Latest / Community Marketing with Fexingo: Discord, Slack Groups, and Brand Communities / How a Community Vetted Its Own Onboarding Flow
Transcript
- Lucas: So Luna, earlier this month I watched a community with forty thousand members completely redesign its onboarding flow in ten days. And they didn't run a single survey. Luna: No survey? How did they decide what to change? Lucas: They opened the process itself to the community. The team posted a simple prompt: 'We're rebuilding how we welcome new members. Here's the current sequence. What's broken?' And within three days they had hundreds of replies. Luna: That's brave. Most teams would be terrified of that kind of open feedback. Lucas: Exactly. And that's the angle I want to drill into today: not just asking your community for opinions, but letting them co-own the actual mechanics of your onboarding. This is a real case from a software company I've been following, and the numbers are pretty striking. Luna: I'm in. What was the first thing they found? Lucas: The first thing was that new members were dropping off within two weeks. They had a forty percent activation rate at the end of week one, and it fell to twenty-two percent by week two. So they were losing almost half of the people who'd just joined. Luna: That's a lot of wasted effort. So what did the community say was wrong? Lucas: The biggest complaint was that the automated welcome message felt like a robot. It was a long list of rules and links, and people said it felt like homework. They wanted a human touch, something that felt like a handshake, not a Terms of Service agreement. Luna: So the fix was to make it more personal? Lucas: Partly. But the community didn't just say 'make it warmer.' They suggested a specific structure: a short intro from a real moderator, a single question asking new members to share something about themselves, and then a one-on-one welcome from a volunteer within twenty-four hours. Luna: A volunteer welcome that quickly? That sounds like a big operational lift. Lucas: Right, and that's where the community surprised them. When the team said 'we can't scale that,' the community itself volunteered. They had a hundred and twenty people sign up to be welcome buddies in the first week. They didn't have to recruit anyone. Luna: That's incredible. So the community basically built the solution. Lucas: Exactly. And they did it in a very structured way. They broke the onboarding into seven steps, from the first message to the first week's check-in. Each step was voted on in a thread, with options for how it should feel and what it should include. Luna: So they didn't just complain, they designed. What were the seven steps? Lucas: First, a personalized welcome from a moderator, not a bot. Second, a prompt to introduce yourself in a specific channel. Third, a curated list of three channels to follow, based on interests. Fourth, a direct message from a welcome buddy. Fifth, a scheduled voice chat for new members. Sixth, a checkpoint after three days to ask if anything's confusing. And seventh, a monthly community-wide call for all new members. Luna: That's a lot of touchpoints. Did they actually implement all of it? Lucas: They did, but with one big change. The voice chat was a disaster at first because nobody showed up. So the community suggested pairing it with a game night, and that made the attendance jump from four people to forty. Luna: So they iterated based on real feedback. That's the key. Lucas: Exactly. And the results came fast. After two months, the week-two activation rate went from twenty-two percent to forty percent. That's an eighteen percentage point improvement. And they saw a noticeable drop in early churn, which they've now maintained for four months straight. Luna: Eighteen points is huge. What was the most unexpected thing the community asked for? Lucas: That's the best part. The community actually rejected the idea of a fully automated onboarding. They wanted it to be slower, more human. They said a bot that sends a welcome message after a few minutes feels like spam, but a human who messages within a few hours feels like a friend. Luna: So they were willing to trade speed for connection. Lucas: Exactly. And that runs against a lot of conventional wisdom. Most teams think you need to automate everything for scale, but here the community said 'we'd rather wait and have a person.' Luna: That's a lesson I'd love to see more brands learn. Lucas: And they had to set some boundaries too. Not every suggestion was adopted. For example, some members wanted a personal video message from the CEO for every new member. The team said that wasn't scalable, and the community actually agreed quickly. They just wanted to know it was considered. Luna: It's about transparency. If you explain why, the community is usually reasonable. Lucas: Exactly. And this whole episode is a reminder that when you give your community real ownership over the experience, they'll surprise you with how thoughtful they can be. Luna: It's almost like they know what they want better than we do. Lucas: They do, because they live it every day. And that's the core of community-driven design: trust the people who are actually in the room. Luna: If these marketing conversations have sparked something you've actually used in your own work, the way we keep this show ad-free is through listener support. You can buy us a coffee at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. Lucas: Yeah, and it genuinely makes a difference. It lets us keep digging into stories like this one. Luna: So back to that activation rate. How did they measure it so precisely? Lucas: They defined activation as a member posting at least once in the first week and again in the second week. It's a simple metric, but it captures the behavior that matters for retention. And they tracked it weekly on a public dashboard that the community could see. Luna: A public dashboard. That's another smart move. It keeps the community accountable to the change. Lucas: Exactly. And they attributed the improvement directly to the onboarding changes, because nothing else changed in that period. Luna: So if a team wants to replicate this, what's the first step? Lucas: Start with a single question: 'What's the one thing that makes you want to stay in a community?' Post it in a public channel and let people answer. You'll get a hundred perspectives in a day. Luna: And then what? How do you turn that into a design? Lucas: Then you structure it. Break the current onboarding into steps and ask for feedback on each one specifically. Don't ask for vague opinions, ask for concrete suggestions. That's what made this work so well. Luna: It's a great reminder that your community is your best product team. Lucas: And the best part is, this doesn't require a huge budget or fancy tools. Just a willingness to listen and a little structure to make the feedback useful.