“Instead of just like dumping you into our product and letting you figure it out we try to discover as much as we possibly can up front and that's through a registration and sign up experience that asks you a bunch of questions by the time you get to the end of that experience you feel already compelled to buy you don't need to actually test the app on your own.”

Discovery-Stage Onboarding Converts Without a Free Trial — Ask First, Then They Want to Buy

Babbel runs a hard paywall with a discovery-first onboarding: a registration quiz that uncovers the user's goals, gaps, and motivations before they ever touch the product. By the end, users have been sold through the discovery process itself — they feel understood, not evaluated. Stephen argues that dropping someone into a suboptimal free product (the freemium experience) often fails to convert people who would have bought if sold properly from the start.