Before onboarding our cohort retention was 2%...after 1 week.
This means that after a week only 2% of our users came back to use the app.
After a basic onboarding we jumped to 10%. We're now at about 14-15% (just via improving the app).
About 50% of our users completely skip the onboarding altogether.
I think I'm going to experiment with a video instead of a tour to see the difference.
I'd consider Polar a success of "adding onboarding when ready." I just don't want people to consider onboarding as the first and only tool to reach for when trying to fix your Trial-to-Paid Conversion issues. There are a lot of other useful tasks you could - and frequently should - be working on as well.
Presumably the user group you've self selected into also has a retention rate that is 20x lower than those that don't skip the on-boarding.
Of course none of that matters because it makes another tiny, self-selected group considerably more money.
How is this different than when you had no onboarding? (serious question) Did you make other changes that made the onboarding process less important to end users?