onboarding-and-upgrades
Onboarding and upgrades
Signups mean nothing until they reach value and stay: "Judge activation by lead→customer conversion + 90-day retention, not lead volume." The path from signup to the activation event should be the shortest one that makes the user confident ("the least number of steps to experience enough value to make a confident decision"), and the ask to pay comes after that moment, not before, with an easy way to say no. This skill comes from [coreyhaines31/marketingskills, onboarding] and [coreyhaines31/marketingskills, paywalls] (MIT, Copyright (c) 2025 Corey Haines; the aha-moment method cites Amplitude, the card data ChartMogul, model-market fit Brian Balfour), checked against Apple's App Review Guidelines and Google Play's Subscriptions and Payments policies. Both sources write for web products; native app onboarding and paywalls are in app-growth ONBOARDING.md, app-growth PAYWALLS.md and revenuecat PAYWALLS.md; the signup form before onboarding and the public pricing page are in cro SKILL.md and pricing-strategy SKILL.md; early churn after activation is churn-prevention SKILL.md.
Read the product context file first, .agents/product-context.md (anti-slop-copy CONTEXT.md); the sources call it .agents/product-marketing.md. Then ask: B2B or B2C and the core value; the aha moment and the action that shows a user "gets it"; what happens after signup and where users drop off; for upgrades, the model (freemium, trial, tier upgrade, usage limit), what's behind the paywall, and whether it's a mobile app, a web app, or both.
Apply only the routes and checks for the selected job. Read a linked skill's named file from its installed folder when available, or from the linked source. Report an unavailable required reference instead of inventing it. [skill-authoring, DISTRIBUTION.md#composing-skills]
| The job | Read |
|---|---|
| Principles, psychology, the 10-component toolkit, defining activation, the aha-moment method, minimum path to value, the first 30 seconds, checklists, empty states, tours, onboarding email, stalled users, metrics, patterns by product type, audit output | ACTIVATION.md |
| Freemium, free trial, paid trial, money-back and consultation, the card decision on visitor-to-paid, model-market fit, hook don't satisfy | ACTIVATION-MODELS.md |
| Upgrade prompts: principles, triggers, the seven screen parts, templates, timing and frequency, after the upgrade, dark patterns, the App Store and Play rules, what to measure | UPGRADE-PROMPTS.md |
| The test catalogue for onboarding and upgrade prompts, with store-invalid arms marked | EXPERIMENTS.md |
| Recovery audience worksheet: event evidence, billing and cross-platform identity, segment precedence, exclusions, channel eligibility and measurement handoff | RECOVERY-COHORTS.md |