Nobody Gets Excited to Migrate: Turning a Customer Beta into 3x Adoption in Year 1

The product team’s goal was to raise the ceiling of what’s possible on our platform while lowering the floor so anyone could succeed. My job was to turn that vision into adoption by answering three customer questions: Can it do what I need? What can I do now that I couldn't before? And why now?

Go-to-market starts in beta: Finding what drives adoption

More than 100 customers joined the beta program I built, starting in late 2023. Beyond product feedback, I used it to test messaging, find friction, uncover new value, and build proof before launch.

Our messaging centered on two pillars, “designed for creativity” and “engineered for giving.” It balanced flexibility and brand with performance and ROI, gave both creative marketers and conversion-focused analysts an entry point, and differentiated us from more limited, templated competitors.

The beta program revealed the insight that shaped everything else. Customers loved the flexibility, but they needed to know when, why, and how to use it for their own goals. So the work shifted from selling Studio’s flexibility to redefining what's possible with our product and showing customers how to use it in new ways.

Beta also showed which new features would sell. Gift matching was the clearest example. Customer lit up when the saw it in beta, so a line item on our "what's new" list became a go-to reason to switch for sales and customer success.

Answering Question 1: "Can it do what I need?"

With a product moving quickly from beta to GA, we needed a source of truth for what's new, what's coming, and what remains unchanged. I built a comparison matrix covering 20–30 features and requirements and updated it with every release: Studio versus legacy, new features on Studio, and platform requirements like payment types, reporting, and integrations. It became the primary reference for sales and post-sales in account-based strategy, and we linked it in the support article so customers could evaluate and compare for themselves.

This asset also helped us target segments and accounts as the gap closed. I knew which release would unblock each of our top accounts by GDV, and which features would drive the next wave of adoption.

The alternative was holding a big migration push until full parity. Instead, we prioritized ready-now use cases while others caught up, built awareness in the market, and moved account by account as each blocker shipped. That changed the sales conversation from “Are you interested in Studio?” to “Your top requirement ships in October. Let’s plan your migration around it.”

This was most important in enterprise. For those accounts, we led with advanced use cases, A/B testing, and their requirements mapped against the matrix.

Answering Question 2: "What can I do now that I couldn't before?"

Studio was almost too flexible. In the legacy builder, customers picked a campaign type and edited within a certain template. In Studio, they faced more options and new decisions: form above or below the fold, how many impact tiles, which layout?

This was where smaller teams needed the most help. For them, we led with great design without a designer and speed to launch.

So I built a use-case map that matched the product's feature mix to the customer's goal, channel, and campaign. A page for a digital ad got the form above the fold, limited options, and visuals to match the ad that sent the donor there. A major time-bound or thematic campaign got a visible goal, countdown timer, and more room for storytelling.

I also built a donation page best-practices checklist, connecting key features with customer priorities, use cases, and goals. This shifted many customers from a one-size-fits-most approach to creating more dynamic pages for key audience segments, channels, and campaigns as part of their full digital strategy.

Our CX team turned the use case map and best practices into templates that customers could request, which later became productized templates. Then, the best customer examples on Studio were highlighted in the new Inspiration Hub.

This created a flywheel: more customers to built on Studio, expanded into new use cases, and turned adoption into more social proof to fuel our go-to-market motion.

Answering question 3: "Why switch? Why now?"

A better builder alone wasn’t enough to change a campaign that already worked. Giving season became the compelling event that gave customers a reason to switch, especially once parity landed in October. Every customer already had a year-end campaign to build, so the question became why Studio, and how, for their specific campaign in this moment.

Our year-end campaign led with Studio and connected the most impactful giving-season strategies to our products. The year-end checklist I wrote positioned other top products as campaign-level add-ons, so we benefited from their halo while every entry point led back to Studio. Earlier in the year, we created compelling events and laid the groundwork at our annual conference, a dedicated event for 80 customers in Los Angeles, in launch webinars, and with live enterprise demos built around each account's top priority.

But asking enterprise teams to change their pages during their highest-volume weeks also takes trust. The matrix, beta proof, and performance data behind the first two answers helped earn it. For any launch, the lesson is the same: find the moment your customers already care about, and tie adoption to it.