The ‘Aha’ Moment Product Guide: How to Identify and Measure

Let’s go back to history class in school. As most of you probably know, Isaac Newton was an English mathematician and physicist that lived in the 17th century. History says that Isaac discovered gravity when he saw an apple falling from a tree. Do you remember this story? That’s also known as a Eureka moment.

We all agree that discovering something is satisfying, especially when understanding how something works. That “Aha” or “Eureka” moment is now used across almost every industry when users discover something that will change their entire experience.

In the SaaS industry, product teams can retain customers and users by helping them quickly understand how a product works and its direct benefit. Assisting users to find their Aha moment within your product will create a long-term relationship with them. But what exactly is Aha? Which other metrics are impacted by Aha? Is there a clear correlation between your Aha rate and sales conversion rate?

In this article, you’ll find the answers to these questions and more, including:

What is an Aha moment?
How to identify your product’s Aha moment
How to improve your Aha rate
Great examples of companies that hacked their Aha rates
How Aha impacts Churn, Retention, and Sales conversion rates
The Aha moment Product Guide

Let’s dive in!

What is an Aha moment?

The Aha moment is the time when a user first realizes the value of your SaaS product. It’s when they understand how a product works, its main functionalities, its value, and how to add it to their own processes.

Ideally, it should occur during the first time a customer uses your product and when the onboarding process is complete. Basically, the sooner it happens, the better.

However, in a recent internal benchmarking study that OpenView ran, they found that activation onboarding rates at the best PLG companies currently hover between 20–40%. And it sounds like product managers are defining “aha” moments far too loosely. So let’s move on to successfully identifying your product’s Aha moment.

How to identify your product’s Aha moment

We wish identifying your product’s Aha moment was as easy as ABC, but unfortunately, it isn’t. An Aha moment requires many different tactics, strategies, and metrics. If you want to identify it, start by looking at your data. In particular, your user’s analytics and customer surveys. Let’s now dig deeper and uncover different ways to identify your Aha moment:

Track and measure user behavior

Edward R. Tufte said one day, “Above all else, show the data,” and we couldn’t agree more. To do so, start by tracking your SaaS metrics, such as conversion rate, customer lifetime value, user engagement rate, retention rate, or churn rate. This way, you will gain more insight into your product’s user journey and see where exactly the aha moment might be happening and where not. Tracking and measuring user behaviors will allow you to begin answering the following key questions:

Where do you lose most of your users?
Which steps of the onboarding process aren’t clear?
Why do some users churn before/after the onboarding process?
Which features aren’t understood by your users?

Ask for user feedback

You can find out where your Aha moment is by talking to your users. Start by conducting customer surveys at the end of your onboarding process, asking for feedback in your support chats, or sending customer satisfaction emails. Here’re some questions you can ask your customers to understand their behavior and identify the Aha moments:

Could you tell us what you like most about our product?
Which feature or features do you enjoy the most?
What made you convert to a paid customer?
How did you find the user onboarding process? Was it useful?
Have you encountered any difficulties using or understanding the product?
Are there any features you would like our product to have?
Why did you choose our product over others?

After those questions are answered, have a closer look at them. Try to identify the exact moment customers realize your product’s value.

Learn from churned users

We know nobody likes to receive churn customer feedback. But there’s one key thing to remember; churned users are a powerful source of information, and it’s important you don’t forget about them. Knowing their reasons for churning will help you improve your product.

Indeed, many of your churn customers won’t be available to speak with you on a call, but a vast majority of them will be willing to give their opinion about your product or service on an exit survey. Remember that if you’re unsure how to calculate the churn, you can always use our FROGED Churn Calculator.

Here are some questions you can ask your churned users:

Why did our product not meet your expectations?
Which features were you missing?
Is there anything you found confusing when using our product?
What could we have done to keep you?
What suggestions do you have to improve our product or service?

Identify your product’s problems and gaps through those questions and learn from them. This is an excellent way to improve your product and find the Aha moment. Are you ready to discover ways to enhance it?

How to improve your Aha rate

Fortunately, there are several ways to improve your company’s Aha rate. Through them, you’ll ensure your customers find your product’s value. Here are out top four methods to optimize your Aha rate:

Personalization: Personalized communication such as tailored onboarding, product flows, unique emails based on user behavior, or push notifications will help you drive your users to reach their Aha moment.

Create intuitive onboarding flows: Intuitive communication and product flows will help you guide your users through your website or application. By doing this, you’ll lengthen their customer lifetime value, and they’ll be able to recognize the value of your product sooner.

Push new product features: Customers always welcome new features. By pushing your product developers forward to launch new features, you will increase user retention, reduce churn, and enhance the product’s value.

Reduce friction: Solve any potential barriers that may prevent a customer from making the most of your product or website Friction can happen, for example, signing a contract, verifying an email, or setting up an account. By removing those barriers, your customers can achieve the Aha moment sooner.

Great examples of companies that hacked their Aha rates

Here’re some of the best examples of companies that hacked their Aha rates and achieved customer success.

Ordermark

Ordermark is a SaaS company that helps restaurants take charge of online ordering. To help users reach their Aha moment, they designed the Ordermark Dashboard tool. It’s an application that helps users manage their online business at their fingertips, making more informed decisions about things such as menu items and staffing levels.

Uploadcare

Uploadcare is a complete file uploading, processing, and delivery platform built for developers. It provides companies with simple, powerful, developer-friendly building blocks to handle file uploading, processing, and delivery.

They have different tactics to achieve the Aha moment: an interactive demo on their website’s main page showing how it works and image insights report demonstrating how the images on your website can be optimized.

Feedly

Feedly is a company that lets you collect, read, and share new content from your favorite websites, blogs, and feeds. They’ve developed two tooltips to help users achieve the Aha moment and find the value of their product. Those two tooltips guide the users intuitively to understand how to collect and share the articles.