Building @keeponboard an onboarding & retention platform with @melissapekel. BJJ Dad. Ex Ongage (email marketing platform) CGO, Press on It (agency) CEO.
Lund, Sweden
Joined August 2007
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The "SaaS is dead" crowd: "Why pay for software when AI can build it in a weekend?"
Every founder who's kept software alive past version one:
These are some of the best tips out there to sell your product without it looking like you're trying to sell anything.
Sales shouldn't feel like sales.
How do you sell without selling?
Sales is everything. Without sales, no product survives.
But people pull away when it feels like selling, right?
So how do you sell when selling is the issue?
You stop treating sales as a conversation, and start treating it as everything around the conversation.
Easy and challenging at the same time:
1. Your actions are sales.
Reply to every lead or customer within hours (preferably under an hour), and do the small thing you promised on the call. People buy from whoever kept their word first.
2. The way your brand looks is sales.
If you look bad on the outside, nobody will want to see the inside. Make sure to amaze people, don't use stock photos or website LLM designs, be real, and create trust.
3. The way your product looks & acts is sales.
Onboarding is a sales call. Get new users to their first win in the first session, and rewrite every error message so it sounds like a human said it.
4. Your conduct when things go south is sales.
Tell customers about a problem before they find it, and tell them what you changed so it won't happen again. Hiding the incident costs more than the incident.
5. What leads and customers read about you is sales.
Take the questions people ask on your calls and answer them in public, in posts and emails. By the time they talk to you, your content has already done the selling.
None of this feels like selling, and all of it sells.
Got any questions?
As always, my DMs are open if you don't want to share them here.
I've been postponing this for far too long.
I've chosen my hill to die on ๐ซก
Starting next week, I'm doing videos.
The unfiltered build of @keeponboard why customers really leave, what you can do about it, and how to leverage what you got, to do a lot!
I have the weekend to get my nerve up.
Not just here. Going full Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn.
Let's do this!
instagram.com/pekelmark/
tiktok.com/@markpekel
linkedin.com/in/mark-pekel/
After not posting for 4 days, I started posting again 24 hrs ago.
As requested, here are the results of the experiement:
Atm:
- 11 comments.
- 20 likes.
- 386 views.
- Commenters verified purple star in notifications.
- 61 replies yesterday, 30 today.
- 2 posts in total yesterday, and 2 today.
I dunno, not too shabby compared to usual posts, but I wouldn't stop posting if I were you, or if I was able to avoid it.
The reply guy strategy isn't just great for building reach.
It generates lots of post ideas because you write a lot.
These 2 are force multipliers on other platforms too, not just X.
But don't fool yourself, it's a full-time job, and you can't build properly doing that.
Unless you're willing to work overtime. Which, I think, we all are.
So set a date when you're stopping to build, and start spreading the word.
Thatโs the only way to become force majeure at this.
I'm writing this, and I still haven't stopped building.
This is not a reply guy post.
It's a keepalive strategy.
Which also requires 2-3 posts per day, and to reply, reply, and reply again.
Mark Pekel ๏น๐๏น retweeted
For a lot of people, work is something they're involuntarily forced to do so they can buy food, own clothes, and live in a home.
People like that don't get excited about a new SaaS. They just want to use whatever it is that makes their work day require less effort. Note -- I did NOT say more productive ... I said less effort.
We ran into a lot of that attitude when, at Adobe, we did interviews of potential customers for our project management solution. While our questions were useful and customer answers were helpful, you could always feel the "I just do my work the way I'm told to do my work and I'm not interested in anything other than finishing my 8 hours and going home".
What do people when they go home? They entertain themselves. And they DO care about their entertainment. And that is one reason that I am now building games.
Wyrmlair is the game I wanted to build when I first started experimenting with fully-AI-built apps in early 2025. AI wasn't there yet. Now it is.
Iterating quickly right now. The build is still SUPER early. Getting great feedback. This game is going to be incredible as it keeps iterating forward.
Come help me keep building and improving: wyrmlair.com
Most people interact with a book only if it has an "ing," and ".com" right after.
I'm reading atm this gem, by @asmartbear. What are you reading?
This morning I woke up and you know what I found?
I was building w/o posting for 4 days and the world didn't end.
And my reach?
Might have an issue lurking there, stay tuned ๐
What's the target time to an "Aha" moment?
How about a "Wow" one?
They look completely different depending on your B2B SaaS model.
If people sign up and then drop off, it's usually not a PMF problem. They signed up, so the pitch worked. What failed is the product delivering on the promise fast enough.
Fix it by mapping your onboarding backwards from that first moment of value, and connecting it to the "Wow" milestone.
That's what we're working on atm at @keeponboard.
How fast do your users get there?
And what's your model?
We are working on making every transition in the
@keeponboard onboarding process animated.
WDYT?
Oh boy, Legend, our mascot, is working so hard during the @keeponboard customer onboarding stage ๐
He has to make sure our agents are connected and that everything is synced.
Can't wait to share our onboarding journey with you once it's done!
WDYT?
Happy Wednesday, gang ๐
Guys, what are you doing to make onboarding on your product really memorable?
In our onboarding, we are literally showing our ICPs how they're building a ship with each step they take, like a progress bar, just on-brand.
We also use videos to entertain them while data uploads and areas populate, that's also a part of why we're producing all these brand imagery and our comic strip.
Never seen anyone doing that before, although I might be wrong, and someone did, which can mean only 2 things:
1. We're doing something right, and this is going to be fun.
2. This is a horrible idea, and we should probably avoid gamifying B2B onboarding.
The only way to find out is to see whether people finish our onboarding.
But would love your opinions.
Something I noticed, am I the only one?
I reply faster, and produce more reply output when on mobile device compared to laptop.๐ซฃ
Yo dwag,
She has a point!
When you answer every customer yourself, you know your product, the history, every promise you made.
It's easy.
Then you hire your first CSM, and both break because everything you knew lives in your head, and they're not telepathic.
So when the answer is wrong, check the system before you blame the crew.
