Apollo.io

Growth experiments for a sales platform: onboarding, search, sequences and upgrades. Activation up 15.7%.

Apollo.io is a sales platform: a database of people and companies to search, sequences of emails, calls and LinkedIn steps to reach them, and a Chrome extension that brings both onto LinkedIn.

I joined as the team’s second designer and worked on growth with Krishan Patel, then Head of Growth and later VP of Product. Sequences were my first project; then came onboarding and the path to a first search, empty states, upgrade prompts and the LinkedIn extension.

Sector: Sales Tech
Timeline: 2020 – 2023
Role: Product Designer, Growth — onboarding, search, sequences & extension

Apollo people search with the Add filter menu open: filters grouped into Lists, Contact, Company and Engagement, with Engagement expanded and Email listing states from Sent and Opened to Bounced and Auto Responder, under the prompt “Add filters to begin your people search…”

The problem

Apollo only clicks once a new user applies filters and sees people worth contacting. The growth question was how to get more sign-ups to that first result, and more free users to upgrade when they hit a limit.

How I approached it

One experiment at a time, with Krishan Patel. The empty search started pointing at the filters, with saved and recent searches waiting in its place. Onboarding got shorter, asking one question before a short checklist, and upgrade prompts appeared the moment a plan ran out, their wording built as A/B tests.

What was hard

Users were hard to reach: when Apollo offered $50 for an interview, about six or seven people out of a thousand replied. So most of what we learned came from tests in the product, not from interviews.

The result

Sign-up to activation rose 15.7%. Before I left, I helped hire Max Burlak, who took over my role and went on to lead design at Apollo.

Sign-up to activation: +15.7%; More new users reached their first filters and first results.
Product areas: 5; Search and filters, onboarding, sequences, upgrade prompts and the LinkedIn extension.
Lead designer hired: 1; Max Burlak, who took over my role and went on to lead design.

From sign-up to first result to upgrade

Most of the work sat between sign-up and a paid plan: what a new user sees before their first filter, what an empty page says, and what appears when a free plan runs out. Around it sat the tools reps use every day, from sequences to the LinkedIn extension.

Scope