How I broke a record with the sleep app onboarding
The onboarding I built
Walk through the Lune onboarding →
Context
Lune is a sleep app in the Fabulous portfolio (50M+ downloads), launched to find product-market fit in a new vertical. I led our product-market fit (PMF) apps, strategically owning the full flow from creative angles through app experience, while also hands-on designing and building the onboardings myself (remote config JSON and HTML). I convened a cross-functional PMF forum aligning Creatives, UA, Data Science, and leadership around angle testing across the PMF portfolio.
Problem
After two months of optimization since launch, the Lune onboarding had plateaued. Traditional optimization wasn't moving the needle. We needed a fundamentally new angle, and a way to test many angles fast without bottlenecking Design and Frontend every time.
Insight
Instead of asking Creatives to make ads for my onboarding, I flipped it: I built an onboarding for their best-performing creative angle. The Creatives team had found that the reason you're so tired is that you go to sleep at the wrong time resonated strongly with users. So I designed a flow around calculating the user's ideal bedtime.
What I built
- Ideal Bedtime flow: Users answer sleep questions, watch a bedtime calculation animation build anticipation, then get a personalized result
- Behavioral science: Personalization, showing the app's effort (visible "calculating" animation), and investing the user's own effort in setting up their plan
- Fully dynamic framework: Template-driven onboarding. I can turn "Ideal Bedtime" into "Insomnia," "Bed Rotting," or "Sleep ADHD" in hours, with zero marginal cost for Design or Frontend
Results
In two months, I improved our North Star metric by 84% and reached the target goal: the fastest any product hit that milestone in Fabulous's 12-year history. The dynamic framework enabled dozens of rapid A/B experiments: multiple onboarding variants shipped with fixed design costs and near-zero marginal effort. The approach was later extended to Lumiere (anxiety) and Shape (fasting), with 4+ app onboardings running in parallel.
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