How to nail onboarding  -  a case study of Runna

Lessons in clarity, confidence and community

This post is sponsored by Attio. A few weeks back, I shared a full figma board of Attio’s onboarding flow, time to magic moment and UX analysis. It’s a great reference for anyone working on onboarding - you can grab it here and make it your own 🔥

Targeting runners is a big market.

Nearly 1 billion runs were recorded on Strava in 2024.

And it’s a market that’s growing - according to Strava, running was the ‘fastest growing sport globally’ with ‘Gen Z turning to running to create community and connection’.

Which is the winning strategy for coaching app Runna.

If you run, you’ve probably heard of Runna. The consumer app is all over instagram, TikTok and Strava, with 48,000+ ratings at 4.9 stars on the app store. The Reddit community alone now has around 47,000 members.

Officially launching in March 2022, Runna reached 7,000 paying subscribers a year later and has since helped millions of runners complete their first race.

In April 2025, Runna was acquired by Stava for an unknown amount. Though estimates are around £150 million, based on 30X return to early crowdfunding investors, who invested when it was valued at £5 million (30 X £5M = £150M).

That’s when I decided to see what all the hype was about.

The acquisition caught my eye, and so did the fact that my friends had just signed me up for a half marathon 🫠 As a Strava paying subscriber, I got the email about a Strava × Runna bundle, it made sense to give it a go.

And this is that story: my journey through Runna’s incredible onboarding.

We’ll see three big lessons across the onboarding flow, covering:

• Why most product marketing tests fail to have impact, but Runna’s pack a punch
• Where user-generated content and community can come into onboarding
• How having a 12-minute, 30-step onboarding isn't a bad thing

By the end we’ll see that there’s nothing flashy about Runna’s onboarding. It just makes you believe that you can actually do it.

Let’s jump straight in to lesson one, starting from the first thing we see: a welcome screen carousel.

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Lesson 1) Show your product clearly

Most apps try to look impressive. Runna just tries to make sense.

When I open the app on my phone for the first time, I see an onboarding carousel which looks slightly old-school, but I love it.

The classic saying is ‘no one reads an onboarding carousel’.

Which, in my experience is half true.

Studies have shown users don’t have time to read: most people read 28% of the words on a page; 20% is more likely.

However, I’ve added a carousel before a paywall before and it improved conversion to trial. So there’s something to be said for adding extra context for customers.

In my view, Runna’s carousel works here. It does three things really well:

• It runs through screens like an Instagram story (no tapping required)
• There’s very few words (max 9 in each headline)
• Imagery does the heavy lifting

The instagram-style story creates a variable reward 🧠 as you don’t know what’s coming next. It also follows a common consumer app mental model which works well in this context.

What stands out here is the imagery. From the second carousel screenshot, it’s clear to me what a ‘personalized running plan’ might look like.

As someone who gets injured all the time and has no real game plan for running, this structure, clarity and format made me sigh with relief.

It created a mini-magic-moment for me early on.

On the fourth screenshot, my running injuries came to life:

Runna has used a common running injury (Achillies Teninitis) as an example, with micro copy:

• Get back to running quickly and carefully
• Returning to running post-injury

They know that this is one of the biggest fears, frustrations or anxieities that holds people back from runnning. Whether it’s past injuries or future injuries, with these images Runna is signalling:

Does this impact conversion? Hard to say. My gut says no.

In my experience, I’ve rarely seen adding imagery into onboarding improve conversion.

That’s because it’s really hard to do well. You need to have excellent image designers and really think about what will make people have a lightbulb moment. Imagery needs to be:

• Easy to scan, easy to see
• Use specific, real examples
• Be able to be understood in a moment’s glance

That’s a tough order.

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Lesson 2) Bring your marketing inside your product

Runna’s onboarding starts long before download. Its community and content seep straight into the product journey.

The first obvious thing I noticed is the authentic lifestyle imagery and social proof throughout the flow.

After the carousel, I see a load of smiling women and men I want to be friends with sitting on a park bench.

Further into onboarding, after I select the run I’m doing, I see 230 other little avatars ready to run with me.

There are little signals of value add here too:

• Date
• Location
• Run type = flat (thank god)

Before this onboarding flow, I hadn’t checked the run route for the run I’d booked.

With these details (flat ‘elevation of 34 meters’ & ‘230 others running’), the app has calmed some anxieties around being fit enough for hills. Quietly reassuring me:

And it continues.

At the end of onboarding, I see more runners 👀

Notice how the human imagery varies:

• Full screen vs. small avatars vs. videos
• Stylised shoots, vs ‘taken on the run’ vibes
• Background gradient fade or spotlight image

What’s curious is that these touchpoints are littered throughout. There are 30 screens I see in onboarding before I see my plan on the homepage.

Here’s a summary (as I know the above image is too small 🥴):

In terms of where the imagery sits, there’s imagery beginning, middle (almost) and end of onboarding. With a big cluster near the paywall.

What I see here: a product direction that knows community is important. And an onboarding funnel that matches the acquisition funnel (influencer marketing, user-generated content in ads, reddit communities).

Whilst hard to execute, I’ve heard of experiments showing that matching ad creative and copy at the top of the funnel to the product journey, from onboarding to homepage, can improve conversion to paid and retention.

I'm yet to test such a full-funnel play myself, one day perhaps.

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Lesson 3) Design for confidence, not speed

Everyone has fears.

My fears are around running injuries (and the dark).

The key doubts on my mind coming into this were:

• Can I run this run I’ve booked?
• Will my old injuries resurface?
• Will I get new injuries?
• Will I get faster? Can I run under 2 hours?
• Can I fit this into my work week?
• Will this app work with my Garmin and Strava set up?

By the end of my 12-minute-long onboarding, I’m clear on all of the above. And honestly, I felt pretty relaxed about it all.

The hard part of testing onboarding is balancing two things:

1. The macro steps (getting you set up, called ‘set up tasks’)
2. The micro details that aren’t crucial, but subconsciously push people along.

On 1. it’s incredibly hard to prioritise what to put in onboarding. As a rule of thumb, if it positively impacts retention (i.e. when people take [product action] we see they retain better) then AB test it in onboarding to see if it’s a causal relationship, not just a correlation.

On 2, it’s even harder to make decisions of what small details to add. What micro copy will calm users, what images can help.

Individual, isolated tests rarely reach significance on these things. And if you’re not close to the customer, you can end up just adding words, steps and noise that get in the way.

For Runna, the macro steps are:

• Set a goal
• Pick a race
• Self select your running ability
• What days would you like to run?
• Predict your running time
• Pick km/mi

From the copy on these steps, my anxieties around fitting the plan into my week, running a good pace and ‘will I be ready’ for my half marathon are covered.

Then it’s the micro details that add confidence. If I pick a 5k time that’s too fast, it tells me the app isn’t built for me.

Which reinforces that I am in the right place, because I cannot run that fast (but I hope to one day).

The post-onboarding plan introduction takes the level of confidence one step further, with:

• Estimated race times
• A guide to the four run types (with a coach video explainer for each)
• The first of those workouts reflected in my plan (starting with an easy run, yay)

The estimated times show me what I can achieve with and without the app:

• Without Runna: 1hr 59
• With Runna: 8 minutes faster (1hr 51)

Again imagery being used here to show value at a glance.

Lastly, the copy on ‘Types of run’ guides is just so simple.

No jargon, no running-speak in the product copy. None of that elite language that puts people off.

Just plain old english. And again, none of it feels optimised. It’s just plain and simple.

Bish bash bosh.

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The summary: confidence is what Runna is optimizing for.

Thinking back over this flow, the funny thing is that it isn’t particularly sexy. Runna doesn’t try to impress me.

Instead, every choice - from unhurried pacing to clear copy - signals that this app is serious about getting me to my goal.

It feels like the restraint on product sexiness or pazazz, and the focus on plain and simple, is what earns my trust here.

The irony about this UX analysis is that this onboarding doesn’t just onboard you into an app. It onboards you into believing you can actually run the race. Which feels more important than the product UI.

That’s what great onboarding does; it earns belief over attention. Runna proves that calm, clear, confident design can still move people - arguably better than a flashy funnel ever could.

This was quite a throwback to the B2C world this week. I think there's so much anyone can take away here, no matter the business.

Keen to hear if you liked this B2C example? I can litter more in (I've been more B2B focused recently).

See you next week,

Rosie 🕺

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