The flow

Milestone-based onboarding for SaaS products with a setup that takes longer than 10 minutes. Five emails over the first 30 days, gated by the user’s actual progress in the product. Manual checkpoints at days 7 and 21.

Why milestone-based

Time-based onboarding (“here’s day 3 of your journey”) sends day-3 content to people who haven’t finished day-1 setup. The user gets emails that don’t match where they are in the product. Milestones-based sequencing only sends the next-step email when the user has actually completed the previous step.

When time-based wins

Products where setup is under 5 minutes. Products where the value is delivered in the inbox, not the app. Newsletters. Time-based sequences are simpler to build and they work well in those contexts. Field-ops or accounting software is not one of those contexts.