212. Single player vs. multiplayer 🕹
How to design onboarding experiences that drive the best retention
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Links that are worth your time:
I’m always excited to see companies share transparent salary & equity formulas. Here’s one for Whimsical, one of my favorite wireframing apps.
A Slack product launch gone bad.
Great tweet thread from Jon Lai:
Hi there 👋
I’ve been fortunate to connect with a few folks from the Zoom team recently, and one of my conversations with them sparked the topic for this week’s newsletter. (Ross, if you’re reading, hello and thank you!) The topic swerves a bit into product development, which means I am in way over my head. If any product-minded folks reading this have extra context or advice to add, I’d love to hear from you.
Wishing everyone a great week,
Kevan
Single player vs. multiplayer
Marketing, obviously, is so interconnected to the rest of everything that happens within a company that it’s impossible to say that marketing is purely, only this or that. This is especially true when you think about awareness and acquisition. If we (marketing) ended there, then we’ve only influenced the very first part of the customer journey. We got the customer to the airport, but will they get on the plane? Will they have a good flight? Will they ever choose us again?
That’s why I’ve found those initial moments of product usage such an interesting and vital piece to the overall success of marketing.
(Sidenote: Interestingly enough, Customer Experience will be a subset of marketing at Polly. I’ll tell you all about it in a future email.)
Here’s where this idea of single player vs. multiplayer comes in.
It’s a similar concept to the sandbox. Or …
Practice field vs. stadium.
Preview vs. the real thing.
When a user is first starting out with your product, you must instill a sense of trust and safety between the user and your product. If the user doesn’t trust you, they’re going to bail. If they don’t understand the value right away, they’re going to leave (this is a pillar insight of Product-Led Growth).
Single-player mode allows you to build the trust.
If your app or product has any sort multi-user user case — be it team collaboration features, multiple seats, or org-wide app adoption — single-player mode can be a critical first step to building trust and making the user feel completely safe.
The obvious corollary is with video games. Many games have a single-player mode where you can hone your skills before jumping in to participate in multiplayer mode. You have the opportunity to test things out before jumping into the deep end. Mario Kart is one of my favorite examples of single player versus multiplayer. But substitute almost any multiplayer game, and the analogy holds true.
In some video games, you even see a single player sandbox mode before the real single player experience. Think of a sports game like Fifa where you kick the ball around casually while the main game loads, or any number of adventure games where you start off in a training mode before jumping in to the full game.
It can be useful to think of software in the same way.
How can you create a single player mode for your user so that they feel trust, safety, and confidence jumping into the real deal and playing with their team?
We have this in a way at Polly.
When you click to install Polly into your Slack or Teams workspace, you are instantly entering a sort of multiplayer world.
How can we as Polly marketers do a good job of creating trust and safety before you’re adding Polly to an entire workspace?
We can do it with messaging.
With social proof.
With interstitial pages.
(Do you have other ideas? Please let me know.)
Another example of single player vs. multiplayer is Feedly. They’re a content discovery platform powered by AI. You enter your favorite content sources, then train the AI on what matters. With Feedly, that entire early experience of collecting content and training the AI happens in single-player mode. You can fully create your Feedly sandbox before introducing it to the rest of your team (multiplayer).
Seen through another lens, this Feedly example — and the single player vs. multiplayer paradigm — is another way of looking at B2C2B businesses.
Anum Hussain wrote my favorite article on B2C2B, and it has this great graphic:
With B2C2B, the product moves from the individual into the team/company. We had this to a degree at Buffer where we were a much-loved personal utility tool that people would “bring with them” to their marketing team. Feedly has this going for them, too.
Single player is baked into the B2C2B experience.
But if you’re not B2C2B, there’s still a relevant case to make for single player. How can you onboard well? This is hard work, but important work. Especially for collaborative tools or multi-seat tools, setting a customer up for success is going to lead to better activation, adoption, retention, and expansion.
Products with a small learning curve are easy to bridge from single player to multiplayer … but they’re also easier to walk away from because the investment is smaller.
Products with a steep learning curve require a lot more time and attention into single player mode … but the payoff is big.
Once you’re invested, you’re hooked.
Use single player mode as a space for new users to get highly proficient in a short amount of time. If they’ll successful, you’ll have customers excited, ready, and willing to dive into the deep end (multiplayer) with you.
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Polly (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer and Vox.
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