jenny-obrien

I'm a former business journalist who's fascinated by the intersection of tech and business strategy — in particular how the right solution can transform an idea into reality. I specialize in ROI, data privacy, and identity.

Business Content Manager

Jenny O'Brien

Head of Customer Success &mdash; EMEA Aoife Crowley on delivering results despite complexity, rapid growth



_EDITOR’S NOTE: Welcome to the EMEA Blog Takeover, where our EMEA employees take over the Auth0 blog to share success stories from the region. This week, you’ll meet our thought leaders across the pond, discover some of our most compelling use cases, and read about the trends that influence how we do business._

As a customer success manager, [_Aoife Crowley_](https://www.linkedin.com/in/aoifecrowley/) contributed to Auth0’s rapid expansion across EMEA, a region that saw [_550% year-over-year growth in 2018_](https://auth0.com/blog/auth0-continues-rapid-expansion-in-emea/). Her ability to help Auth0 customers execute quickly despite the complexity of identity has led to her recent promotion to Head of Customer Success for EMEA.

![Auth0 employee Aoife Crowley hiking](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/4pAnhMJVAaWxJzJ1fDkfFM/e96b4d542c5f366d71ac32cfffc53af4/meet-the-expert-aoife-crowley_aoife-crowley-hiking)

A former product manager, Aoife’s is skilled at defining, scoping, and validating varied approaches and solutions, while having co-founded her own tech startup has given her a deep understanding of the nexus of tech and business.

We talked about the big investments Auth0 is making in the Customer Success team in EMEA, the complex challenges she’s helping customers best, and her advice for helping companies work more effectively with enterprises.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="How Customer Success Manager - EMEA .@aoifacrowley used her expertise as a startup co-founder and product manager to drive 550% YOY growth in EMEA."/>

**What kinds of identity challenges are Auth0 customers solving in EMEA?**

In the EMEA region, many of our customers are running digital transformation projects to remove legacy systems, modernize to microservices architecture and refresh their customer journeys. Often these projects are multi-year initiatives, with Identity being a single piece within the initiative.

We can assist with these use cases by helping to scope a phased rollout approach, which can often be used as a model across multiple regions or projects, and track progress to goals and milestones. We also ensure customers are aware of all the features which may benefit their use cases, like our migration without a password change, the possibility of integration with various API gateways, and our ability to act as both a service provider and identity provider.

We support massive customers with very spiky usage patterns – for example, TV shows with live voting apps, global hardware companies with products that require account setup on Christmas Day, retailers with Black Friday promotions, and travel companies with flash sales. Our Post-Sales teams can work with these types of customers who have both scale and spikes, to ensure that their architecture is robust and ready.

**Tell us about the investments Auth0 is making in EMEA:**

In the three-and-half years since Auth0 came to EMEA, we’ve seen huge growth. Our customers have grown in both number and usage, with deeper integrations and increasingly complex use cases. We want to share that expertise with new customers as well, so we’re making really big investments into the Customer Success team in EMEA.

Previously we were focused a lot more on the account management skill set, but we’ve seen that having a blend of technical abilities as well as business acumen leads to the greatest customer success. Based on that success, [_we’re adding multiple people to the team_](https://auth0.com/careers/positions?areas=Customer%20Success) and requiring technical abilities for the customer success role.

**Since we’re hiring, let’s dig a little deeper into what it takes to succeed at customer success:**

This is a cross-functional type of role, and you're kind of the nexus to all these different nodes. So on the customer side obviously you're speaking to people from C level all the way down to developers, and on the Auth0 side, it's similar. I really enjoy that interaction, and it reminds me a lot, actually, of when I was in product management. There are a lot of transferrable skills. When you're dealing with customers you need to get beyond what it looks like they want and understand what the ask is behind that.

So actually scoping what someone is trying to achieve based on their goals, understanding the requirements and maybe some of the barriers or blockers that might get in the way of their success and gathering information about their team and also making sure they have all the information they need about our service, and then building consensus as well because sometimes a customer might want to do everything at once. And our recommendation would be, okay, why don't you start with phase one and then build to a phase two or phase three. And that can give them a much clearer path to getting to where they want to go rather than following what they initially wanted to do. So I suppose building that consensus is a key part which I took from product management as well.

**How did co-founding a startup help build your empathy for the customer journey?**

The type of startup I ran was a hardware device aimed at women who were having trouble conceiving. As part of my role, I used to conduct interviews with women who were perhaps having issues and they might have gone through IVF. They might have been tracking their health in multiple different ways, and I would try to understand what that felt like, what would make that experience better, and use those soft skills on a very emotive issue to try to build out, how could we create a product and a feature set that would meet these requirements for these individuals.

And again, I think those skills are essentially what you're doing no matter what type of project you're running. You're trying to just speak to people, understand what are your motivations as a person. Why do you want to do this? Is it because it's your business's key goal for the year? Is it because it's your team and you're the head of the team and you want a promotion and you want this to go really well? Is it because the market is shifting and your business is trying to keep up with industry trends? Is it because you are responsible for maintaining and supporting these old systems, and it’s slowing you down when it comes to innovation? Where are the motivations coming from? And then that can help customer success assist, bring them down the right path first, but also talk to the things that they want in a way that will resonate with the customer as well.

**On what most companies miss when working with enterprises:**

If you don't have a customer success team or a customer success style relationship, it can become quite transactional. So you can end up focusing a lot on technical support: how do I do it; here's how you do it. And not taking a step back and saying, well, why do you want to do that? Or, I noticed you have 17 questions all roughly around the same topic, and if I look at them all together, I can see that perhaps you're just going down the wrong path entirely. For example, they're trying to build something, not in a standards-based way. They can have technical questions on how to do that, and we can answer those questions, but the real question is why aren't you using the standard? Why aren't you following the approved path for this? And do you know about it? And that educational piece.

So I think that's where sometimes enterprises can underserve their customers by essentially just answering their questions and not challenging them and not asking, "Why do you want to do this? So what are you trying to accomplish?" Because sometimes people think they know what they want, but when you step back, it isn't actually what they want, and the question they're asking is the wrong question.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="What do most companies miss when they work with enterprises? Customer Success Manager - EMEA .@aoifacrowley shares her insights."/>

**What advice do you have for companies looking to delight their customers?**

You have to put yourself in the customer's position and be empathetic and understand that most people are just trying to get something done in a certain way probably for reasonable reasons. So even if from your perspective, it looks like what they're doing is very inadvisable or strange or isn't following the documentation, very often there is a business reason or a very understandable reason why. So getting to the bottom of that is really the first step.

**How can Auth0 customers access the customer success team?**

Our Enterprise Customers have access to the Customer Success team. The team takes a tiered approach and works with customers from the corporate level to FTSE 100, with resources dedicated according to the size and scale of the accounts. The Customer Success contact information will be introduced to the team at the time of signing their contract, and they take it from there.

In other words, when someone signs a contract with us, it’s the starting line. We stand alongside their dev team to map out a strategy and help promote the investment within their business. It’s all about delivering the value we promised as quickly as possible.

<include src="asides/AboutAuth0" />


Meet the Experts: Aoife Crowley

How Customer Success Architect Julian Lywood-Mulcock applies music to identity challenges.



![Auth0 Customer Success Architect Julian Lywood-Mulcock playing piano](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/71DTBXKWgjXX30VSLht5Yb/5bc0ee47d477b221be6ed8e1405ed4fc/auth0-meet-the-experts-julian-lywood-mulcock)

Playing flute, violin, and piano gave Customer Success Architect [Julian Lywood-Mulcock](https://www.linkedin.com/in/julianwilliam/) a thorough understanding of how each player comes together to form an orchestra. Although his soloist career never brought him his big break, it did lead him to obtain a Ph.D. from [Durham University](https://www.dur.ac.uk/) in machine creativity by using music as a vehicle of interaction between himself and an AI.

During a long stint at Accenture, Julian worked on challenging identity problems for businesses across the UK and Europe, until a customer need for [passwordless authentication](https://auth0.com/passwordless) confirmed his interest in working at Auth0.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="Think you might need professional services help with your identity solution. Auth0 Customer Service Architect-EMEA @jlnwlm shares the questions you need to ask."/>

We sat down with Julian to talk about how his musical background informs his work with customers, why you need to solve identity first in any AI scenario, and how he helps customers work through identity pros and cons.

**On how Julian’s musical background informs his understanding of system architecture**: 

People talk about music being very much like mathematics. I think there's an element of truth in that. There's always patterns and there's always something within it that makes it music. Designing system architectures is very much like music. You're dictating your orchestra, and that orchestra in this context just happens to be a lot of systems or a particular application.

**On why identity should be the first consideration in any AI scenario**:

If your business is looking at using AI services, get your identity services in check first. Because if you don't, you're going to have a hell of a problem trying to get an understanding of your customers and also your AI understanding your customers, too.

**On why he sticks with identity**:

There's a pattern in music called an antecedent and a consequent. An antecedent is like your call, and your consequent is your response — very much a dialog, which is how I like to think of identity. The challenge is making sure everyone (or everything) knows who (or what) it’s talking to — identity is an integral part of having a dialog between at least two parties. 
I've stuck with identity because I enjoy clarifying that dialogue. 

**On why identity matters**:

I think one of the core reasons is that our customers want to understand who their customers are.
 
Identity is integral in the B2C domain because our customers need to understand their customers: who they are and what they want so they can better communicate with them, provide personalized experiences, and customize their products. From a marketing perspective, this allows our customers to be more accurate in what they provide to their customers.

In the other domains, like the B2B domain and the B2E domain, where marketing personalized experiences are lower priority, giving end-users easy access to systems with a single set of credentials is immensely powerful, making secure and reportable use of systems a click of the 'Sign In' button.

**On what’s in Julian’s toolkit when he works with customers**:

* Security comes first. How do I mitigate as much risk as I can for this customer's customers? 
* You have to be quite confident in knowing that what you're saying: hey, here's the best practice, and this is why. 
* Understanding who's in the room. Am I speaking to a business owner? Am I speaking to a developer? That is absolutely integral to success because there is no point talking to a business stakeholder about access tokens because they're just going to switch off. 
* Knowing that you can't possibly know everything there is to know about identity — you have to want to learn. And you need to want to apply your knowledge.

**On working with Auth0’s Professional Services Team**:

One of the best parts of working with the professional services team is the breadth of understanding of everybody within it.

**On what Julian can do at Auth0 Professional Services that he can’t do at another company**: 

Deliver. It's the ability to deliver an end-to-end solution, which enables our customers to offload identity services and focus their resources on other priorities. Plus, the satisfaction of knowing that millions of people worldwide are using our services.

**On the most intriguing customer problems Julian faces regularly**: 

* Creating a single identity for multiple brands — we can create very specific tenants for customers and link that either to a database that they already have or we can link that to a master tenant, as it were, which is kind of a big tenant that ties everything together. There are many different ways of doing it, and all of them have their pros and cons. And then it's a business decision.

* Data Migrations — If you're moving identities, that means you've got to [move secure information from one place to another](https://auth0.com/docs/migrations). And if you don't have the capability to move that securely, then that means that customer is going to need to reset the password if you move them. Auth0’s lazy migration process means that our customers can move their passwords and that whole identity across from wherever it is right now into Auth0 in as secure a manner as possible, mitigating as much risk as possible. 

* Passwordless — You do not need to store passwords. What we're saying by using passwordless is actually using other methods to verify that you are the person you say you are. This mitigates password breaches because you simply don't have passwords to breach. However, one of the problems is that it blows customers’ minds when you talk to them about this. Very often the user experience teams are most against passwordless experiences, because they have highly customized flows that are dependent upon the whole sign in: you enter a username/password, then you do this, then you do that. From a UX perspective, passwordless could be perceived to break that very familiar pattern. Again, it's a pros/cons case. "Here's what we can do, here's what we can't do, and here's how it's going to benefit you as a business."

**On how modularizing helped solve a customer’s digital transformation challenges**: 

We had a customer who is going through a major, major, major digital transformation. They're moving two different platforms. One is their identity platform. That's us. And the other is their bookings platform. 

They've got millions and millions of users all around Europe. In terms of what they have today, which is a legacy architecture that cannot be unpicked in any timely or logical way. We provided the ability to migrate all of their users (without having to reset their passwords!), and the identity services those users sign in with, in one deployment. This is a leap for them, and was a core component of why Auth0 is their partner. We continue to deliver improvements to their identity services with milestones set for introducing Social Login, and bringing in federated B2B services to their booking platform.

**On what the customer gets out of a whiteboarding session**: 

Confidence in us. Customers want to know how long a solution is going to take. And nine times out of 10 our time to market raises eyebrows because it's that quick.

**On the value of a providing security-focused opinion regardless of whether or not customers follow Auth0’s advice**:

There is not one person that I have met or engaged with at Auth0 where the mitigation of risk is not a priority.

I had a customer very recently ask me about how frictionless we can make a particular experience. And we went through some of the patterns they had already documented. We took it back and we reviewed it in the office, and I just went, "Hold on a second. Is this really what they're asking?" So we realized that there was this massive security hole in what they'd asked us to do. Knowing there is a large expansion opportunity with this customer, I told them, "You are seriously putting your end users at risk." That also puts our expansion opportunity at risk. 

But I know that it's my job to make sure those end users are secure.

**On advice for customers considering professional services**: 

Ask yourself how you’re managing identity today. If the answer is "I’m not sure" or 
"Well, we've got this here and we've got that there, and sometimes we do this, and sometimes… And isn't there somebody over in that department that does that?" Please reach out. We can help.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="Find out how modularizing helped solve one major customer’s identity challenges and other advice from Auth0 Customer Service Architect-EMEA @jlnwlm."/>


Meet the Experts: Julian Lywood-Mulcock

df6c864847fba9687d962cb80b482764?size=200 avatar

df6c864847fba9687d962cb80b482764?size=200

Martin Gontovnikas, a.k.a Gonto, is a software engineer at heart who moved to the ‘dark side’ and became VP of Marketing at Auth0. He considers himself lucky to have found a way to combine his two passions and apply his engineering thinking model to marketing.<br/><br/> Gonto’s analytical thinking is a huge driver of his data-driven approach to marketing strategy and experimental design. He is based in the Bay area, and in his spare time, can be found eating gourmet food at the best new restaurants, visiting every local brewery he can find, or traveling the globe in search of new experiences.

Former SVP of Marketing and Growth at Auth0

Martin Gontovnikas

No two apps are identical, and so no two user onboarding processes should look the same. However, there are universal lessons to help you onboard new users.



Everyone knows that retained customers are more valuable than acquired ones. With mobile apps especially, where only 2.3% of customers remain after 30 days, your loyal customers are the most important thing to your business.

There are many theories about why customers churn so quickly in their early days, some believe downloading is so easy it’s basically noncommittal, while others believe that competition between apps drives users to switch frequently.

The less-discussed and more obvious reason is this: Most apps suck at onboarding new users.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="Most apps suck at onboarding new users."/>

It doesn’t matter how much long term value your app provides, and it doesn’t matter how many customers your marketing strategy brings on, if you can’t get users from day 1  to day 30 without losing their business, your business has no chance.

With this in mind, we compiled the seven most important lessons for onboarding new users.

## 1. Real World Use-Cases Are All Your Users Care About

The goal of onboarding is to show your users how to get value out of your product. While it can be tempting to explain the technicals of your product, the various features you spent hours developing, this doesn’t help users find value. You need to show them the direct benefits your product gives them, and how to use your product to achieve them.

A great example of focusing onboarding around real life use-cases is Spring, the mobile shopping app that recently raised [$25 million](http://fortune.com/2015/04/16/spring-raises-25-million/) off of a $90 million valuation. As a shopping app, Spring doesn’t have the most complicated UI: You scroll through and click what you want. But through clever onboarding, they show users the particular, real-life value Spring gives:


![Spring Onboarding](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/6PRzXMfhMISEpiuoJDqkku/996503dcd13b27c2ef3ca2dfae6435b5/spring-onboarding)

Spring’s onboarding could detail the behavioral analytics behind their recommendation engine, or the infrastructure behind their daily updates, but instead they focus on how users actually get value from their app.

### Key takeaway:

Always focus your onboarding process on showing users how your app makes their lives better. If they can’t see a direct connection between the problems they face and the solutions your app provides, everything else is irrelevant. Your app's technical specs, development innovations, and success metrics should all take a backseat to the actual benefits it provides your users.

## 2. Your Product Itself Is Your Best Onboarding Tool

Your onboarding process should educate users by making them use your app. Think about the video games you played as a child (or last night). The early levels always introduced the basic building blocks of gameplay, before asking you to put it all together in harder levels later on.

Your onboarding process should operate along these same lines. You want to get users engaged in your app, and slowly introduce more complexity. You want them to learn your app by actually using it.

A great example of this sort of onboarding is Quartz, a news app that gives users the news through a texting format. Their onboarding looks like this:

![Quartz User Onboarding](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/5fB2Q7TYviwEmAVx4VERnv/1db7cb5b10f3149bcffdc791ec2ce05b/quartz-onboarding)

Just by using the app, users are seamlessly onboarded.

### Key takeaway:

The best way to learn an app is to use it. Reading articles on how an app works gives you some cursory knowledge, but doesn’t come close to the familiarity you develop by actually exploring it.

## 3. Personalization Is The Fastest Route To Your “Aha!” Moment

Your “Aha!” moment is the point in onboarding when users finally “get” your product’s value. One of the fastest ways to do this is to tailor their onboarding experience to their personal information, by using social authentication.

Think about social apps like Instagram, that onboard users by connecting them with friends from other social networks. When users log into Instagram for the first time, and immediately see the photos of their best friends, they quickly internalize the value of the platform.

With Auth0’s social authentication, you can pull any information stored on their social accounts (friends, location, birthday, etc.). In your “Connections > Social” dashboard, you can pick which social platforms to support just by toggling a switch:

![Socual Connections](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/4VGoq2xRks7Yvvek1XcWAk/c4bacedff3f6dd5114ee2c3669a54538/social-connections)

### Key takeaway:

The whole point of onboarding is to teach users how to get value from your app. Make it easier for them to relate the process to their own life by building it around their personal information, which easily attained via Auth0’s social connections. With Auth0, you can easily integrate information from over [30 social platforms](https://auth0.com/docs/identityproviders) by clicking a button.

## 4. Successful Onboarding Takes A Human Touch

Every startup knows the importance of automation. It’s how you service 10,000 customers with a team of 20. It is for this reason that so many companies onboard users just by using their documentation. It scales well, but it takes away any personal connection. This doesn’t have to be a trade-off.

Kristen Craft, director of business development for [Wistia](http://wistia.com/), a video platform for businesses, [explains that with video](http://wistia.com/blog/video-familiarity) “You can express the full range of human emotions, explain things in great clarity, and generally appeal to the viewer's humanity.”

The benefit to this, in her words, is that “One video can speak to thousands of customers.”

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="One video can speak to thousands of customers."/>

Wistia’s own onboarding process reflects this. Instead of just giving you a series of articles to read, they give you this 5-minute video at the beginning of the [onboarding process](https://wistia.com/community/posts/jaio/are-you-using-video-in-your-new-user-onboarding):

![Wistia Onboarding](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/7a6pJrsvwuWPdlqaP40wqb/53c1bfc116416a11b09b9c51bccd3bcb/wistia-onboarding)

Users have someone personally walk them through the product, and it scales to any size.

### Key takeaway:

The idea that you must sacrifice personal interaction for automation and scalability is a false dilemma. By including video instruction in your onboarding, you can scale human connection infinitely. Using video also allows you to demonstrate how your product works, condensing a ton of information into a relatively short period of time without overwhelming your users.

## 5. Users Need You To Meet Them Halfway With Targeted Email

Just because a user is in the onboarding process, it doesn’t mean you’ve locked down their business. According to a study by Oracle, within the first 90 days of the customer lifecycle is when they are [most likely to churn](http://conversionxl.com/onboarding-emails/). The best way to get out in front of this problem is with targeted email.

Auth0’s [Segment rule](https://auth0.com/docs/monitoring/sending-events-to-segmentio) allows you to segment your email list according to whether a user is logging in, or has just signed up. It's as easy as copy + pasting a block of code:

```js
function (user, context, callback) {
  if (context.protocol === 'delegation') {
    return callback(null, user, context);
  }

  const request = require('request');

  if (context.stats.loginsCount > 1) {
    sendEvent('Logged in');
  } else {
    sendEvent('Signed up');
  }

  function sendEvent(e) {
    const sioTrack = {
      userId: user.user_id,
      event: e,
      properties: {
        application: context.clientName
      },
      context: {
        ip: context.request.ip,
        userAgent: context.request.userAgent
      }
    };

    // Segment API returns 200 OK for all its request. For possible errors
    // you must use Segment's Debugger (https://segment.com/docs/libraries/http/#errors)
    request({
      method: 'POST',
      url: 'https://api.segment.io/v1/track',
      headers: {
        'Content-type' : 'application/json',
        'Authorization': 'Basic ' + Buffer.from(configuration.SEGMENTIO_WRITE_KEY + ':').toString('base64')
      },
      body: JSON.stringify(sioTrack),
    });
  }

  callback(null, user, context);
}
```

From within the Segment dashboard, you can toggle on the [Customer.io](http://customer.io/) integration to leverage Customer.io’s email automation. Engaging customers at the beginning of user onboarding will boost retention without you spending any extra time.

### Key takeaway:

Personal engagement early in the useronboarding process lets users know you are invested in them, and increases the chances they’ll stick around. With targeted email automation, you can do this affordably and at scale. You can even take things a step farther and create a [custom rule](https://auth0.com/docs/rules) to target users based on more specific attributes, like recent activity or personal information.

## 6. Decision Fatigue Is The User Onboarding Killer

Asking users to make too many decisions early in the onboarding process will mentally exhaust them, until they’re not interested in your service anymore. This tiring process, called “decision fatigue” is the reason judges grant [65% ](http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/14/when-lunch-is-served-so-is-justice/)more convicts parole in the morning, when they’re fresh, than in the evening, when they’re exhausted.

With your app, you have to strike a balance between collecting necessary information and wearing your users out. The key to this is to figure out what the most essential information you need to collect is, and to ask for it incrementally. The app that is perhaps the best at this is Duolingo:

![Duoling User Onboarding](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/2atrcN3janLc19z3yrv7Kk/831f832214de10ce8d264756e3dd6ed8/duolingo-onboarding)

After you click to sign up, these are the first three screens you see. You make three decisions, and you are all set up to start learning a new language with a complete plan.

This gradual collection of information is called [progressive profiling](https://auth0.com/blog/2016/04/18/progressive-profiling/). With Auth0, you can easily implement it with our [Users API](https://auth0.com/docs/api/v2#!/Users/patch_users_by_id). The API collects user metadata in a “bucket” conveniently called “user_metadata” which you can update at any time throughout the customer’s lifecycle.

![Progressive Profiling](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/35hTUTdyiyzxsKjMoBVKdm/3131c86834139591e46b16df5911be21/progressive-profiling)

### Key takeaway:

If you force users to make too many decisions up front, you will mentally exhaust them. That tiredness will translate into inactivity. Avoid this by collecting information progressively, on an as-needed basis. Not only will this boost retention, but it will improve the quality of the data you collect, as users are less likely to hurry through and submit fake data if they’re only filling out a couple forms.

## 7. The Door Must Be Left Open For Users To Come Back

In an ideal world, building an user onboarding process would be a streamlined affair:

1. Identify what customer behaviors lead to retention
2. Build a process that encourages those behaviors and educates users
3. Sit back and enjoy your diminished churn rate

The reality is that no matter how well designed your process is, you can’t completely stop users from leaving during your user onboarding process. People get busy, life gets disrupted, and they bail on your onboarding process midway through.

The trick is this: They haven’t churned. In many of these cases, they’ll be coming back eventually, and you want to make sure when they do they aren’t completely lost. Your user onboarding process doesn’t just have to make it easy for new users to learn your product, it has to let returning users relearn your product quickly.

The way to do that is by centralizing your information somewhere users can easily reference. [Close.io](http://blog.close.io/), a sales CRM, does this with their “Getting Started” email:


![Close.io Getting Started](https://images.ctfassets.net/23aumh6u8s0i/dLeBJfdODzj0z5Tt2Xzja/6b5d78352eeae5112fc4fafd6ad7cc46/closeio-getting-started-emails)

Instead of making returning users restart the whole onboarding process, they give them a map to the various resources they might need to brush up on.

### Key takeaway

Users are going to go away and come back. If you don’t make it easy for them to transition back into using your app, you’re making it easy for them to walk away entirely. Store your onboarding information in a format that allows returning users to go straight to the parts they don’t remember, and doesn’t force them to re-study the parts they already know.


7 Crucial Lessons That Will Save Your User Onboarding

ef2eecee7655f814bd7a9228ba0c6992?s=200 avatar

ef2eecee7655f814bd7a9228ba0c6992?s=200

I'm passionate about startup culture, leadership and employee engagement, coming from the experience of having left big corporate, packed up with my wife and kids and moved from Australia to the US to pursue startup life.

Director of Culture

Clayton Moulynox

“Auth0 introduces pre-release program, Zero To Launch, giving qualifying customers exclusive early access to new features and functionality.”



The pace of innovation in this new world of always-on cloud services is phenomenal.  At Auth0 we live and breathe it everyday – continually releasing updates, service enhancements and amazing new features.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="The pace of innovation in this new world of always-on cloud services is phenomenal."/>

More often than not these improvements to our service stem from the way our customers and partners use our platform.  This eco-system continually challenges us with new use cases, scenarios and requirements - customers, technology partners and solution providers themselves pushing to drive innovation in what they do.  Frankly, it makes me pretty excited!

## 3…2…1… Zero To Launch

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That’s why today I’m pleased to announce our new pre-release program, Zero To Launch.  This program will give qualifying customers and partners exclusive early access to new service enhancements and features plus support and resources to get things happening.  It’s seems a fitting way to continually give more value back to the incredible eco-system of customers and partners who challenge us to do more.

Of course, during the pre-release period, we’ll be eagerly listening out for your feedback and gaining a deeper understanding of how you’re using the new features. It’ll help us make final tweaks to UI and documentation as well as helping our engineering and support teams prepare for general availability.  This isn’t beta testing – features released through Zero To Launch can be used in your live projects.
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## What’s in it For You?


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I haven’t met too many devs, system architects or even just general technology types who don’t love getting their hands on something new.  You can expect to gain knowledge, to be first and to create something new.  It’s a chance to work with like minded people who enjoy pushing the boundaries to create something better.  In fact, we’re developing a recognition and rewards component to ensure you’re honored for your valuable contributions…you could be our first Auth0 MVP!

From a business perspective, it also allows you to look forward and plan – maybe fix a problem, unlock new ways of working, remove a blocker from an existing project or interact with customers in new and different ways.
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## Mission 1: API Authorization-as-a-Service

In launching the program, we’re also launching availability of the first pre-release feature. If you have an API that stores data from users or exposes data from a service and you want to open that API to 3rd party developers, like Facebook or Dropbox does with their APIs, then this is for you. Kick-start a 3rd party developer ecosystem faster than ever before!


## Get on Board

Zero To Launch is currently by invitation only.  Customers and Partners must meet certain criteria including being a paid subscriber or [**recognized technology or solution partner**](https://auth0.com/partners).  If you haven’t received an invitation but think this sounds pretty awesome, then feel free to [**reach out to me directly**](mailto:clayton@auth0.com?subject=ZeroToLaunch) to see if you qualify.


"customer-success"