First Deposit

High-intent users, vanishing at the finish line

Amplitude flagged something that didn't add up: a meaningful share of new users completed identity verification, the hardest part of onboarding, and then never made a first deposit. Company data put a number on it: only a minority of users who create an account go on to make a deposit within a year, and of the ones who don't deposit right away, the vast majority never come back to do it at all.

These weren't casual signups. They'd already cleared the biggest friction point in the funnel, which made the drop-off both costly and confusing. Working alongside my mentor and a cross-functional group spanning design, customer experience, product, and marketing, I spent 4 months at theScore finding out why.

Triangulating four different answers to "why"

A single data source wasn't going to explain a drop-off this specific, so I built the diagnosis from four angles.

Behavioral analytics in Amplitude mapped exactly where in the flow users stalled. A targeted survey, sent to 80,000 registered non-depositors (150 responded), surfaced their stated hesitations. A thematic read of support tickets caught the technical complaints users were already volunteering, deposit errors alone accounted for a significant share of all payment-related tickets that year. And competitive market research checked whether our offer was simply weaker than what users could get elsewhere.

The harder decision was recruiting. By definition, the users I needed had already disengaged, so response rates were going to be low. I expanded the outreach list well beyond a typical study and adjusted the incentive specifically to re-engage a group that had already tuned us out.

Three barriers, three different users

The drop-off wasn't one problem. It was three, each hitting a different kind of user.

Users already loyal to a competing sportsbook were window-shopping, not stalling. Experienced bettors were nearly four times as likely as brand-new ones to say they'd compared us to other sportsbooks before deciding, and several times as likely to say they simply preferred another book. Lining up our welcome offer against theirs made it easy to see why: our $100 bonus was the smallest of the four, despite asking users to risk one of the higher minimum bets to unlock it.

Users who did attempt to deposit sometimes hit real technical errors, made worse by vague messaging that turned a fixable bug into a dead end and a support ticket. Only a small fraction of users who hit an error were able to resolve it themselves; nearly everyone else gave up or ran into the same wall a second time.

Most of those errors were simply users trying to deposit less than our $10 minimum, a floor twice as high as two of our direct competitors.

A third group, simply cautious and new to depositing, hesitated over unclear terms: many said they'd intended to deposit but got distracted, and several specifically cited not understanding how withdrawals worked as the reason they changed their mind.

That three-part diagnosis pointed to three different fixes: sharpen the new-user value proposition against named competitors, fix the technical failures and rewrite the error states so they resolve instead of dead-ending, and add clarity and reassurance around deposit and withdrawal terms.

What I'd do differently

I initially treated this like a simple onboarding problem, until the data showed many of these users were already active on competitor platforms. That reframed the entire challenge.

We weren't just onboarding a new user. We were convincing an experienced one to switch.

That's a much higher bar, and it taught me to always ask: what is the user's current solution, and is our offering compelling enough to make them abandon a familiar habit? It shifted my focus from just removing friction to actively creating motivational value.

The same survey that surfaced the drop-off also gave us reason to keep investing in fixing it: a majority of non-depositors said they were still likely to make a deposit on ESPN BET in the future. The barriers were fixable, not fundamental.