized changes, ordered by what has to run first rather than by score
    • Your onboarding benchmarks, pulled from the cut matching the surface you actually showed us
    • An activation lens and the full ICE-ranked backlog in the appendix

    We run these in batches. Expect results within a few business days.

    What it looks like

    SampleDuolingo· excerpt from a real run

    This flow already does the hard part right: first value lands on screen 13, with no account, payment or permission ask in front of it on the observed path. The cost is the twelve screens before it, which collect six answers, read back one, and five of which ask nothing and return nothing structural. Half the goal, the next-day return, sits past where this capture stopped, so nothing on this list moves it until that moment is walked.

    The numbers that matter (excerpt)
    MetricThis flowBar
    Screens to first value12 observed10 to 25 (a depth range, not a performance bar, drawn predominantly from mobile flows)
    Activation rateNot supplied34% (cross-vertical average, substituted; no Education-on-web figure exists in our references)
    7-day activationNot supplied7% (top-quartile threshold, not a target)
    Options per question8, 7, 5 on screens 5, 6, 74 to 5 maximum (a principle threshold, not a measured benchmark)

    No step-level drop-off was supplied for this flow, so it is a pattern and heuristic read: changes are ranked by expected impact against best-practice libraries, profile-matched benchmarks and named psychology principles, not by measured leak. The audit makes no claim anywhere about where users actually leave this funnel.

    Request yours

    Everything below is what the audit actually needs to run. Nothing extra.

    Access model

    The biggest single swing. A gated free tier with an early paywall is still freemium.

    AI-powered or not

    AI apps run about half the cross-vertical trial-start rate, so they get their own column.

    Platform

    Answer with the surface your walkthrough actually shows. A browser signup flow is Web and gets web-funnel benchmarks. App-store onboarding rows do not apply to it and we never substitute them silently.

    We only use your email to send your results and to ask a follow-up question if the audit needs one. No list, no sharing.

    Otter Growth AdvisoryProduct growth for consumer apps and products