Case Study
Finding the "aha" moment at YouCanBookMe
Using the TRACE framework to increase new user activation from 17% to 26% in two months.
The challenge
From 2018ā2024 I worked at YouCanBookMe, a bootstrapped, product-led scheduling SaaS serving more than 1.5 million users (now part of Capacity).
Growth wasn't the problem.
Every booking page included a "Powered by YouCanBookMe" link, creating a natural viral loop. People booked meetings, experienced the product, and many signed up themselves.
New accounts were being created every day.
But we knew we weren't making the most of those new users.
Somewhere between creating an account and becoming a successful customer, people were disappearing.
The question became: Where were they getting stuck, and why?
š Track - Understand the data
I started by mapping the onboarding funnel in Mixpanel, following users from registration through to receiving their first booking.
Three clear drop-off points emerged.
79% of people who started registration completed sign-up.
48% of those users created a booking page.
Just 17% received their first booking within seven days.
The numbers showed me where people were dropping off.
They couldn't tell me why.
So the investigation moved to the next stage.
š£ Research - Talk to users & audit the experience
I recruited people who had signed up within the previous month but had never received a booking, offering an Amazon voucher in exchange for a 20-minute discovery call.
Using the Jobs to Be Done framework, I wanted to understand:
What had brought them to YouCanBookMe?
What were they trying to accomplish?
Where had the experience let them down?
Alongside the interviews, I organised Hotjar watch parties with the team, reviewing session recordings together and observing new users move through onboarding.
We also added an on-abandon survey during account creation, asking people why they were leaving before completing sign-up.
That uncovered something we hadn't expected.
A surprising number of people weren't prospective customers at all.
They were end bookers.
Someone had sent them a booking link, they wanted to amend or manage an existing booking, and assumed they needed to create their own YouCanBookMe account to do it.
They had no intention of becoming users.
That insight immediately improved our understanding of the top of the funnel.
We introduced a simple segmentation step:
Booker
Individual
Team
That meant we could:
direct end bookers to manage their booking without creating an account
reduce frustration for people who were often trying to join meetings quickly
prevent unnecessary no-shows for our actual customers
separate genuine prospects from no-intent sign-ups in our reporting
It was a small change that made both the customer experience and our product data significantly clearer.
š§© Analyse - Connect the evidence
One customer interview changed how I thought about activation.
He told me he'd shared his booking page with his partner just to test it. She booked a meeting. He received the confirmation email. She received the confirmation email.
For the first time, he'd experienced the entire booking flow from beginning to end.
Then he paused and said: "I want to personalise those emails."
He went straight back into the product.
It wasn't just one conversation.
We heard similar stories again and again.
Some users had booked with someone else's YouCanBookMe page before signing up.
Others took a test booking almost immediately.
Others were lucky enough to receive a genuine booking early.
The pattern was always the same.
The first booking was the moment users understood the value of the product.
The interviews told us that.
The data backed it up.
People who reached that milestone explored more features, personalised their experience, and were much more likely to stick around.
People who never reached it quietly disappeared.
That became our activation milestone.
š Change - Prioritise and implement
Once we'd identified the first booking as the moment users experienced value, every onboarding decision became much simpler.
We asked: Does this help users reach their first booking faster?
Three areas became our priorities.
1. Reduce friction during sign-up
Email verification was causing unnecessary drop-off.
Clicking the verification link dumped users into busy inboxes where many never found the email again.
We changed the flow to open a filtered Gmail or Outlook inbox showing only emails from YouCanBookMe, with the verification code included in the email subject.
Drop-off reduced almost immediately.
2. Simplify booking page creation
Users consistently told us they weren't confident they'd configured everything correctly.
Key settings like availability, meeting duration and location were buried inside advanced settings.
We redesigned onboarding to surface those decisions in a guided, step-by-step experience using progressive disclosure, helping users build confidence before exposing the product's full complexity.
Booking page creation increased and users reported feeling much more confident sharing their booking page.
3. Build trust before asking for commitment
Connecting a calendar caused a consistent 23ā27% drop-off.
Interviews revealed many users simply weren't ready to grant calendar access yet.
So we added the option to skip this step.
People could explore the product, understand its value and connect their calendar later.
Shortly after launch, we noticed a sudden spike in sign-ups. The numbers looked fantastic. Too fantastic.
Working with our CTO, we discovered the skip option had attracted a wave of spam accounts.
Rather than rolling the feature back, we introduced lightweight protection while keeping the lower-friction experience for genuine users.
It was a good reminder that shipping quickly also means learning quickly.
š Evaluate - Measure the impact
Within two months:
New user activation increased from 17% to 26%.
Sign-up completion increased from 79% to 82%.
More importantly, we had aligned the onboarding experience around helping users reach the moment where the product truly clicked.
Reflections
Iād have loved to have more robust A/B testing infrastructure during this. We measured success using before-and-after funnel analysis, which gave us confidence in the direction of travel, but experimentation infrastructure would have strengthened the evidence further.
The takeaway
Every product makes a promise. There is always a moment when users first experience that promise being kept.
Before that moment, they're still deciding whether your product is worth their time.
Finding that moment changed how we thought about onboarding at YouCanBookMe.
It's the same question I begin every TRACE Investigation with today.
What's the moment your users experience the value your product promises?