The Product Adoption Guide
How We Adopt Things
When we like someone, we tend to adopt their ways.
It's why we often pick up phrases from our friends.
Adoption is that phenomenon, and you can encourage it.
How do I know adoption is the problem?
A user who signs up but never comes back is just a vanity metric.
True adoption means users are actively engaging with your product, discovering value, and making it a part of their daily workflow.
The Behavioral Psychology of Adoption
Your product isn't competing against other software. It's competing against human nature.
“Stop Copying me!”
Watch a child mimic the way their sibling walks. Catch a coworker using your boss’s favorite phrase. Realize a habit you picked up from your parents.
We're creatures of influence, all of us. Not just in obvious ways—like buying the same shoes as our friends—but in the subtle rhythms of daily life.
The way we speak. The tools we trust. The routes we drive.
Our brains are wired to adopt behaviors from those we trust and admire. It's a survival mechanism that's evolved over millennia. Copy what works, avoid what doesn't.
This is same psychological mechanism drives your product's adoption.
Why Adoption Matters
A user who signs up—but never comes back—is just a vanity metric. Adoption is the single difference between teams that scale, and teams that stall.
In a perfect world, adopting your tool is a no-brainer. It’s easy to download, sign into, and works exactly like I hoped it would.
That’s why everyone is obsessed with the word fit.
When we try on the product for the first time, we want it to fit so well, that it gives us confidence—like our favorite outfit.
The best products fit nicely into our existing lifestyle, and improve it.
Where Most Companies Fail
Many companies focus on acquisition, pouring resources into marketing and sales to drive thousands of people to their website. Then only a handful convert.
Acquisition is about getting users in the door; adoption is about keeping them there. An adopted user is one who regularly engages with your product and finds it valuable. They're the ones who drive sustainable growth, provide valuable feedback, and spread the word about your product to others.
Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one. By investing in adoption, you can reduce churn, increase LTV, and create a stable base of recurring revenue.
High adoption rates also have a direct affect on organic growth. When users love your product, they become advocates, recommending it to the people in their lives. At Calendly, our big advantage was that using the product meant you were exposing someone else to it. When they found it valuable, they were immediately keen to adopt it.
Product-led motions are comparable to word-of-mouth marketing in this way. They are more authentic and trustworthy than any ad campaign, and it doesn't cost you a dime.
Which Users Will Adopt My Product?
There’s something called a product adoption curve.
It describes how different user groups adopt new products over time.
The curve is divided into five segments:
Innovators (2.5%): The first to try new products, these risk-takers are eager for novel experiences. They are highly creative, and rarely executive.
Early Adopters (13.5%): Opinion leaders who are quick to spot potential and are influential in spreading the word. Most top executives are here.
Early Majority (34%): Pragmatic users who adopt once a product has proven its value, but before it's mainstream. The middle of the bell curve. Most folks.
Late Majority (34%): More conservative users who wait until a product is well-established and widely used. Think of the cash strapped or risk-averse executive.
Laggards (16%): The last to adopt, these users are highly resistant to change.
You’ll notice one thing right away: Most people are not “early adopters.”
The product adoption curve is not a bell curve; it’s a skewed distribution.
Understanding where your ICP falls on this curve can help you tailor adoption strategies.
If you're targeting creative folks, you’ll have an easier time getting them to try something new. (Think how quickly Figma and Canva ballooned.)
If you’re targeting CPAs, they’re going to be fairly entrenched in the way they’ve always done things.
Meet your audience where they are, and appeal to their needs there.
Adoption Techniques for SaaS Companies
Why should users adopt your product?
You need to create a compelling, friction-free experience that delivers unmistakable value from day one. Here's how:
Show clear ROI fast - Deliver tangible value in the first session
Excel at core problems - Solve key pain points better than competitors
Remove friction - Intuitive interface with smart, progressive onboarding
Make success inevitable - Self-service resources + proactive support
Scale seamlessly - Grow naturally with teams via collaborative features
Price transparently - Align cost with value, starting with generous free tier
Remember: Users invest in outcomes, not features. The hole, not the drill. When you’re positioning your product’s abilities, on your site or in your UI, stay benefit focused—not feature focused.
Adoption Techniques I’ve Used (That You Can Steal)
If you’re reading this far you deserve some freebies.
Here’s the gold:
Empty State Hook: Turn blank screens into tutorials or informative entertainment. At minimum, show sample data instead of emptiness, to help the user “get it” faster.
LIVE Social Proof: Show real-time notifications of user actions. "Sarah T. just upgraded to professional." Or for e-com, “Justin R. just bought Heart Hoodie XL.”
UI Distractions - Want free-tier power users to upgrade? Put a red dot in the UI over the upgrade button. Users will do anything you ask of them to get rid of it, including dropping that $8/month you’ve been asking for.
Add a Progress Bar: Display completion metrics prominently—like a video game. People finish what they can measure, and knowing I’m halfway there, or 80% there, orients me in this journey. I’m more comfortable, and more likely to advance.
Get a Quick Win: Design a single 90-second task that makes users feel immediately successful. Think “time to value” on warp speed. If your software is too complex for them to actually complete a task, mock it with two clicks. They need to feel the win.
Friction Audit - Have an exec sit down with the CS team. What are they hearing? Note what’s repeated among the team, and solve for it.
Adoption Metrics Worth Measuring
First-Action Rate: % of signups who complete initial key tasks
Value Events: Key moments like first team invite or project completion
Time to Upgrade: Days from free signup to paid conversion
Adoption Rate: New users / total users - A strong indicator of organic growth and product market fit. High rates mean your product sells itself, lowering acquisition costs while driving up retention and lifetime value.
Keep it simple: measure concrete actions that prove users are getting value. If they are not getting value, your inactive user pool will stack endlessly.
New Feature Usage & Adoption
Most SaaS products are buffet of features. Your job is to make sure users taste everything that's relevant to them.
When it comes to releasing new features to existing users, you want to draw their attention to it at all costs.
Users must be exposed to a new feature at least once to properly self select. Here’s a list of things I’ve tried that didn’t work, and a few things that did.
Strategies that DO NOT work:
Popup on Login: when active users first log in, they have a goal in mind. A popup is an annoyance that blocks their initial goal right away.
Release Notes: Only weird power users and developers read these.
Generic In-App Messages: "Check out our new feature!" gets ignored 100% of the time. (Hint: It’s about you, not the customer.)
Strategies that work well:
Power-User Programs: Early access to new features creates evangelists. Give something out to a select group as a “treat,” and it’s perceived differently than if you dropped a new element into the UI overnight.
Problem-First Messaging: "Struggling with X? We just built a solution." This lands fine by email, but it’s extremely effective inside the UI—displayed exactly when users need it most.
Little Red Dot - Need to draw attention to a new feature in your UI? Don’t interrupt their workflow with a popup. Instead, put a red or orange dot over the new feature. Eventually, they’ll click there just to disappear the dot, and you can show off then.
User Adoption Campaigns We’ve Run
Calendly
PLG’s founder, Adam Lambert, was on Calendly’s founding marketing team. Half of that team, to be exact, and despite the inherent virality of the product, we needed to introduce more people to Calendly. By investing in video, we put content out for more people to see, and they could learn about the product before signing up for it. Video served as a filter, causing more interested people to sign up, while curbing disinterested people.
Pequity
Pequity sells compensation software to CPOs and CHROs. Not the most accessible people, and for good reason. Instead of bombarding them (as this is their negative experience of work life with candidates)we opted to “be there when you’re ready.” Following this ethos, we distributed hundreds of Pequity branded desk mats to execs at the top HR conferences in the US. As a result, when 12 of those companies were ready for compensation assistance within the next quarter, they came to us, having a positive, non-solicitous memory of our founders from SHRM and other conferences.