This post was written for FunnelFox by Olha Yohansen—a Product Growth Advisor who helps B2C companies build web onboarding funnels that convert and scale. Olha has advised over 20 products across markets, including Flo Health and Keto Diet App, where she’s driven major improvements in web revenue, onboarding performance, and internal growth processes — all without growing team size. If your funnel isn’t converting or growth has stalled, she knows how to fix it.
If your web2app funnel isn’t delivering results, the issue may not lie solely in the flow itself—it could be the limiting mindset and the organizational structure around it.
I’ve worked with B2C startups of various sizes—from lean teams of 10 people to companies of over 500—and I’ve consistently seen the same mistakes: teams focus on quick fixes, hacks, and best practices in an unstructured way instead of addressing fundamental problems and approaching web2app as an integrated framework. True growth occurs when you transition from isolated experiments to a coherent, scalable system.
Web2app is critically important yet frequently misunderstood. It’s not just a set of screens that end with a paywall; it’s the strategic component that connects user acquisition, onboarding, monetization, and retention within a cohesive web2app strategy.
Here’s how to structure your growth team and processes for maximum efficiency in web2app, without inflating your budget or headcount.
1. Determine where onboarding sits in your org chart
Should web2app onboarding belong to Marketing or Product? I’ve seen both approaches, with the most recent appearance of a so-called Growth team (a mix of product and marketing) but most commonly, onboarding falls under Product. Marketing brings users in, while Product guides them through onboarding, paywalls, and activation. However, this division can cause friction.
Sometimes onboarding lands in Marketing since they typically handle the landing pages on web, making onboarding seem like a natural extension, because it’s web. Yet, when teams operate in silos, collaboration suffers:
- Marketing typically optimizes for cost per acquisition (CPA), while Product tracks conversion rates and lifetime value (LTV).
- Marketing controls ad spend but may have limited input in funnel optimization.
- Product owns the funnel but struggles to align messaging with marketing campaigns.
The solution? Create alignment through:
- Shared goals: Both teams should optimize for the same metrics (LTV or ARPPU).
- Cross-functional collaboration: Combine Marketing’s storytelling with Product’s user experience expertise. Make sure the ads align with the first screen(s) of the funnel and build up from there.
- Clear accountability: Define funnel ownership clearly and encourage collaborative workflows.
In a growth team I advised, assigning a dedicated marketer and a small experiment budget to the web2app team streamlined processes, aligning messaging with funnel strategy and significantly reducing delays. We didn’t need to ask for budget or approve angles—we experimented on the side and then scaled what worked as part of the UA process.
2. Set up the team
Web2app funnels encompass various stages: user acquisition (targeting, ads structure, etc.), creatives, landing pages (optional), onboarding funnels, quizzes or questionnaires, signup screen(s), paywalls, checkout, possibly upsells, and go-to-app section. If these aren’t interconnected, performance drops.
Establish:
- Clear ownership of growth metrics: Small startups typically assign all of this to a Growth or Product Marketing Manager (if they’re lucky to find an affordable experienced hands-on marketer who can do both). But it quickly becomes at least two people: UA and a Product person. In larger organizations, the responsibility may be shared but must always be explicitly defined. Paid UA would be owned by the UA team, the rest—by the PM and their dev team.
- Cross-functional synchronization: Integrate UA managers, designers, developers, and product marketers early on—everyone on the growth team should be aligned and allowed to bring in ideas.
- Onboarding as a strategic priority: Position onboarding as a core strategy, not a secondary task.
3. Set up the growth loop
Without the right loop, experiments don’t scale. What makes a difference:
- Clear testing pipeline
- Fast decisions (no more endless Slack threads)
- Accountability for implementing, learning, and iterating
The cadence of growth events I would advise for is:
Growth weekly: The whole team gathers and ‘sells’ each other hypotheses. The hypotheses have to follow the agreed format, be well-thought-out, and have screenshots, references, and numbers if possible. The team then scores each new hypothesis (typically with ICE scoring), and the winners go to the top of the backlog. This collective practice trains the team’s confidence and judgment, increasing the success rate of experiments. It also makes people think their hypotheses through instead of getting upset their idea was never implemented because it wasn’t a thought-through hypothesis.
The learning call: The team gathers (weekly or bi-weekly) to review concluded experiments and answers one question: “What do we know now that wasn’t obvious before?” After concluding the learning, the team can suggest follow-up hypotheses. Please don’t try to answer “and why” question—trying to guess why certain metrics shifted is usually not a good practice on those calls. Instead, think on your next hypotheses based on what you now know that wasn’t obvious before and bring them to the next Growth weekly.
Growth retrospective: Occurs monthly or quarterly. The team adjusts the process and thinks about improvements. Importantly, the focus here is on process adjustments, not the quality of hypotheses.
Other calls: Daily standups or Slack updates ensure ongoing transparency. Anyone can recommend a hypothesis, but the growth team prioritizes them.
In one fintech project, implementing this structured loop quadrupled the number of experiments within a few months without additional hires.
Roles and tools for an optimal web2app funnel team
Team composition can vary, but here’s an optimal minimal setup:
For in-house development:
- Creative Producer, Motion Designer (for ad creatives)
- User Acquisition (UA) Manager
- Product Marketing Manager or Growth Manager or Product Manager
- Designer
- Frontend & Backend Developer
- QA Specialist
- Project Manager
Lean team with tool support (such as FunnelFox):
I see this more and more: the team is lean, a lot of the roles above are outsourced to an onboarding funnel tool. Then you still need:
- Creative Producer or Motion Designer and/or UA Manager who also makes creatives happen
- Growth manager / Product manager – someone who does the whole funnel with the tool
Automation tools like FunnelFox allow small teams to operate with larger-scale effectiveness.
FunnelFox is a no-code web2app builder that cuts costs by 3x compared to in-house builds. It lets you crate and launch high-converting web funnels, A/B test every step to maximize conversion, switch payment providers anytime, and optimize in real time with accurately attributed data—all without dev delays or app store approvals required.
Final thoughts
Web onboarding typically underperforms not due to aesthetics or length but because it lacks strategic ownership and integration into the broader web2app strategy. Solve structural problems, and results will follow.
