Onboarding · Product advisory · SaaS
Diagnosing why a SaaS platform was losing users before they even started
An employee development platform was haemorrhaging prospective users before they created an account. The team assumed it was a marketing problem. It was not.
400%
Improvement in signup completion
1,400+
Assessments completed post-launch
8 months
From audit to launched product
The situation
Upskillable is a SaaS platform for employee development, operating in Saudi Arabia during a period of intense workforce reform driven by Vision 2030. The business had a working product, a clear market, and genuine demand — but it was struggling to convert the people it was reaching into users, let alone paying customers.
The team was focused on marketing. More campaigns, more outreach. The problem was not acquisition. The problem was that people who arrived at the product were leaving before they did anything useful.
What I was brought in to do
My role was to work out what was actually going wrong and recommend what to do about it. That meant starting with research, not assumptions. Rather than accepting the team’s hypothesis that marketing was the problem, I pushed to understand the product from the outside in. We ran structured interviews with HR and L&D Managers — the actual buyers — to understand how they thought about employee assessment and what they needed from a tool like this.
What we found was a gap between what the product was communicating and what users were looking for. The platform was positioning itself too broadly, the onboarding asked for too much too early, and there was no clear path from landing on the product to understanding what it did.
The diagnosis
The product problem
Users arrived without a clear sense of what Upskillable was for. The interface was cluttered, the value proposition was unclear, and the signup flow asked for decisions users were not ready to make.
The market problem
Competitors focused on hiring assessment. Upskillable’s real strength — ongoing employee development — was buried. The positioning was not communicating the actual differentiation.
The onboarding problem
There was no freemium path. New users had to commit before they could experience any value. Time-to-value was too long, and most people dropped off before they got there.
The localisation problem
The product had not accounted for the specific context of Saudi Arabia. The platform name was difficult for Arabic speakers to pronounce, and there was no Arabic-language version.
What I recommended
- Reposition the product clearly around employee development — not hiring — and make that distinction explicit from the first screen.
- Redesign the onboarding flow to remove friction at the top of the funnel. Ask for less upfront. Get users to a moment of genuine value before asking them to commit.
- Introduce a freemium pathway — a meaningful free experience that demonstrates the product’s value and creates a natural reason to upgrade.
- Build a proper right-to-left Arabic version. Not a translation bolted on, but a version designed for how Arabic speakers read and interact with interfaces.
- Simplify the brand and visual identity to reduce cognitive load and improve memorability, particularly for the product name.
What the client said before we started
We had a lot of support calls because users weren’t sure how to use the platform. There was a lot of clutter. Our developers and support were doing a ton of work.
— Upskillable stakeholderThe results
Eight months from the initial audit, the relaunched platform was live. The results validated the diagnosis:
400%
Improvement in signup completion
1,400+
Assessments completed in the first period post-launch
2
Languages supported — English and full Arabic
The core finding — that this was an onboarding and positioning problem, not a marketing problem — was confirmed by the numbers. More spend on acquisition would have poured users into a leaky funnel. Fixing the funnel first meant every subsequent campaign worked harder.