SaaS makes its money from the inertia of long-term relationships, but "bodies in motion stay in motion" only applies if things are already moving to begin with.

When someone signs up for your software, they're trying to gain traction on something they care about, and your app can either help or hinder that. The track record of trustworthiness you build with them is what affords that inertia.

At signup, what a user is really running on is hope: a trust fall that the time, energy, and resources they invest doing things your way will beat trying to do the same thing on their own (or *gulp* one of your competitors' ways).

The trust bank isn't literally empty at that point; your reputation precedes the moment, whether through a single instance of social proof or years worth of word of mouth. But you ideally want to be growing that "trust fund" (lol) over time, not merely maintaining its opening balance.

Every papercut a user experiences is a withdrawal, and voluntary churn happens when trust has gone into the red. This is why when a papercut lands counts as much as how painful it is.

If a user hits a session-ending failure on their second session with you, then half of their sessions with you have sucked. If a different user hits the exact same failure on their 200th session, a significantly smaller fraction of their time with you has ended on a rough note. Same failure, opposite bill, depending entirely upon how much evidence the user already has on you.

But good news: the stakes cut both ways. Since a new user has so little to base the relationship on in those early sessions, small wins can feel as gigantic as the small losses do. Nailing something as simple as "upload my avatar" can pay dividends way beyond its pay grade in terms of helping users realize they picked the right partner early on.

But still, bad news: the window to put a healthy baseline in that trust account (and in your own actual bank account, eventually) is smaller than the way that most companies operate would imply.

Default Gone

When it comes to continuing with your software or not, brand new users have a completely different incentive from tenured users. Both kinds of users want things to work out, but if a recent signup is going to find out that an app isn't for them, they want to find out fast.

In that sense, they're almost looking for a reason to leave, as a close second option to persisting. A long-term user, on the other hand, has all the comfort and familiarity of their routine, and doesn't want to upset the apple cart of business-as-usual unless there's a really compelling reason to.

Long-term users are "default stay". Signups, by contrast, are "default gone". A new user is in an upended routine and looking for a reassuring landing spot; for a long-term user, the software is the routine.

One gradually becomes the other. As the relationship progresses, user expectations are more routinely met because A) users have a lot more context to base their expectations around (for better or for worse), and B) most of your product attention is probably focused on habitual usage to begin with.

"B" isn't a bad thing on its own -- you of course want to maintain the relationship as long as you can -- but it does make early usage an organizational blind spot.

Familiarity breeds accuracy, whether in user expectations or product design.

Not Baby Power Users

Signups, of course, also have different goals from power users.

Think about what a white-belt karate student is focused on, compared to a purple or black belt. The white belt isn't practicing mini versions of crane kicks; they're trying to perfect their stance. White-belt students aren't dumb; they're just focused on their immediate zone of progress.

In a similar way, new signups aren't just baby power users who are a tooltip tour away from mastery. They can be novices not only in UI-familiarity but also in problem-space familiarity. Most new users carry a completely different mental rolodex of immediate goals than established users do, and it isn't limited to "gosh I want to tour the interface".

Instead, meaningful progress for a new user might involve setting up a key integration, or getting teammates to actually adopt a new way to chat, or even something relatively frivolous-sounding like getting their custom color scheme juuuuust right.

These are almost a whole other breed of intents than the ones that power users bring to any given session, and they're ones that you're a lot more likely to be organizationally blind toward.

One of my favorite onboarding emails ever was from Buzzsprout, who dedicated their very first -- aka highest-leverage -- email to "a guide to microphones under $100". It was the opposite of a polished, visionary glimpse into what million-subscriber super-pros do. Instead, it was a humble, baseline-setting leg up on something that appealed to most of their signups, because most of their signups weren't famous podcasters (... yet).

Signups are taking a chance on you because they hope it's better than doing it alone, and especially in a self-serve SaaS context, this might be the first time they've done it at all. The broader market you want to expand to might already be getting turned away at your doorstep.

Early is big, and it won't wait for you.