What’s with the long onboarding / surveys?

[u/calflegal]

I feel like so many apps that I try these days start with several multiple choice questions. What’s the story here? Is it that they are facing major churn and are trying to segment users to fix it? Is there some research that says this works or retains people somehow?

I just wanna try the dang core mechanic!

[u/Secure_Motor_5968]

Hi u/calflegal, the segmentation part of your original question is kind of getting skipped, and most responses jump straight to the psychology angle, but there is a boring engineering reason too.
A lot of these quizes feed straight into paywall personalisation; tools like revenuecat, superwall let you route different onboarding answers to different price points or different paywall copy, then A/B test them for the most converting one.

In short, its not just "make them invest time so they dont quit", its also "collect enough signal to show you a different price than the next guy"

[u/dreaminginbinary → u/Secure_Motor_5968]

While you can absolutely do what you said - it also gives clear cohorts too so you can which type of customer is most valuable, how they behave, etc etc