Help users get the ground running on day one

Before we start, check out a snippet of growth tides that B2B companies in the tech space are making —

• Miro users collaborate more than ever. For example, we saw a 166% increase in returned weekly operational teams between the beginning of March and mid-June and a 236% growth of weekly active users.
• Launched in 2016, Loom is finally hitting its growth spurt. It’s up from 1.1 million users and 18,000 companies in February to 1.8 million people at 50,000 businesses sharing 15 million minutes of Loom videos per month.
• In 2020, Calendly doubled its subscription revenue to $70 million, according to the announcement. In addition, more than 10 million people use the platform each month to streamline the way they schedule meetings, including teams at companies such as Zoom and Twilio.

The growth stories of these fast-growing companies have between 42 million users and more. If you have ever used these products, you would have experienced something they all have in common.

These companies allow users to experience the product quickly and unblock them with timely documentation/tutorials. From day one, you can calculate this optimization in user experience in terms of “(immediate) value delivered to the user.” Unfortunately, when we talk about product metrics to capture, we rarely discuss this metric to optimize for launch or even after that.

Let me be honest, while companies like Miro, Calendly, and Loom are growing their user operations at a breakneck speed, most companies in the B2B space cannot deliver value to the user on day one. Most B2B companies count on contracts and agreements to lock the users in using the product for at least 1–3 years.

What is time to value?

Time to value: It is the time that the user takes to understand the tool, and realize the value they’re expecting from your product or service. The more quicker/immediate it is the better.

Based on the time to value that a user attains, it is a Yay! or a Nah!. The lower the friction of the tool, the faster a user achieves time to value.

Why optimize for this metric?

Simply because optimizing for this metric can help companies to grow faster. Only when an invited user or First-Time User Experience (FTUE) of a user is stellar will they achieve an immediate time to value. This great FTUE results in companies growing exponentially.

Unfortunately, very few companies have achieved such growth. Here are a few exciting examples —

Experiencing value within the first usage

The real magic for immediate time to value gets experienced when a user has to do very little to see value in using or adopting a product.

• Airbnb: On Airbnb, a user can search for a location to stay at without creating an account.
• SimilarWeb: Similarly, on SimilarWeb, a user can search for data about a website without creating an account. In both these instances, a user can experience the product first before deciding to go all in.
• Loom: With Loom, you can do the same. A user can send a video, watch a video comment or add emoji to get immediate value without signing up first.
• Miro: Even without signing up on Miro, a user can leave a comment and start collaborating with another user on a shared board.
• Calendly: A user can set up a calendar schedule and send other users a calendar link that allows them to set up a meeting, see available times and book time with you without the need to sign-up.

Companies can only increase product virality by expanding the product's stickiness by letting users experience the product immediately. It will motivate users to sign up for their account and send/share/refer the product to others to achieve exponential data peaks. Unfortunately, immediate time to value is an unfair advantage that some products have, creating a distribution loop like no other.

Product behind paywalls

Another metric that companies like MailChimp exploit very well is Time to Realized Value (TRV). Compared to MailChimp, other marketing cloud platforms can take months to set up and years for the purchasing company to see a return. Some platforms can also be quite costly, considering steep base platform costs, new user license costs, and recurring maintenance/patches and migration. In this case, MailChimp works on a freemium model, and once the user perceives the values of the product, it is a sure-shot purchase more often than not.

Again, in this case, not all companies are comfortable with the model that allows users to experience the product without shelling out any money. Enterprise companies most commonly like to protect their most valuable experiences under an expensive paywall. The paywall allows them to save the product's perceived value before someone can even give it a try. In most cases, the company loses on nailing the “aha!” moment because of a stupid paywall. Unfortunately, redesigning the landing page won’t allow them to convert more customers. The “aha!” moment will provide an immediate delight, leading to high conversion ratios.

Solving for light — Closure

Freemium products evolve into products that don’t require an account to achieve Time To Value (TTV). Some products undoubtedly are better positioned to take advantage of this hack, like collaboration products. Product teams should be less scared of seeing their install numbers dip in the short term and allow users to experience the product value with minimum investment (before signing up/before installing).

Although it’s never one size fits all kind of solution, but keeping time to value as a design principle is a great place to start. As a product metric, we can break it down further into three splits:

1. Light Time To Value: Non-logged-in experience. For mobile apps, it can be a light-app experience thru’ PlayStore (no installation required).
2. Basic Time To Value: Optimizing for the first time, a user can experience the product's actual value after logging in.
3. Long Time to Value: Optimizing for the user to get repeat value after continuous product use.