Activation & onboarding review

Onboarding review for Omar

Recommendation

We are measuring setup, not activation. Completing a checklist of preferences does not establish that someone has experienced Tidepool’s value: seeing where their money goes and taking control of it.

Redesign onboarding around that first useful financial insight. Treat the celebration screen and progress bar as supporting elements—not the main fix—and replace next quarter’s checklist-completion goal.

What activation should mean

Use “connected a bank and categorised at least 10 transactions within the first week” as our provisional activation definition.

This combines access to real financial data with an action that helps users understand their spending. It is a stronger approximation of delivered value than naming an account or picking a theme.

The threshold of 10 is a starting hypothesis, not a proven magic number. We should validate whether users actually gain an insight at this point and whether a different threshold or milestone—such as reviewing a spending summary—better predicts durable use. Creating a budget may become a subsequent milestone, but the current evidence does not support making it mandatory for initial activation.

What the evidence says

Among August’s 4,000 sign-ups, overall day-60 retention was 28%.

The strongest signal is the combined bank-and-categorisation milestone: 27% of sign-ups reached it, and those users accounted for 842 of our 1,120 retained users. Retention among everyone else was approximately 9.5%.

Checklist completion, by contrast, is associated with retention only slightly above the cohort average. Raising it could improve the reported activation rate without improving users’ outcomes.

These are observational, overlapping groups. Motivated users may both complete meaningful actions and remain active; the data does not prove that pushing everyone through those actions will cause retention. Nor can we infer exact step-by-step drop-off from these aggregates. The CSV also differs slightly from the funnel summary on checklist and categorisation counts; reconcile reporting before setting the baseline.

What to change in onboarding

1. Lead with the value proposition, then bank connection. Explain what users will get from connecting, how their data is handled, and what happens next. Instrument connection starts, failures, abandonment and successful imports; address reliability and trust barriers.

1. Replace the upfront preference checklist with a guided first-value journey. Move theme selection and account naming out of the critical path. Ask for notification permission when there is a clear benefit. Keep savings goals optional or introduce them after users understand their finances.

1. Guide users through real transactions. Provide sensible category suggestions, easy corrections and a short review flow. Then show a useful spending summary—not merely confirmation that ten items were completed.

1. Offer budgeting as the next step. Help users turn their spending insight into a realistic budget, without making budget creation another prerequisite that delays first value.

Measure the full journey and test changes against the existing experience, including first-week milestone attainment and day-60 retention.

Design proposal and next quarter’s goal

A progress bar is worth testing if it tracks meaningful value steps, not cosmetic setup tasks. A celebration screen belongs after the first useful insight, should be brief, and should not interrupt it. Neither proposal addresses the core problem on its own.

Replace “raise checklist completion from 61% to 75%” with “increase first-week bank-plus-10-transaction activation.” A provisional target of 27% to 35% is reasonable to plan against, subject to baseline reconciliation and experiment sizing—not a forecast supported by this dataset.

Success must also include improved day-60 retention, with bank-connection reliability, privacy complaints and abandonment monitored as guardrails. Keep checklist completion as a diagnostic metric, not the team’s definition of success.

To: Omar | Re: Onboarding review

Recommendation

Activation should mean connecting a bank and categorising 10+ transactions in the first week. Our current definition, completing the setup checklist, barely predicts retention, so the 61% is flat for a reason: we're measuring the wrong thing. I'd fix the path to the real activation event, use the design team's ideas only on that path, and replace next quarter's goal.

Evidence (4,000 August sign-ups, day-60 retention)

Three things stand out:

• The checklist is a weak signal. Checklist completers retain at 30%, against 28% for everyone. The checklist is theme, notifications, account name and goal, so it's mostly cosmetic setup.
• The combination matters, not either step alone. Backing out the overlaps from the CSV:
• Bank only (no categorising): about 920 users, 13% retained.
• Categorised only (no bank): about 300 users, 16% retained.
• Neither: about 1,700 users, 6% retained.
• Both: 78% retained.

Users who connect but never see their spending sorted do worse than average. The value moment is seeing where the money goes, which needs both steps. - Budgets and app opens aren't the answer. Budget creators retain at 33%, close to baseline. Opening the app 4+ days (40%) is engagement, not a lever we can pull in onboarding.

Caveat: this is observational. Motivated users probably do everything, so these numbers show who retains, not what causes it. The recommendations below are therefore tests, not guarantees.

What to change

The funnel is 100% → 50% connect → 27% connect and categorise. There are two leaks:

1. Half of users never connect a bank, and they retain at 8%. Put bank connection first, straight after sign-up. Move theme, notifications and account name out of the critical path (defer or drop them). Look at where the connect flow fails and whether trust copy (read-only access, security) is needed. I can't tell from this data whether the checklist is causing bank drop-off, so I'd A/B test bank-first against the current order.
2. 46% of those who connect (920 of 2,000) never reach 10 categorised transactions. This is the biggest fixable gap, since 78% of those who finish retain. Auto-categorise on connect, pre-fill best guesses, and walk users through their first 10 with one-tap confirmations rather than leaving them to find the feature.

I'd also instrument the funnel by step and by time, so we can see where in the first week people stall.

The design team's proposal

A celebration screen and a progress bar for the checklist would probably raise checklist completion, but that metric barely relates to retention, so we'd likely see a "win" with no change in retained users. I wouldn't ship them as proposed. Both ideas are cheap and sound, though, so I'd redirect them:

• Make the progress bar track the real path (connect bank → categorise 10).
• Put the celebration at the moment of value, such as the 10th categorised transaction, ideally with a first insight ("here's where your money went").

This is a good way to involve design in the work above rather than rejecting their proposal.

Next quarter's goal

Drop "checklist completion 61% → 75%". Pushing it up could even pull effort toward low-value steps.

Replace it with: percentage of sign-ups who connect a bank and categorise 10+ transactions within 7 days. Baseline is 27%. I'd propose a target around 35%, but that is a judgment call until we've sized the effect of the first experiments, so let's set it after a few weeks of data. Guardrail: day-60 retention among those users should hold near its current 78% (if we widen the funnel with less-motivated users, it may dip, and we should watch that). Track the real outcome, overall day-60 retention (28% today), alongside it.

Next steps

• Run the bank-first vs current-order A/B.
• Prototype auto-categorisation and a guided first-10 flow.
• Work with design on the redirected progress bar and celebration.
• Agree the new activation definition and dashboard before the quarter starts.

I'm happy to walk through the numbers if useful.

To Omar — onboarding review

What activation should mean

Activation should mean a new user has reached Tidepool’s core value: connected a bank account and categorized at least 10 transactions within their first seven days. Completing setup tasks is not the same as understanding where your money goes.

What the evidence says

Of 4,000 August sign-ups, 61% completed the checklist, 50% connected a bank, and 34% categorized 10+ transactions. The behavioral data points to which events are most associated with retention at day 60:

• All sign-ups: 28% retained (1,120/4,000)
• Completed the checklist: 30% (742/2,438)
• Connected a bank: 48% (964/2,000)
• Categorized 10+ transactions: 65% (891/1,380)
• Connected a bank and categorized 10+: 78% (842/1,080)

The combined behavior is the strongest signal and represents 27% of all sign-ups today. By contrast, checklist completion is barely above the overall retention rate. Creating a budget is associated with 33% retention, so it is not a better activation milestone on this evidence.

These are associations, not proof that onboarding changes will cause retention to rise: users who connect accounts or categorize transactions may already be more motivated. We should treat the numbers as a strong direction for what value to help users reach, then test changes and track outcomes.

What to change

• Move bank connection earlier. Defer account naming, theme choice, savings goals, and notifications until after users see value. Explain why connection helps, address security concerns, and make the flow as clear and low-friction as possible.
• Guide users to their first insight. After connection, help them review and categorize transactions with sensible suggestions. Measure progress toward 10 categorized transactions, not just completion of onboarding screens.
• Offer budgeting in context. Prompt users to create a budget after they have seen their spending, rather than treating it as a prerequisite.

Design proposal and next-quarter goal

A progress bar could help, but only if it tracks the path to value—connect a bank, review transactions, categorize 10—not the existing checklist. A celebration screen after checklist completion would celebrate the wrong milestone; consider celebrating the first meaningful spending insight instead. Test both against a control, measuring bank connection, 10+ categorization, and retention—not checklist completion alone.

Replace the goal of raising checklist completion from 61% to 75% with a provisional target: raise seven-day activation from 27% to 35% of sign-ups next quarter. Track day-60 retention as a lagging outcome and guardrail. This keeps the goal tied to Tidepool’s promise while making clear that improved activation is a hypothesis to validate, not a guaranteed retention lift.