How Userflow gave 20 hrs/week back to the Topic team

From time-consuming demos to a free trial

Ryo Chiba, Co-founder of Topic, and the team had early traction with their SEO Content Optimization solution, but due to only allowing for demo requests, they were spending a significant amount of time on sales and onboarding calls. They were also seeing a significant amount of customers, who were buying the lowest tier of their offering as a trial, to try it out before committing to more, resulting in lower ASP and higher risk of churn.

To solve both of these problems they decided to move to a self-service free trial. But they knew that their product had complex scenarios that required guidance and onboarding to bring first-time users to their “Aha” moments and trial conversion. Some years back in another company, Ryo had tried an in-app guidance tool, but given that was years ago he wanted to find a new modern solution, and that is how he discovered Userflow.

“Our product is rather complex due to the jobs our users are using it for, thus guiding users to their "aha" moment is essential to us.”

- Ryo Chiba, Topic

The usability and reliability of Userflow was key

Ryo signed up for a 14-day free trial with Userflow and he was able to quickly build out user onboarding flows for even complex scenarios. He was impressed by the UX, reliability and advanced capabilities of the Userflow builder. They quickly built out a full self-service onboarding flow for their free trial and launched it into production.

“Userflow was easy to use, and I could build flows for advanced scenarios in our application, without running into issues.”

- Ryo Chiba, Topic

Saved 20 hrs/week and reduced churn

The onboarding flow of Userflow showed immediate results. Now instead of spending time on trial handholding and onboarding Ryo and the team could focus on other high-value aspects of their business. Overall they were saving 4 hrs/day (20 hrs/week) without diminishing service quality.

"The free trial combined with Userflow has allowed us to free up to 20 hrs/week to focus on marketing, building product, and connecting with existing customers instead. This is key for a young business like ours and our customers love the self-service experience."

- Ryo Chiba, Topic

It also enabled them to run a smooth free trial experience, avoiding the problem of users buying a lower-tier plan as a trial and potentially churning.

“Since we launched this new system in March we have had almost zero subscription churn, whereas before we had about 30-50% of our lowest tier users churn after a few months because they were effectively using it as a trial, which messed up our numbers.”

- Ryo Chiba, Topic

Will continue to expand the use of Userflow

As Topic will build out more features they will use Userflow as a key mechanism to continue to ensure onboarding and feature adoption and Ryo is confident that Userflow has the advanced capabilities to support their growth.

“As we add more functionality, it will be harder to onboard customers, but Userflow will make this easier”