Designing a self-serve database creation experience to accelerate activation
Overview
Background
As part of Scispot’s journey to Series A, we introduced a 4-week pilot program for prospective customers. While interest was strong, adoption and conversion were low. Activation depended heavily on customer-success–led onboarding, resulting in a 2–3 week time to value and higher early churn.
The redesign focused on enabling faster self-serve activation, reducing onboarding dependency, and improving pilot-to-paid conversion.
Timeline
4 months
Team
1 Product manager
3 Engineers
1 Customer success
Responsibility
Product strategy
User research
Interaction design
Prototyping
User Testing
Design system
Cross-functional Workshops
Problem
Pilot customers were accustomed to traditional scientific database tools and brought those mental models into Scispot. When Scispot’s interaction patterns didn’t align with these expectations, the steps required to create and configure database schemas were not obvious to new users.
As a result, customers relied on the customer success team for setup, which delayed activation.
Problem
Pilot customers relied on customer success to set up their database schema, delaying activation and reducing conversion.
Solution
A redesigned database experience that enables self-serve onboarding and helps teams reach value in days instead of weeks.
Impact
We launched the redesigned Labsheet experience in March 2024 and rolled it out broadly in May 2024. The redesign significantly improved activation speed and pilot conversion.
830k
Revenue generated
40+
Labs onboarded in 2 quarters
3 → 1 week
Reduction in time taken for activation
74%
Conversion of pilot customers