Lighthouse update February 2nd

The current state of Lighthouse is that the website gets a decent amount of views and a good amount of those also create an account. However, of those who create an account only a tiny fraction start using the product.

This points to an onboarding issue. That people don’t know what to do with the product after they signed up.

Lighthouse is a powerful product. Particularly the rule system can do a lot. But it’s worthless if users don’t get to that point.

To improve that I’m going working on a better onboarding flow and an after-signup email drip campaign.

The after-signup email drip campaign will be a series of emails, each explaining a different aspect of Lighthouse. This serves two purposes. First, it shows what Lighthouse can do and how to use it. And second, it reminds people that the product exists. I had this one before, but when Sendgrid changed their pricing I stopped it and didn’t reimplement with another system. This may have been a mistake.

The onboarding flow changes I have planned is to reduce the explanation steps (now handled via the emails) and show a discovery page with search immediately after signup. The idea is that this makes the product easier to explore.

Until now I didn’t implement a typical website search because users can just enter the website and Lighthouse finds the feed automatically. But looking at popular products in the space, they all have a search mechanism.

The new user experience has been a blindspot for me. Now I’m working to remedy that.