Case Study: Autopilot achieves a 15% higher activation rate and simplified onboarding with FullStory

FullStory Helps Software Company Simplify Onboarding, Boost Activation Rate by 15%

Autopilot, a multi‑channel marketing automation SaaS, struggled with a puzzling onboarding gap: paid test users completed the setup reliably, but real signups repeatedly got stuck and failed to publish their first “journey,” our key activation metric. After hours of watching usability videos the team still couldn’t pinpoint the problem and needed a way to observe real user behavior in the wild.

Adding FullStory session replays revealed that users rarely read onboarding text and clicked frantically, often exiting or mis‑completing steps. Autopilot responded by replacing copy with clear visuals, limiting active click areas to focus tasks, and rebuilding the tutorial to get users to publish a simple two‑email + SMS journey (the product “Aha!”). Those changes lifted activation substantially—from about 30% to 42% after the UI fixes—and produced an activation rate roughly 15% higher than the beta.

Autopilot

Michael Sharkey

Chief Executive Officer