Let's take a deeeep breath together, shall we?

All good? Now let's tear down the onboarding of a very interesting product - Endel.

Introduction

We live in a chaotic world today. In this socially connected and emotionally disconnected world, every day we are burdened with information from all over the world right from wars to climate crises to cruelty and violence to just technology-led uncertainty (read AI). While we wish to be connected with our loved ones, it also comes with a baggage of sensationalism masked as news from across the world, and one often feels helpless reading this and still not being able to change the world for the better. Over and above this, screen times and excessive phone usage have been some of the top problems for people worldwide. This has also led to an increase in stress levels with a decrease in focus and sleep.

Moreover, by adjusting for the global demographic structure in 2020, the prevalence of persistent adult ADHD was 2.58% and that of symptomatic adult ADHD was 6.76%, translating to 139.84 million and 366.33 million affected adults in 2020 globally. (source)

Sound has been proven to be an effective tool in managing symptoms of ADHD (source). Different sounds also have different soothing effects on people when it comes to focus, sleep or even during exercise.

Apologies for the uninitiated information on the world. It must have been slightly stressful, isn’t it? Lets take a deep breath again 🧘‍♂️because we now have a product which is backed by science to help solve some of the issues mentioned

Enter Endel🧘‍♂️

Endel creates AI-powered sounds designed to support your everyday life. You can focus, relax, and sleep through the power of sound. It is backed by science and takes inputs like location, environment, and heart rate to create the optimal personalized soundscape for you. The app helps people with ADHD or ADD a lot with soundscapes and scenario-based sounds. Unlike music, Endel is designed to restore, not entertain. It is an endlessly adapting backdrop to better your mental state.

Endel is in a market where the competition can be music streaming apps and meditation apps like Calm, Headspace, or Happier. To truly understand the motivations of the users of such apps, I spoke to 5 people (few Endel users and few users of competitor apps) and was able to come up with the ICPs

Let's meet our power users (ICPs)

Jobs to be done (JTBD)

JTBD Validation

Based on the interviews with users and secondary research, the following insights were gathered:

1- Both ICPs use sounds in the background during certain activities and often there are creators on YouTube which do the needful for them with playlists for nature sounds, 'study with me' videos or focus music. Thus, willingness to pay for an app like Endel is lesser making it crucial for Endel to showcase its true value (especially for ICP 1)

2- Both ICP 1 and ICP 2, don't follow fixed routines to use the application. They use the app on need-basis. While some of them have tried to have a routine (before sleep or early morning relaxation) and have enabled notifications too, but they are unable to commit to the process.

3- Users belonging to ICP 2 found timed focus sessions very useful since it improved their productivity during the time

4- There are users (from both ICPs) who use Endel more than 7-8 hours a day (soundscape) for sleeping, relaxing, and focussing [Read this from user reviews on the App Store]

Ready for the real teardown?

Teardown Legend

• Written in white - What's working well
• Marked and written in red - Improvements
• Marked with a💡and written in blue - AHA moments
• Cognitive biases experienced on certain screens are written inside the 'Cloud of bias'Onboarding Teardown - Endel.pdf

Hypothesis 1 - By sessions completed in days

Activation metric hypothesis: Users must complete at least 7 sessions (irrespective of sleep/focus/relax) in 10 days

Reasoning: Users can only understand Endel's true value after experiencing a productive work session, complete relaxation, or perfect sleep (since only 3 modes are available with the free version). For this to happen, they have to be consistent with their sessions for any of these categories. Achieving the above metric will be a leading indicator of retention and long-term engagement.

The rationale behind 7 sessions is that both our ICPs have a lot of distractions and alternatives to Endel and hence they must use Endel at least an average of 30 minutes per day. The reasoning behind 10 days is that I think a weekend often skews a lot of these metrics for people in their wellness journey (due to social commitments) and hence spreading over 10 days averages the outlier events.

Important Metrics to track: 1- Frequency of usage per user: This is obvious to calculate the number of sessions

2- Session Length: Comparison of this metric for a Free edition user vs a paid user will help us sharpen our number of hours and days metric. This metric also must be dissected at an ADHD vs non ADHD user level to generate deeper insight into user behaviour.

2- D1, D10, D30 retention: An active user for us will be defined as a user who has completed an entire session. D1, D10, D30 retention numbers will help us track churn of such active users.

3- Feature usage frequency: Endel is all about personalization and curation. Knowing which out of the 'Relax'/'Sleep'/'Focus' features is being used the most will help us personalize our communication to the user and also sharpen our activation metrics basis cohorts of users using each feature

Supporting Metrics to sharpen our thesis: - Device category level retention figures (iWatch vs phone vs laptop etc.) - to understand device type level nuance and improve on offering
- Time of usage (morning vs afternoon vs night) - to create personalized session recommendation engagement levers basis previous history
- Tech observability with metrics like latency, animation rendering time and UI faults

Hypothesis 2 - By habit formation for features

Activation metric hypothesis: After a week of usage, users must have specific time slots during the day where there is consistent frequent usage and longer session lengths. For eg. for Focus - the user must have at least a 1-hour session between 9 am-5 pm (working hours); for Sleep - the user must have at least a 15-minute session between 9:30 pm-12 am (sleeping hours); etc.

Reasoning: Endel operates in a market where there are multiple ways (or distractions) for a user to get their job done. YouTube playlists, music streaming apps, OTT, exercise/yoga, meditation or wellness apps like Calm, Headspace, Happier, etc. In such a space, it is crucial that a user realizes your CVP and builds a habit around the product as soon as possible. A user who uses Endel at a specific time during the day every single has now built a habit to focus with Endel. Going forward the user will start showing Pavlovian conditioning and hence becomes very easy to retain.

Important metrics to track: 1- Frequency of feature usage per user plotted against time: This helps in tracking consistent behaviour of usage per feature for all users

2- Session length: This will help us personalize their experience and understand their focus period or time taken to sleep.

3- D1, D7, D30 retention: To understand churned users and their behaviour against people who showcase this behaviour

4- ADHD vs non-ADHD user behaviour: This will help us fine-tune our hypothesis even more since a user with ADHD might have longer session lengths and a greater need for the product at multiple points during the day