Led and designed edrone's freemium onboarding, bringing in 5050 stores in 11 months with 7.8% converting to paid
Problem
A small store had no way into edrone. For ten years every customer was set up by Support's onboarding team, and that cost made small stores not worth acquiring.
Freemium had to reach them with nobody doing the setup, and almost nobody had ever run edrone alone.
edrone is a marketing automation platform for online stores. It sends automated emails and newsletters that bring shoppers back to buy, for example after they leave a full cart or to nudge them towards their next order.
Research
Research ran from before launch through the 11 months after it:
- Around 100 user interviews, run with the 2 freemium specialists on my team, on what stores expect and where they get stuck
- Onboarding team calls and exit calls, to see what the team set up by hand for every new customer and why stores left
- Session recordings, to see where stores hesitate or drop off
- Onboarding analytics I set up myself in
Amplitude, read alongside 
Tableau and 
Vitally - Competitors and other self-serve SaaS, to see how they onboard new accounts
AmplitudeSolution
Every part of freemium went through many iterations, the onboarding most of all.
- Shop connected to edrone first, then 3 automations switched on in onboarding cards. Stores clicked "next" without reading, and were angry when emails went out.
- Shop connected first, then a checklist and walkthrough for stores to set things up themselves. Most were new to marketing automation and did not see the value.
- Shop connected first, then live events with suggested tasks, like "someone just added to cart, turn on abandoned cart". Stores still did not act, and some waited for a call.
- Everything ready first, shop connected last. An onboarding widget walks the store through what is already built, and it connects its shop only after its aha moment. Fewer stores connected, but those that did knew what they would get, and the share of active stores kept climbing.
What shipped:
- Freemium, not a trial. Small stores need time to grow before a paid plan makes sense, and freemium let them stay with us until it did.
- Built from the store's URL alone. AI generates every email ready to send, from layout and images to copy.
- Everything on from the start, with 7 core automations across channels, a pop-up to grow the customer base, Contacts activation and a widget showing recent purchases.
- 1-click shop connection, which I pushed hard for, since connecting the shop was a major blocker.
I led it with 2 developers and 2 freemium specialists, and built parts myself in 
Codex.
CodexIt was love at first sight. As soon as I set it up on your freemium plan, I could use it freely with the small base we had. […] We moved to the paid plan simply because our base grew. There was never even a moment of asking if it was worth it.
Outcome
Ten years of the sales-led model built 2500 paying stores. In 11 months freemium signed up twice that many stores, free and paid, with nobody from Support setting them up, and its paying stores grew the paid base by 16%. An active store is one with its automations running.
| Cohort | ACTIVE STORES |
|---|---|
| May 2025 | 44% |
| June 2025 | 33.6% |
| July 2025 | 40.9% |
| August 2025 | 23.2% |
| September 2025 | 37% |
| October 2025 | 51.5% |
| November 2025 | 56.4% |
| December 2025 | 49.9% |
| January 2026 | 74% |
| February 2026 | 77.6% |
| March 2026 | 80.3% |
The onboarding ended at the integration. After that, nothing in the app led a store to its next step, only Intercom messages did, and that is the part I would design next.