ShootProof: Activation Up 36% with Pendo Onboarding Guides

Before Deliberate Signals, I ran product operations and customer insights at Foreground, the company behind ShootProof, a gallery and sales platform for photographers. This is the story of two projects I ran there with Pendo onboarding guides: one lifted first-week activation by 36% relative, and one moved the studios behind an estimated $4.3M of payment volume off a payment gateway that was being shut down. I am telling it because the mechanics are copyable, and because it is the work that taught me what Pendo is for.

Some context on the users. 85% of ShootProof studios were one-person businesses. About 30% of new signups had started their photography business within the past year, roughly 75% earned under $5K a year from it, and 52% made money only from the session fee, never from prints or downloads. Those were not the users the product tour had been written for.

Project one: activation was sliding for a second year

Our activation definition was concrete: create at least one gallery and upload at least ten photos in the first week. That number had slipped for a second straight year, and the proxy signals were worse. Year over year, first use of the payment gateway, price sheets, client contracts, and paid invoices all dropped, with paid invoices falling to zero in the June 2022 cohort. People were signing up and not finding the part of the product that made them money.

We did three things, in this order.

1. Simplified the welcome dashboard. We removed clutter, added a four-tile Get Started path, and defaulted some users straight to the Galleries page. The Gallery First experiment, where new desktop users landed on galleries instead of the dashboard, produced a 51.3% increase in galleries created and photos uploaded in the test group, and a 20.9% increase overall.
2. Built branching Pendo onboarding guides. A required five-question profile survey ran first (genre, age of business, revenue, delivery method, sales model), then each person got a walkthrough that matched their answers and pushed toward their first gallery. The same survey, run to existing users, collected just over 37,000 responses and became the segmentation layer for everything after.
3. Tracked it as a funnel, not a feeling. Signup, survey, first gallery, first upload, first sale, with the drop-off at each step reviewed every week.

Activation moved from about 25% to about 34%, which is 9 percentage points and a 36% relative lift. For the hobbyist segment, the one most likely to churn, time to first value came down about 18%.

Project two: a payment migration run on Pendo guides

The second project had a deadline attached. A legacy payment gateway was being retired, and 16.2% of all ShootProof payment volume was still flowing through it. In a 90-day window that was $839K of $5.1M. If those studios did not move to ShootProof Pay before the cutoff, their clients could not pay them.

The playbook was a hybrid, and that is the point. Pendo segments identified the top legacy-processing accounts by volume. Nine phases of in-app messages ran against those segments, each one more direct than the last. Alongside the guides, the team ran one-to-one outreach to the highest-value studios: 29 phone calls and 80 emails in May 2021, 38 calls and 54 emails in June. The guides did the broad work and the calls did the stubborn 10%.

By June, 92% of the top 75 legacy accounts had activated ShootProof Pay, which protected an estimated $4.3M in annual payment volume, and the deprecated gateway’s share dropped below 2%. We also ran surveys at three moments, setup completion, early use at 5 transactions, and power use at 100 transactions, and collected 1,411 responses. Those open-text answers fed the feedback themes we shared with product, and they are the reason I still start with the words before the scores. The method is in the post on open-text survey responses.

The numbers in one table

What Pendo onboarding guides need in order to work

Three lessons survived the move from in-house to consulting, and I use them on every engagement.

• Segment by business model, not just persona. The hobbyist needed a faster path, not a heavier tour. A professional studio needed the payment setup first. The same guide for both would have served neither.
• Treat a technical migration as a revenue funnel. The tools that sell features, segments, guide goals, and funnels, also de-risk infrastructure changes. Pendo funnels show conversion and drop-off at each step in sequence, which is exactly what a migration deadline needs.
• Watch the snippet. In May 2021 we found the gateway value in our Pendo install was not updating, which meant segments were stale, and we paused all migration messaging until engineering fixed it. A guide pointed at the wrong people is worse than no guide. That is why the first week of any Pendo implementation I run now is an install review, not a guide build.

The dashboards that held the numbers and the survey stories side by side are their own story, in the Pendo dashboards post.

Questions people ask

What are Pendo onboarding guides?

In-app walkthroughs, tooltips, and messages that Pendo shows to a chosen segment of users at a chosen moment. The useful ones branch on who the user is and have a goal attached, such as creating a first gallery, so you can measure whether they worked.

How much can onboarding guides improve activation?

At ShootProof, dashboard simplification plus branching guides moved first-week activation from about 25% to about 34%, a 36% relative lift. Your number depends on how clear your activation definition is and how well your segments match real user types.

Can Pendo guides be used for a migration or a forced change?

Yes. Segment the affected accounts, run a sequence of increasingly direct in-app messages, and track completion as a funnel. Pair the guides with direct outreach for the highest-value accounts, which is how 92% of ShootProof’s top legacy studios moved before the gateway cutoff.

If you have an activation problem or a migration with a date on it, book a free Pendo strategy call and we will sketch the segments and the funnel on the first call.