In terms of survey platform, I've used like a bunch of different tools: Google Forms, Typeform, SurveyMonkey, etc..

Sometimes the company I'm working with has a preference and they just want to use whatever tool they have. For this survey, I just used my own Typeform account.

Also, the incentive is key and so I typically recommend choosing it depending on how many people we are sending the survey to. In this case, I think we gave out 5 $500 Amazon gift cards.

It definitely improves the response rate a lot by having an incentive. And you don't wanna be too cheap. For example, giving out more gift cards makes a big difference versus just one. Because, even though the probability may be the same depending on how many people you're sending it to, people just feel like there's a better chance of winning if there's five available instead of one.

And for some B2B products I've worked on, we knew it was going to be a smaller sample size, and they also wanted to make sure people were really happy. So we sent out like $20 per response or something like that. And yeah, that works great too. It can just be a little bit more expensive if you're sending it out to a lot of people. But, the response rate was a lot higher when we gave each person a gift card.

In this kind of survey, I try to get people to respond who've recently gone through the upgrade process, like in the last few months. So with Clubhouse in particular, we sent out a couple batches of the survey. We started with people that had upgraded very recently and we just didn't have enough responses coming through, so we expanded it to go back a little bit further.

Sometimes I will try and talk to people who didn't upgrade to learn about why they didn't upgrade. Although I find I usually get better quality data from the people that actually upgraded because the people that didn't upgrade, there's a couple problems.

One, they may not be the best fit in terms for the product in the first place. So if I had just tried to target people who had who did signed up but didn't upgrade, you'd probably get a lot more noise. And then, two, the other thing is, they're just less motivated to give you feedback. So the paying customers want to see the product improve, they want to see you become successful, so they're more motivated to give you better quality feedback.

Although, sometimes I do run surveys to inactive leads that signed up but didn't convert. And the difference with that is I try and make it super easy for them to just send a quick response about why they didn't convert. So just like an email that says, "Hey, I saw you signed up recently and never converted. Can you tell us why?" And then people might just send a quick one sentence reply.


In this survey, I'm going for more qualitative data, and I really like that approach. That also means I'm not trying to get to statistical significance on any of the questions. And I'm asking open-ended questions, so I'm getting very rich feedback from each of these respondents. So, because of all that, it's not a huge deal if I end up having a smaller sample size, even though more data is always better.

If you're going for statistical significance with quantitative responses, you need many more people to answer your survey. But when I'm working with startups, they might not be getting a ton of upgrades, so that audience is limited to begin with. Again, that's why I like the qualitative approach here.

Typically with this kind of survey, because it's open-ended, it takes a little bit longer to answer each question. So we don't usually include more than 8 to 10ish questions. You get much richer data out of it, but it's also a pain in the butt when it comes to analyzing it afterwards.

I think the key thing with any user research question is to be careful to avoid leading the person in one direction or another, like not leading the witness. So, I try to keep the questions as objective as possible. For example, instead of saying, "How easy was it to start using our product?" which is kind of implying that it was easy, you would say, "Please describe the process of like adopting our product. Is there anything you liked or disliked about the experience?"

So you're being really careful not to bias them in one way or another.

I have a pretty standard set of questions that I'll kind of pull from when I'm creating these surveys. So I'll just take like 10 questions out of that pool.

Here, the idea is just to really understand the entire journey the user went through. What were they using before this product? What was life like before? How did they first hear about it? What made them start looking for an alternative to whatever they were using before? What products were they using before this one? And then asking them to describe in detail the actual process of adopting the product what they liked or disliked about that, if there was anything that could have been easier, and what ultimately persuaded them to upgrade.

Here, it was important to ask if there was anything that almost prevented them from upgrading because then you can learn about friction in the existing experience. And that'll probably parallel some of the main reasons why the people that aren't upgrading are not upgrading. They're probably running into similar things.

I also wanted to ask them how they would describe this product to a friend. Then, you get the answer in their words, and you can pull a lot of good copy ideas out of those answers that you can then use on your website or on your upgrade page.

In general, in this kind of survey, I find these questions particularly helpful:
- I always ask them how they heard about the product. The only time I won't is if they're already collecting that information during onboarding.
- What motivated them to start looking for this kind of product and what the biggest challenge was to actually finding a new solution?
- What the top things were that actually persuaded them to purchase? This starts to get at what specific benefits are more persuasive, and you want to make sure you're including those on your homepage, on your signup page, in your checkout flow.
- And, what nearly prevented them from converting?

Mike Fiorillo

When working with the team at Clubhouse (now Shortcut), I used this survey script to better understand the user onboarding experience.

Survey **recent customers**, ideally who converted in the last 2-3 months. We want the experience to be fresh in their minds.

What led them to choose us vs. competitors

What they can do now that they weren’t able to before

What made you start searching for project management software?

What was your biggest challenge or frustration in finding the right project management software?

What competitors did you consider before choosing Clubhouse?

Thinking back to when you first signed up, what was your biggest fear or concern about using Clubhouse?

Please describe the process you followed in order to adopt Clubhouse at your company.

Did you team make the buying decision, or was it a company-wide decision?

Please list the top 3 things that persuaded you to use Clubhouse rather than a competitor.

What’s the one thing that nearly stopped you from choosing Clubhouse?

What could we have done to make the decision-making process easier?

How would you describe Clubhouse to a friend?

Onboarding customer survey script for Clubhouse

Plan:

Questions:

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