#28 Samuel Hulick (Founder, UserOnboard.com) - Find a niche you love, specialize, succeed

The Hacking UI Podcast - with Sagi Shrieber & David Tintner

Episode #28: Samuel Hulick Our guest today is none other than Samuel Hulick, Founder of

UserOnboard.

Samuel started as a developer, and eventually found himself focusing on UX design and customer success. That led him to find that one crucial part of the experience that leads customers to succeed with any product: User Onboarding. From there, he only kept moving forward. He became a user onboarding specialist, founded UserOnboard.com, and wrote a book about it.

Samuel wrote his e-book, 'The Elements of User Onboarding', entirely with Keynote. The book was later developed into a whole package, where he shares teardowns, tactics, and strategies from his experience.

Today, Samuel is consulting for companies, helping them to scale their business with his wide range of specialties.

In this episode, Samuel shared with us the most important steps you should be taking in your organization in order to scale your operation and make costumers successful in your product.

This is the third episode of the third season of the Hacking UI podcast - 'Scaling a Career'.

In this season we have 10 amazing guests for you, who are leaders and influencers from a variety of different backgrounds. Design managers, development leaders, entrepreneurs and product geniuses that we admire, and we'll be sharing a new episode every Thursday.

Please support our amazing sponsors

Invision:

This episode is brought to you by Invision, an amazing product design platform that you probably already know about.

In the past 5 years we’ve seen Invision come from a design collaboration tool, into a massive suite of products for the entire design process all the way from ideation to handing off design to developers:
They have tools like Freehand which you can use for ideation, wireframing and getting feedback from clients.
They are soon releasing Invision Studio which is a robust design tool including micro-interactions.
They have Invision Prototypes which we all use and love to create prototypes and collaborate with stakeholders,
and of course, Invision Inspect which allows you to handoff your Invision prototypes to developers directly from within Sketch or Photoshop.

So, if there is any chance in the world you’re not a part of the Invision community of users (which chances are slim that you aren’t because according to their stats they have around 3.5 million users) we really recommend that you check them out, you can head over to Invisionapp.com and start right away.

Freshbooks:

Freshbooks is the perfect accounting software for freelance designers and developers or creative entrepreneurs with a small business. They have some really powerful features like integration with stripe, expense tracking and a customer support team who actually works with you to find the perfect solution. If you’re looking to get some understanding of your business and keep track of things without wasting hours of your time, then this is exactly what you need.

Try it free for 30 days →

Links from the show

• Samuel's UserOnboard.com
• Twitter (@samuelhulick), (@UserOnboard)
• Samuel's book package - The Elements of User Onboarding
• Patrick McKenzie's (also known as 'patio11') Website, Kalzumeus.com

I Love this podcast - now what?

Show your love #1 - Talk: Talk about it with friends and get the word out! We started this podcast in order to learn and would love to see others learn from it too.

Show your love #2 - Leave a review: Review us on iTunes and tell us which guest you'd like us to bring on the show next. When you review us it lets us know that you like the show and that we should keep doing it. Check out the following image, which describes exactly how to leave a review in one minute.

Show your love #3 - Share: Share this page on Twitter, Facebook, or wherever you can :)

Key points from this episode:

• Learn about Samuel’s background and how he got to focusing on customers success and user onboarding ever since. [00:03:50]
• Learn about working with companies and what to focus on. [00:04:55]
• Find out how emails are a great tool to discover what it is you want users to do, and how it correlates with customer success. [00:07:33]
• Learn about ‘life cycle’ emails, and how they advance your progress within the product. [00:09:35]
• Understand which team players are in an organization and what are the tools they use. [00:12:45]
• Learn about the economy of scaling your product, and how to do so. [00:16:20]
• Find out how Samuel wrote his e-book (that was made in Keynote) on user onboarding, where he shares all of his tactics, strategy and what he learned. [00:22:05]
• Understand how writing and documenting is not only a great way to market yourself, it is actually helping the world. [00:25:15]
• Samuel shares his secrets on how to scale your operation and legacy [00:29:25]
• Learn about Samuel’s business plan which is what he calls ‘Quarterly Retreats’, and how it is a great way to set your business goals. [00:34:15]
• Samuel shares some tips on how workshops is a great way to take an idea and grow it. [00:37:15]
• Find out why lifecycle emails excite Samuel the most, and why companies should implement that in their organizations. [00:40:00]
• Learn about micro-copy and how it facilitates meaningful progress in your product. [00:43:00]
• Understand how copy and emails are great discovery tools to check your goals and bring a lot of user engagement to your product. [00:46:00]
• Samuel shares his inside steps to successful user recipes that you should definitely implement in your organization. [00:49:10]
• Samuel’s tips for designers and freelancers. [00:56:00]

About The Hacking UI Podcast The Hacking UI podcast is hosted by Sagi Shrieber and David Tintner, a designer, and developer who are also both entrepreneurs, bloggers, productivity/time-hacking maniacs, and all around tech geeks.

We are thrilled to launch the third season of the Hacking UI podcast, where we hack our way through product design, development, and creative entrepreneurship.

Our first season, was called ‘Scaling a Design Team’, the Second season was called ‘Scaling a Side Project’ and we’ve decided to call this season - ‘Scaling a Career’.

In this season we have 10 amazing guests for you, who are leaders and influencers from a variety of different backgrounds. We have design managers, development leaders, entrepreneurs an...