What Is An Aha Moment?

DEFINITION
An ‘aha’ moment is the first time a user understands the value proposition your product offers them, usually accompanied by a sudden realization or insight.

💡Understanding The ‘Aha’ Moment

An ‘aha’ moment occurs very early on in the user journey, ideally within the first few seconds of them discovering your product. 

It’s the miraculous moment of discovery when the user connects your product’s value proposition to an innate problem they’ve been facing in their day-to-day life. It can also be the realization of having a problem they never knew they had before using your product.

An aha moment is the moment when the user transitions seamlessly from being ‘mildly interested’ to ‘heavily invested’ in your product and the unique value it offers to them.

This is why aha moments are so entwined with product-led growth (PLG), a SaaS GTM marketing strategy where the product experience primarily drives your success and growth.

For example, Facebook’s ‘7 friends in 10 days’ is one of the most widely-known aha moments around. Users who added 7 friends in their first 10 days on the platform were far more likely to stay on as long-term users of the platform.

But even before users add friends, they’re already familiar with the utility of Facebook. Their very first ‘aha’ moment would’ve been a friend telling them about it, or coming across an advertisement. 

There are many more examples of aha moments from brands and products we’ve all come to use:

• Google Search: Instant answer to any query
• Airbnb: Completing the first booking
• Uber Eats: Placing a second order within 3 days of the first one

🖋 Takeaway

Aha moments are organic and long-lasting tools to combat churn and create rewarding relationships between products and users.

It’s a myth that an aha moment only occurs when a user onboards to your product. The first aha moment a user should feel is when they come across your product, be it through an advertisement or a video. 

With multiple competitors offering to solve the same problem, your product needs to guide your users towards a series of aha moments within the first few minutes of their discovery–and then encourage them to sign-up. 

You should actively build your product experiences around leading your users towards your top aha moments in the smoothest way possible. Otherwise, you risk seeing customers that never return.

Try to discover what exactly makes your users continue using your product. And what’s making others leave, as well. Identify the aha moments and build your product onboarding journey around them.

What Is An Aha Moment?

An aha moment is when a user understands the value of your product and goes, “Ah, this is what I was looking for.”

Without experiencing the aha moment, the probability of users coming back is slim and in most cases, none.

For this reason, you need to be crystal clear about your aha moments and craft the entire user onboarding experience around leading the user to an aha moment in the quickest way possible.

Formulating your acquisition and retention strategy around your product’s core aha moments will not only net you more users but also help you retain them for longer.

Today, your product might not be unique but the experience it needs to offer to stand out has to be singular. That’s the only way you can retain users. And crafting such an experience needs tremendous insight into user behavior.

The aha moment of your product, according to you, might not be the same according to your users. So, leverage all the data you have access to and get to the bottom of what makes your target audience tick. 

Product-led growth need not be the sole pillar of your acquisition and growth strategy but it needs to be an important element of it. And you can’t do that without harnessing the incomparable potential of aha moments.

How Do You Discover Your Aha Moments?

Identifying aha moments involves treading a long road from researching user behavior to sifting through tons of analytics data to narrowing down to the few experiences that can drive the maximum impact. 

Here are three steps to help you discover your aha moment:

1. Find What Made Users Stay

Use your analytics tools to identify patterns in the behavior of your retained users. You’ll be able to find activation points where your free users willingly became paid users or committed to your product for the long term.

At the same time, reach out to your existing users with a set of questions to understand what makes them stay.

2. Find What Made Them Leave

Now try to identify what made users leave within the first few days or weeks. What were the actions they didn’t take that the retained users did?

Prepare a questionnaire for the past users to get a deeper insight into why they left.

3. Pinpoint Your Aha Moments And Test Them

Narrow down the moments in the user journey that you think made customers realize the value of your product.

Identify the ones that can create the maximum impact for your users and the ones that are the easiest to push new users to.

You can now create product onboarding experiences around each of these select aha moments and test them using in-app messages or onboarding journey checklists.

Throughout your journey of discovering your aha moments, you can’t neglect the importance of understanding and using data. Using data correctly will help you gain better PQLs and get them to conversion quickly. 

Breadcrumbs help you with the heavy-lifting of organizing data scattered throughout your organization to turn your data into revenue.