A 23% activation lift & 40% faster time to value on a key revenue-generating feature

Joist offers contractors an all-in-one app to manage their invoicing, estimating and payments, but one critical feature wasn’t gaining traction: their payments functionality.  Payments is a key part of Joist’s value proposition—and its vital feature to scale revenue.

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Only a fraction of new users became payments users, and even fewer stuck around long enough to make it to activation. Ryan Chong saw this opportunity and spearheaded the creation of the Payments Growth Squad—a dedicated engineering team tasked with improving activation. To set the squad up for success, Ryan turned to Forget The Funnel to fill critical research gaps and uncover the root causes behind the drop-off.

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The new “Payments Growth” engineering squad started  the process of setting up a new backlog with two core goals in mind:

1. Get more users to see value in enabling payments through the app
2. Get more payments enabled users to quickly start (and keep) collecting payments through Joist.

Adding fuel to Joist’s “army of one” research team

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Connor is Joist’s sole User Researcher. Plainly put, he’s an army of one who provides all the answers to customer research questions.

Connor gets research requests from EIGHT squads. And while there’s no doubt that he’s talented, he only has so much time in a day. With teams constantly battling for Connor’s time, prioritizing research projects is a tough ask.

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Rather than losing more time to other features or one-shot mini research projects, Ryan wanted his new squad to hit the ground running. In his own words, “We are severely under-researched. We needed a team like Forget the Funnel to come in and accelerate our understanding so we could prioritize the solutions that would really move the needle. We wanted to get started faster so the new squad could have a rolling start to product development.”

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Getting to the core of customer motivations using customer-led growth

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It was clear the squad needed deep insights on the psychographics of their best customer when they first considered the payments feature. The squad needed a deep understanding what value Joist’s payments feature brought to their customers.

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To understand why customers were choosing to use (and stop using) the payments feature, we:

• Surveyed 151 payments-feature activated customers
• Ran 12 “Job to be Done” interviews with Joist’s best customers
• Ran 4 Churn interviews with customers who’d activated but stopped using the payments feature
• Completed a rigorous research analysis

The insights revealed a disconnect: while the payments feature was technically sound, contractors weren’t fully grasping the true value of using it, even after they’d gone through the labor intensive task of enabling it. Forget The Funnel helped Joist frame the issue: the gap wasn’t in the feature itself—it was in the messaging.

Contractors needed to see two key things, clearly and quickly:

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1. How easy it was to get paid.
2. How fast payments could happen.

These two value themes, distilled into a messaging guide created by Forget The Funnel, became the foundation for Joist’s new approach.

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Using insights from the research, Joist’s Payment Growth squad revamped the onboarding experience for payments users. Guided by Forget The Funnel’s messaging framework, they replaced vague pop-ups with a 6-slide carousel highlighting key benefits:

• The convenience of setup.
• The security of transactions.
• Options for passing fees to clients.
• Instant payment notifications.
• Fast payouts

This wasn’t just about showcasing features—it was about solving contractors’ biggest pain point: getting paid faster and with less hassle.

To test the impact, the squad ran an ABC experiment comparing the carousel to a step-by-step guide and the original pop-ups. Over five weeks, they tracked activation rates and time to value.

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The new carousel experience drove a 23% lift in activation—significantly outperforming the other variants. Time to activation also improved dramatically, with contractors processing their first payment an average of 20 hours faster, down from 51 hours to just 30.

Both variants outperformed the control:

• Variant A (Carousel) delivered a 23% lift in activation & improved time to value by 41%
• Variant B (Step-by-Step) delivered a smaller 10% lift, likely due to user resistance to prescriptive guidance, however the improvements in time to value remained

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The value of strategic clarity going forward

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The new onboarding experience didn’t just drive immediate results; it laid the groundwork for Joist’s Payments Growth Squad to continue improving. Insights from Forget The Funnel’s research gave the team a clear roadmap for applying the messaging guide across other touchpoints, like lifecycle emails, FAQs, and even pre-signup flows.

Joist is now experimenting with video variants of the carousel to see if they can further boost engagement. They’re also exploring how to integrate payments messaging earlier in the customer journey, with the goal of improving conversion and retention at every stage.

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