Converting customers from payg to subscribers
Leveraging Product Led Growth strategies to increase recurring enterprise customers
Hub, Skywatch's SaaS software has a lot to offer with the advanced features, but they may be too advanced and expensive for smaller teams. In this competition, we used brainstormed some ideas to increase conversions employing product led growth strategies and gamification.
Timeline
📆
From explorations to final designs in 1.5 days
Team
👩🏻🤝👩🏼
Team of 4 - 1 Product Designer, 1 Marketing Specialist, 1 Platform Engineer, 1 Director of Engineering
Problem
❓
The current onboarding process is very sales intensive and involves a qualifying process for organizations which adds a lot of friction, eventually leading to lost subscription revenue and missed opportunities in converting highly engaged users into long-term subscribers.
Goals
🎯
The goal is to make the onboarding process 'self-serve' and reducing friction and the number of steps it takes to try out the product. Our team explored ideas as to how we could encourage the users t
Highlights the approach taken during the project, including research, planning and design
Research & Planning
🔍
During our research we found out that among the customers who purchased more than $5,000 CAD of data, only 38% were subscribed to a monthly plan (Hub), while the remaining 62% were Pay as you Go (Explore ) users.
The Hub subscription involves a qualification process which limits the organization to try out the product and decide if it provides value to them. Also, Hub could be an overpowered solution for smaller teams who did not need all the features Hub provides.
Design & Prototyping
🖌️
Leveraged rapid prototyping to create quick mockups of what the new flow could look like
Our proposal was to provide a tiered-subscription model like most other SaaS products. We also proposed a middle tier subscription option with EXPLORE Pro, these missed opportunities fit the “Power Userˮ persona and can auto-qualify as middle-tier subscribers by incentivizing buying behaviours to “Power Upˮ in a gamified, rewards-driven approach.
🎯 Power User Qualification:
To become a Power User, a persona must complete five key actions:
💰 Spend up to $5,000 on data annually
📧 Have up to 2 matching email domains in the EXPLORE ecosystem
🏭 Be in target industries: energy, engineering, mining, forestry, media, utilities, infrastructure
🖼️ Make 10+ Very High-Resolution Imagery purchases
📅 Use the app frequently: at least 4 visits/month (tracked via last login)
Each action is worth 25 points, tracked automatically through Mixpanel and Hubspot. Users don’t see individual behaviors—only the principle: more data purchased = more rewards. Achieve 125 points, and a user is considered a Power User.
🎮 Gamification – “Power Up!” Experience:
Qualified users can “Power Up!” to EXPLORE Pro, which includes:
🌐 Access to geospatial data sources
📊 Advanced data types
🛒 DirectCartView – share your cart for easy approvals
👁️ DirectView – share purchased data with anyone
🛎️ Priority customer support
This gamified approach encourages users to upgrade without excluding others. Users who upgrade retain their existing payment method and order history, while gaining Pro features.