Turning free trial
users into
loyal members
NeoTaste is a platform to discover restaurants, bars and cafés in major cities, mainly across Germany, with a growing presence in the UK, Netherlands, and Austria. Users get exclusive deals you can only find through NeoTaste. Partner venues use it to fill quieter tables and attract new customers.
Many users on trial were redeeming just one deal
NeoTaste runs on a subscription model. When users sign up, they enter their payment details and get a 30-day free trial. If they haven't cancelled by the end of it, they're automatically charged. That window is everything: it's the only time the product can prove its value before money changes hands.
Cohort data pointed to a clear pattern: a significant portion of trial users redeemed only one deal and didn't convert. Reaching a second deal was one of the main friction points in the funnel.
Why we dropped streaks and built a quest instead
The team's first instinct was gamification. Streaks, daily check-ins, Duolingo-style mechanics. The idea: reward users for opening the app every day, build a habit, and conversion would follow.
But the streak model fell apart quickly. It rewards the wrong thing: opening the app is not the same as using it. And for NeoTaste, where the value is in going to restaurants and redeeming deals, daily opens meant nothing.
Instead of engineering habits around app opens, we'd guide users toward meaningful actions, the ones that actually led to conversion.
Three workstreams, one direction
Concept validation
The UX Researcher ran an unmoderated Maze study with non-NeoTaste users, showing an early quest concept and probing task count and reward expectations.
Competitive analysis
I reviewed Mobbin and habit-building apps across categories to identify onboarding patterns that actually work when guiding users into new behavior.
Cohort data
We requested a specific cohort analysis from the Data team to baseline trial-period behaviour before the quest shipped, so we'd have something real to measure against.
Keeping the quest focused
The core team on this project was small: the PM, the UX Researcher, and me. We were aligned early on what the quest needed to do. The tension came from above.
Management wanted to include a "refer a friend" task inside the quest. Adding it would have given the feature guaranteed exposure, but it meant compromising the activation flow. Referring a friend doesn't help you discover NeoTaste.
We ran user tests and the results were clear: users found it out of place. It felt like the app was asking for a favour before it had earned one. Management agreed to drop it.
Five steps to get new users to their first real win
The core question was: which 5 actions would most reliably take a new user from "interested" to "I get it now"? We mapped retention data against what leading apps teach users early, and landed on a clear sequence.
The quest lives on Home and is fully optional. It stays visible for 30 days. The quest is there to guide, not to block. Each task was chosen because it maps directly to a moment in the activation flow.
Food Preferences
One of the quest tasks prompts users to set their food preferences. The goal was to collect enough signal early to personalise their home feed and surface recommendations that actually matched their taste. A user who sees relevant deals from day one is far more likely to redeem one.
Levels Refresh
The Levels screen already existed, but almost nobody knew about it. By redesigning it with new level names, badges, and a celebration screen, we kept the gamification element where it actually made sense: as a reward for real actions, not app opens.
Trial-to-paid conversion uplift in the test group.
Quest completion rate during the first 30 days of launch.
Guide users early
Users sometimes don't need more features. They need guidance. Once they've redeemed a couple of deals and seen the app work for them, they got it and they stayed. The quest was our way of making that happen without forcing anything.