Experimenting with webinars, temporary group chats and mentor support, I supported a pivot from paid traffic to community-driven growth. Highlighting the community value for users in new markets and on free plan, we reached improved conversion rates and ensured growth under financial constraints

1. Company & Product

→ StudyFree, B2C startup aimed at students and young professionals

→ English, Spanish, Russian languages; clients from all over the world

→ Free and Premium plans

The product consisted of:

Web platform rich with information: scholarships, university programs, admission tips, career paths and internships, checklists
Community-focused mobile app with chats, mentor support, community events

2. Financial Instability and a Need For Pivot

User acquisition originally depended on paid ads and sales consultations, and the company was steadily growing. Free plan user numbers were also strong, but with low conversion to premium.

As the Russia's invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022, we faced stalled investments, loss of payment infrastructure, and drop in subscriptions from Russian and Ukrainian users. Keeping the same model was not an option.

3. Defining the Tasks

The ultimate goal was to prove to ourselves and investors that we can grow and earn money under these new circumstances.

So we had to try new scalable approaches quickly, and be creative with it:

Find ways to convert free users to premium faster;
Expand to new markets.

We focused on English-speaking countries of South- and Southeast Asia, since the company had already been gradually growing in this region — and quickly found out that the same approach will not work equally well on the new markets en masse.

Examples of landing pages used before and during the pivot

How the product values were communicated before

The user acquisition flow was mostly focused on the platform and its informational features: number of scholarships, university programs, convenient checklists.

Community and the app were treated rather as secondary — without much integration into early UX, and the app had little onboarding.

But it seemed that the new user base we tried to focus on wasn't ready to pay for the platform alone.

💬

«Sure, your platform has a lot of info and well-organized guides, but I can Google all that if I really need to»

All this meant that we had to quickly research which values resonated most with users in new markets, and we looked in directions that could possibly help us solve the free user conversion problem.

4. User Discovery Findings: Unique Value of the Community

3. Talking to customers and setting up proper data collection

We took an iterative approach to discovery — combining interviews with non-users and users alike, sales feedback analysis with live experiments.

One of values that came up rather frequently in conversations was the insider access.

The platform with scholarships and checklists — however useful — wasn't valued as much as the community.

Community value

The key idea here is that the application to a foreign university or an internship program is a long, complex process with high uncertainty.

People going through this process often experience confusion, doubt, and nothing can help them better than other human beings that either solved the same problems before, or at least can help one feel not alone.

Our community consisted of:

🧑🏾‍🎓

Mentors
who had already recently navigated the process recently, helping with up-to-date info and serving as inspiration

👨🏻‍💻

Admission experts
who could answer specific questions

🙋🏼‍♀️

Motivated peers
who were not only exchanging experience but also supporting each other in moments of doubt and confusion

It seems quite obvious in retrospect, like many insights you come across in user discovery phases, but we only paid our community the attention it deserved in this crisis moment.

At this point, we decided to test a new webinar-focused funnel followed by temporary WhatsApp groups open for 3 days:

01

Gather interested users at scale

02

Retain the engagement after the webinar in a familiar environment — WhatsApp groups

03

Let them try benefits of our community before committing to premium or even downloading the app

This became our learning-by-doing phase, validating whether and how we can highlight the benefits of our community in a user acquisition funnel.

Experiments with messaging and value communication in the webinar funnel

5. Redesigning the Funnel With a Webinar and Community Focus

When initial experiments with community-oriented webinars worked well, I've teamed up with our CEO, product and marketing teams to design a new acquisition funnel.

The webinars were offered both to new leads and current free plan users.

Invitation

Social media, ads, website and platform, newsletters

Webinar

A 1.5 hour presentation of product features followed by a live Q&A

WhatsApp groups

With 2-3 mentors online.
3-day demo of our community

Conversion

Limited-time discount offer prompting to join or get a paid plan

We experimented with webinar topics and titles, combining fresh up-to-date information with the product presentation

Webinars

On the webinars, we presented three key values:

Access to a curated scholarship database, guides and checklists on the platform, partially available on the free plan
Community with 1,000+ mentors and admission experts with insider knowledge, also partially free
Exclusive events for premium members, such as «How to write a cover letter for the Chevening scholarship»

WhatsApp "bridge"

Instead of pushing users straight to app download after the webinar — which we anticipated would create high drop-off — we created temporary WhatsApp groups. This helped us keep the existing interest and engagement, and conversations continued in these groups immediately after webinars ended.

Each group included 2-3 mentors or admission experts who answered questions in real time, which worked as a live demo of our community.

The messaging was clear: «As a premium user, you get access to this kind of support 24/7»

And it worked incredibly well:

30–50% of webinar participants joined WhatsApp follow-up chats, which amounted to hundreds of users
Mentor interactions replaced many sales manager contacts
The funnel touchpoints felt much less sales-y and more value-focused

6. Improving the Mobile App Onboarding

While redesigning the acquisition funnel, we also worked on improving the mobile app onboarding.

Problem: Users downloading the app had minimal guidance. They had to figure out app navigation themselves, often not reaching the relevant groups, mentors and events.

Solution: Designed a step-by-step onboarding flow: