In case you don’t know: I'm building Redreach, a Reddit marketing tool that helps companies find and engage with their audience on Reddit. It’s got some really cool companies using it so far, which is exciting.
I want to share with you two quick lessons on how I approach design problems. I get that question asked a lot so I thought I divide it into two parts.
The first one part will be about how I redesigned the Redreach onboarding system and the second how I approached creating a new component for the Redreach landing page as well as some general, hopefully helpful, takeaways.
Why I scrapped my onboarding completely
Here's what I learned recently - having a great product means nothing if people bounce during onboarding.
My first onboarding flow technically worked. People could sign up and start using Redreach. But I kept noticing this painful pattern in my analytics: users would hit the onboarding and just... disappear.
The conversion numbers were quite brutal. Not because the product was bad, but because the first experience was killing people's motivation before they could even see what Redreach could do for them.
The issues were subtle but deadly:
- Too much information upfront without any interaction
- No clear sense of progress or achievement
- It felt probably like filling out tax forms instead of discovering a helpful new tool
So I decided to redo it from scratch. Here’s the full video:
How I approach design problems
I get asked about my design process a lot, so I made a quick walkthrough of how I tackled a new landing page component.
My approach is pretty simple: start with the user's actual goal, not what I think they should want.
For onboarding, people aren't trying to "complete setup" - they're trying to figure out if this thing can actually help their business. So instead of asking them to configure everything upfront, I focused on showing value immediately.
For landing page components, I'm not just trying to make something pretty. I'm trying to communicate why someone should care about Redreach in the first place.
The key is making design decisions based on user intent, not just what looks cool. Though making it look cool definitely doesn't hurt.
Both redesigns should hopefully boost conversion, but honestly, the process of thinking through these problems clearly was just as valuable as the final result.
Want to see more of the Redreach design progress?
Here’s a few more from X:
