The Cost of a Bad First Window

• Fenergo — “Global Financial Institutions Struggle with Rising Client Losses and Compliance Costs as AI Adoption Increases” (2025 survey of 600 senior decision-makers; 70% lost clients to slow onboarding, up from 67% in 2024 and 48% in 2023; onboarding abandonment averaging ~10%; U.K. corporate banks averaging 6+ weeks)
• Crowdfund Insider — “Global Financial Institutions Are Losing Clients Due To Inefficient Digital Onboarding Processes: Fenergo” (Oct. 9, 2025)
• FinTech Global — “70% of banks lose clients due to slow onboarding” (Oct. 8, 2025)
• OnRamp — “2026 State of Customer Onboarding: Key Findings from 161 Leaders” (Feb. 2026; companies that cut onboarding investment mostly saw churn rise within six months; 57% tie friction to revenue)
• Business of Apps — App Retention Rates data (average app loses ~three-quarters of users within days; 30-day retention in the low single digits)

The Feature: Slack’s “Magic Number”

• First Round Review — “From 0 to $1B: Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy,” featuring Stewart Butterfield (Feb. 27, 2015; 8,000 invite requests day one and 15,000 in two weeks; more than 90% of teams that sign up never invite anyone or start using it; the 2,000-message threshold — “any team that has exchanged 2,000 messages… has tried Slack — really tried it… after 2,000 messages, 93% of those customers are still using Slack”; find your own “magic number” and engineer onboarding toward it)

The Counterweight: Super Mario Bros. World 1–1

• Game Developer (Gamasutra) — “How Miyamoto built Super Mario Bros.’ legendary World 1–1” (Sept. 8, 2015; World 1–1 as wordless tutorial; “learning through play”; “it becomes their game”)
• Wikipedia — “World 1–1” (design breakdown: the opening Goomba as low-cost first lesson, the coin as reward, pipes of rising height teaching variable jump, pits with floors; sourced to Miyamoto’s 2015 Eurogamer interview and 1UP.com)

Product Mentioned

• Website Reality Check — Johns & Taylor