GrowthBar Case Study

GrowthBar makes creating AI content for search engine optimization (SEO) easy. A mid-6 figure ARR SaaS, GrowthBar was founded in 2019 and enables users to research, write, and optimize content for SEO. It's used by companies like Product Hunt, Bill.com, AllTrails, and Wheel.

GrowthBar turned to Hopscotch when their customer churn rate really started killing growth. And Hopscotch was responsible for improving their churn rate by 9% overnight!

Background

GrowthBar had no problem scaling to $300k in annual recurring revenue (ARR). They were drafting off the early days of ChatGPT and could acquire customers very affordably via SEO and product-led growth. They had a slick tool and several hundred happy customers.

However, at a certain point, their 16% monthly churn began to catch up with them. I've written before about how churn can kill your business. To hit 7-figure ARR, GrowthBar would need to make a huge dent in their churn rate. That's when they turned to Hopscotch. And this was the impact:

Why they chose Hopscotch

GrowthBar ran a comprehensive evaluation before choosing Hopscotch as their user onboarding solution. In this process, they found that Hopscotch would be the best partner for success because:

• The buying process was personal, focused on enabling GrowthBar to discover how Hopscotch fit their specific needs

• Hopscotch met all of GrowthBar's requirements like having advanced styling features that make the onboarding flows look native to their product. This meant the GrowthBar team designers wouldn't need to tinker with Hopscotch flows in order for them to look perfect.

• Hopscotch requires no code. The GrowthBar team only had two developers. They needed to spend their time building the core product, not tweaking the onboarding flows.

How they used Hopscotch

The GrowthBar team identified a few key areas of churn. This is how they used Hopscotch:

1. Onboarding

A lot of GrowthBar's churn happened immediately -- during onboarding. Too many users simply signed up, got confused, and bailed. In fairness, it's a complicated product. There are many different tools within GrowthBar and some users didn't find enough immediate value. You can conduct keyword research, competitor research, and write SEO-friendly content with AI.

The GrowthBar team created simple onboarding flows for each tool within GrowthBar so that users could understand how best to use the product. They found that Loom video walk-throughs performed best. They also found that tours containing less than 3 slides performed exceedingly well.

2. Cancellation

One interesting insight the GrowthBar team learned was that many users wanted to pause their account and restart at a later date -- since they were working on a project that was now finished. Still others wanted to cancel their account because they still didn't see value in the tool. This revealed to them that there was some opportunity to reclaim lost dollars in the cancellation flow.

So GrowthBar decided to use Hopscotch to create dark patterns. Dark patterns refer to any number of ways to retain customers as they're trying to cancel their account. When a user got to the cancellation page, they saw a series of Hopscotch cards prompting them to first, get a (pre-recorded) demo of GrowthBar. If they moved past that step, they were given a 10% discount code to stay with the product. Finally, they were prompted to pause their account for two months.

3. Webinars!

GrowthBar does very well with webinars. When people join their product webinar series, they're extremely likely to become a customer. As such, the GrowthBar team inserted a couple of Hopscotch modules during key engagement moments using custom parameters.

More prospects signed up for webinars and GrowthBar was able to convert many of them into customers.

The results

Hopscotch exceeded the GrowthBar team's expectations. Monthly churn rate went from 16% to 7% within one month of implementing Hopscotch tours.

GrowthBar was able to run incredibly successful Hopscotch tours that generated ROI in record time thanks to their team's dedication to understanding the data -- specifically, which parts of the user journey resulted in the most churn.

Product onboarding tours cleared up confusion and enabled users to find value faster -- which reduced churn. With some tour experimentation and iteration, GrowthBar's trajectory changed overnight.

Moving forward, GrowthBar is determined to continue using Hopscotch to increase customer satisfaction and propel user retention with personalized user experiences.

👉 Want to try it for yourself? Try Hopscotch (no credit card required).