This $3B Startup Is Losing MILLIONS - Here’s How I Fixed It
In this video, product designer Charles (who has worked with companies valued over $160 billion) critiques the onboarding and signup flow of ElevenLabs, a $3 billion‑valued startup that has raised over $280 million. He reproduces the flow in Figma and walks through each screen, pointing out visual and UX inconsistencies, unnecessary information, and moments where the design breaks user momentum. Charles argues that the current flow mixes product education, updates, and pro‑tips with the core task of creating an account, which dilutes focus, slows conversion, and risks losing users at the critical first step. He proposes a series of concrete improvements: stronger social proof (logos, reviews), a clearer, single‑goal account‑creation focus, consistent visual language (button shapes, spacing, card layouts), personalized dynamic onboarding that adapts to the user’s role and goals, feature checklists and testimonials to reinforce value, and systematic A/B testing to validate changes. Throughout, he emphasizes that a smoother, more consistent onboarding experience can increase activation, retention, and subscription revenue, turning a potentially leaky funnel into a growth engine. The video ends with a typical YouTube sign‑off.
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My name is Charles. I'm a product designer. I've worked with companies worth over $160 billion. And in this video, I'm going to review a flow I found online and try to find ways to improve it, to optimize it, because so many companies don't optimize their flows enough and are probably leaving a lot of money on the table. We could pick the first one, actually, onboarding flow for ElevenLabs. So ElevenLabs has raised over $280 million. And, you know, people who invest in companies, they want to see their money back, ideally. So you can imagine that they need to generate a lot of revenue to justify this level of funding. And so I feel like that's kind of like the goal here is how do we become more strategic with the flow that they have so that people onboard faster, they understand the product better, and they subscribe more. Let's copy the flow and put it on Figma so it's easier to like go through it. All right. So we've got the flow on Figma and let's try to like deep dive a bit more into it. So that's like the landing page, right? And It looks a little basic. Okay, so it changed compared to what they have. I think this is still better. It's a lot more practical and useful to use. It still works in terms of showing the potential and the capabilities of their tool compared to that. So that's already a good start. I would still try to put more social proof. Like you can see, they still show that here, but I don't know, I feel like some logos here, maybe some reviews would be nice. It's very basic, right, for landing pages, but I feel like there's a reason they put it so upfront. But yeah, that's a lot better than this. But for that, the problem is that the goal is to create an account. This is what the user should be focused on. And all of this section here, all of the pro tips, it makes sense in a way that you want to educate the user, but they're here to create an account, to sign up. They're not here to learn about the product. It's not the right moment to do that. It's probably going to slow them down. The goal, even on the current landing page, is to create realistic speech. So you want to get started to do that. You're not here to learn so much about the product now. You either learn about it on the landing page or you learn it in the product, but not here. And also when you keep looking at the flow, you can see that there are more pro tips, there are more latest updates, which again doesn't make much sense because even for logging into your account, it's probably a matter of seconds. You don't have time to see that or to even care about that. You want to get into the product as fast as you can. But it still looks nice, and I feel like that's kind of what they wanted to do, is not just have a, you know, just that log into your account in the middle of a white screen and that's it. They probably want you to have some color, some brand, some information, but it's more distracting and probably not that helpful for users to do that right now. And if you want to do that, if you want to keep using that same structure, probably what needs to happen is, what's the goal? What do we really want to achieve with that? Probably we want to show that there are a lot of ways that you can use this product. There are a lot of features. There is a lot of potential for you to create whatever you want to create. And they want to confirm that what you're doing right now, creating an account, is the right choice for you. Here they want to show you that it's super easy to use the product. You just have to upload an audio or record one. They want to show the simplicity of it. And here they want to probably show that there is a lot of updates. So it's mostly just reassuring the user. You confirm that it's going to be what you want, it's going to be flexible, it's going to be easy to use. And no matter how much you use the product, they keep updating it and they keep refining it. Maybe we could show recent updates, dates. It's like, when did this happen? How frequent do we get updates? Maybe we want to show a checklist of features. It's like, you can do this. Like just all of those things here, you want to reemphasize that. They just saw that on the landing page. So maybe we can show that again. Like you can do all of those things with one subscription. So maybe a checklist of features would be nice instead of showing that. Maybe you could show testimonials, just one testimonial that represents their core user who they know are paying for the subscription. And they can reemphasize why for them it's a good thing to do. And they can reemphasize why it's worth it for you to create an account and to sign up. So all of the things would probably be more about structure rather than visuals and more like stacked together. They could even A/B test that. They could just try one at a time and see which one has the best performances. And this is the first step. If you lose customers on that page, you're putting your product at such a huge disadvantage compared to other products, because this is literally like the first, very first step. If you drop off here, it's, it's going to be rough. But the motivation behind it is still good. It's about reinforcing the choice of the users that they make. You're doing the right choice by creating an account with us. So we want to again reinforce that and confirm that what they're doing is the right thing. There's still, in terms of visuals, it's really cool that they use their branding here and their visuals here, but I don't get why it would change so radically between this and that. And that's why probably if they want to stay standard, like it would be so much better if they just have the, you know, the signup here. This section, create an account, and then it turns into that modal of like, we've sent you an email to your address, just sign in through it. And that's it. And you keep the same style and you're good to go. You can sign in, sign up. It needs to be a choice. It needs to stay consistent with the flow. I feel like it's a little strange that it cuts off in the middle of it. And you know, if you want to keep going with that, you can just do that again. Like here, you can darken it like here and have that modal here. And that works as well. It's just about consistency in terms of experience. And then again, here we can reuse that same strategy. We want to reemphasize that what we're doing is right and it's perfect for them, is the perfect solution, the perfect product to their problems. Because otherwise, log into your account, like all of this, the design is great, it works. Another small detail in terms of consistency is here it's a rounded button and here it's rectangular button. It's a, it's a bit different, but I'm just wondering You know, how to stay more consistent again with the design. We talked about the background and the layout, but just in terms of design element, how to stay consistent with that. Because you can see the design really changes between this very cool modern design and then this, that's very V1. And even that is like extremely basic design compared to what they have here. So you switch from very basic, ugly, and weird to have a model with nothing, just 2 buttons. To that, so just you know small details on that. Again, you have this list instead of having those big cards. Also, the cards like you don't even know how many they are. It's just I don't know. I think it's cool visually. It's more about the potential of what could we do instead that would make it even better. It's more about optimizing and refining rather than just changing everything on this screen. Here we we might want to redo everything, but here it's already. Clean, and then it's also confusing because we again change style. So I'm pretty sure that this is the updated version of the design, and this is more of what they had before and that they're working on updating, probably. But it's very basic and very strange. Something that many companies do is they have the questions here, and then on this page they have the screen right here that represents. So if you have like what's your name? Then as you type it, you would see it appear here. And I feel like that could add another level of personalization and you could reuse that same layout, put that interface in there and have it evolve as you write your name and answer the questions. It kind of ruins a bit the experience and the brand in my opinion, because you go from this very cool, colorful, 3D style modern design to that very ugly, basic. And it's not that difficult to improve and to change. I want to check if you can skip every step or not. And it's also, it kind of ruins it because we've been pitching about how the product is amazing, how you have so many easy features to use, how it's always updated to doing that. Like, what's your name? How did you hear about us? What describes you? Well, it's, you know, kind of kills a little bit of the momentum that we've been building up from the landing page up to this point. Also, the cards are not You know, the width between the cards here and the progress bar are not the same. It's, I don't know, it feels very, very strange. It's not even the same spacing, right? 28. Yeah, that's not the same spacing. 30. And here it's probably 26. Yeah, it's spaced differently. This button doesn't have a chevron or an arrow. This one has, even though next should be next page. Obviously it should be the arrow should move to the right and this one move to the left. I'm confused with that design. You can scroll down, but here you don't see it. Setting up your accounts. Again, it's an easy way to show how cool it's going to be based on what you've said. You've just described who you are and what's your goal with the product. And all they show you is that we're setting up your account with everything that stays the same. Why don't we reuse those colorful, cool-looking designs instead to hype people? And even we can reuse that same idea here. This could change based on who you are and what your goals are. So if you're a creator, it's going to be like this. And then if you are a voice actor, it's going to be different. You can see the cards changing and improving based on what you say and having the layout change based on who you are. And I think that's going to be so much more exciting for users to just be ready to use the product. And again, like, we want to build that momentum because we really need that to get people to reach that moment where they realize how cool and valuable that product is. We need to push them to get to that point. And so then it's a lot easier for people when they sign up, when they create their account to like be hyped up about it. And then you just kill the momentum, you kill the flow. You have these very boring questions that they need to answer. You don't see what's happening or why you need to answer those. I think it's mostly just for the product to know who you are and for just data purposes, but it could be so much better that you keep building up that hype. You're like, here's how it's going to evolve. The product is going to change based on who you are, what your goals are, Why you are here, and we really want you to get the most out of the product. And then you land here, which I think looks really cool. I mean, it's based on who you are. It's very personalized. Like, you have questions, you can ask the AI. Like, it's super cool and clean. And so I want the buildup to be even better. It's like we build it for you, and then bam, you arrive, you signed up, and it's your product, it's your space, and you're just ready. You're just here and ready to get the most out of it. In my opinion, that would be a really cool addition to the product and they would probably convert a lot more and get a lot more people to stay, less people to churn, more activation. Like that buildup is going to activate them a lot more and they're going to be even more excited to use all of those features and understand what the product is. And even here, like we could have a checklist. We could ask a question like, what's your goal with the product? What do you want to do here? Is it text-to-speech? Is it voice changer? Is it sound effects? And based on that, we could change the homepage to have those specific tasks of like, here is how you can create This instant speech. Let's do it together for the first time, and then you understand how it works. And it's going to help them slowly learn about the interface, about the product. It's going to be a lot smoother for them than just dropping here and like, okay, what is all of that? What do I do now? So that could be another layer of personalization that's going to really increase activation and retention, subscribing as well. Because the more they see the value for them in the product, the likelier it is that they're going to pay for it. The faster they understand the value of the product, the easier it is for them to use it, the more they're going to Thank you so much for watching this video. I really hope you liked it. Make sure to leave a like and subscribe. Also, YouTube thinks you will like this next video, so, you know, if you haven't watched it already, have a look. Bye! Bye!
