Fadé Adeniyi
Sunday 1 November 2026
Why your price usually isn't the problem, how to find the action your paying users took early and how to get every new sign-up there in their first session.
You launch, the sign-ups come in and the numbers look great. Then you check how many of them are paying and it's a handful. The first thing most founders reach for is the price. They cut it, add a discount or stretch the trial.
Your price is usually never the problem, because most sign-ups never get to that paywall. They sign up, hit a wall of forms and set-up screens and leave before they've seen the one thing that would've made paying feel obvious.
I've spent 16 years in product, understanding the product market. I also built my own product, Xeruit, a jobs platform. Our pre-launch ad campaign got 3,000 sign-ups in less than three days. I found that ad's message by reading competitors' angriest 1-star and 2-star reviews. Most of those sign-ups weren't paying. That's what these three steps fix.
Look at where people drop off first. If most sign-ups never reach the paywall, a lower price won't change anything because they'll never see it.
The 3 steps
I'm attaching an export of my users. Each row shows whether they pay (yes/no) and the actions they took in their first 7 days, with timestamps. 1. Compare paying and non-paying users. 2. List the 5 actions most common among payers and least common among non-payers, with the share of each group that took them. 3. Tell me which single action looks most like the moment people got the value and explain why. 4. Flag anything where the sample is too small to trust.
Talk to your first paying customers. Ask what they did first and when they knew it was worth paying for. Their answers point to the action.
Once you know the action, sign up to your own product as a brand-new user. Write down every screen, field and click before you reach it. Most products ask for far more than they need on day one: job titles, company size, profile photos, preferences, a tour. Every one of those is a place to leave.
"For us, it was removing a lot of forms. You go straight into filling your username, uploading your CV and applying for jobs. We don't care about anything else."
Here's every step in my sign-up flow, from the landing page to [THE ACTION], in order: [paste the list of screens and fields] For each step, tell me whether to cut it, move it to after [THE ACTION] or keep it, with one line on why. Then write the shortest possible flow from sign-up to [THE ACTION] and the copy for each screen that's left.
Count the steps before and after. The aim is the fewest clicks between signing up and the action.
A user who reaches the action in their first session has seen why your product exists. One who doesn't might never come back to find out. So this is the number to watch: of the people who signed up, how many reached the action before they left?
Simple tools are fine. A product analytics tool lets you send these as events and build a funnel from sign-up to the action. If you're not there yet, a spreadsheet works: one row per sign-up, a column for each event time and a yes/no column for the first session.
My app is built with [your stack]. I want to track whether new users reach [THE ACTION] in their first session. 1. Add these events, each with a user ID and timestamp: signed_up, [the_action], paid. 2. Mark a user as first-session activated if [the_action] happens within [30] minutes of signed_up. 3. Send the events to [your analytics tool]. If I don't have one, write them to a table I can export as a spreadsheet. 4. Give me a weekly view: sign-ups, how many reached [THE ACTION] in their first session and how many of those went on to pay. Show me the changes before you make them.
When you change the flow in step 2, this is the number that tells you whether it worked. If it goes up and paying users follow, keep the change.
Don't rebuild your whole product. Find the action, cut one step in front of it and start counting who gets there in their first session.
Your price is usually never the problem. Most sign-ups never get to that paywall.
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What this guide won't do: it won't set up your tracking for you and it won't promise you a conversion rate. The 3,000 sign-ups came from one pre-launch ad campaign and they're not a benchmark. Every product's key action is different, so test what you find before you rebuild around it.
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