Computing Life

In the business and tech worlds, funnel thinking—commonly known as funnel analysis—is one of the most frequently used analytic approaches. The idea is not to focus solely on the end results or conversions (like purchasing a product). Instead, you break the entire process into key stages and identify the most likely bottlenecks that cause users or projects to drop off. Only when you’ve pinpointed the biggest blockage and found a systematic way to clear it can you make the overall flow smoother. From the drop-off that happens between an online store’s “checkout” and “payment” steps, to a scheduling bottleneck for research telescope time, you can use a similar breakdown approach to uncover problems and craft solutions. The article below first illustrates funnel thinking using typical business scenarios. Then it dives into how ZWO’s product strategy with the Seestar series applies this same mindset to bring value not only in commercial settings but also in scientific research.

What Is Funnel Analysis

Mention the word “funnel,” and many people will instantly think of online shopping. Everyone has bought something on the internet at some point, noticing how the number of users keeps dropping off at each stage—from browsing an item, to adding it to the cart, to placing the order, and finally completing payment. For instance, maybe 100,000 people viewed a product page, but only 10,000 ended up paying. Where did the other 90,000 go? Was the product description not appealing enough? Was the address form too cumbersome? Did the high shipping cost scare people away? These are precisely the core questions that funnel analysis helps address.

Funnel thinking means tracking how users or resources gradually convert along a chain of steps and taking a serious look at every stage where a large number of people may drop off. The further you go down the funnel, the fewer people remain (or the fewer examples of a completed goal), but those who stick around are your most valuable paying customers or most successful research outcomes. Using e-commerce as an example, if I discover that 80% of users stop at the “shopping cart” step without proceeding to checkout, then that is my biggest bottleneck. Maybe I’ll pop up a reminder saying, “Spend 20 more dollars to get free shipping,” or launch a limited-time offer to entice those still on the fence. This philosophy applies to any multi-step process with a high drop-off rate. If you don’t know where the biggest wave of people is leaving, you’ll be making blind changes; but once you’ve identified where things get stuck, you can boost your conversion rates in a targeted way.

Seeing Customer Retention Through a Telescope

For a long time, astrophotography was not very friendly to beginners. In the past, if you wanted to capture a photo of a deep-sky object, you often had to assemble an equatorial mount, telescope, camera, guiding system, and install a whole suite of specialized software on your computer to handle drivers and polar alignment. Any hiccup in any of these steps could bring the project to a halt. For people who first got interested by looking at gorgeous images posted online, it felt like an impossible gulf. That’s also why, for a long time, astrophotography often required a mentor—someone who would help you get started—because tackling everything alone felt overwhelming.

If we use a funnel to dissect this process, we can imagine four layers:

1. The first layer is the spark of interest: people see stunning astrophotos and become fascinated by the night sky and deep-sky objects. This pool is actually quite large, as social media constantly seeds interest by sharing beautiful images.
2. The second layer is the initial attempt: people try to figure out how to assemble or purchase the necessary equipment, but the barriers are high—lack of familiarity with the hardware, software, or how to perform polar alignment. Many give up here, making this the largest drop-off.
3. The third layer is actual purchasing: some people do successfully buy all the pieces and begin shooting real images, but further frustrations with operations or image processing can still drive them away before they truly settle in.
4. The fourth layer is the advanced enthusiast: after getting comfortable with the basics, they keep upgrading their cameras and mounts or even start custom modifications, truly becoming hardcore astrophotographers.

If we roll back ten years and imagine we’re a telescope manufacturer’s CEO with a limited budget, wanting to boost customer conversions and retention to earn more profit, how would we do it?

The key bottleneck lies in the stage of fledgling interest and initial attempts. Faced with the high bar of astrophotography, many people who’ve only been dazzled by beautiful social media posts but lack any equipment or technical background can’t make the leap to real shooting. By applying funnel thinking in reverse, we can ask ourselves:

Step one: remove the fear of technology. Why do so many people drop off after just a quick attempt and never progress to buying equipment? Often because “I did some research and realized this is too complicated.” Between driver configurations, ASCOM, astap plate solving, and polar alignment, it’s all too confusing. If we want more newcomers to move forward, we have to simplify or abstract away these complexities. If there’s no product to handle this step, we might envision something like Apple’s unified control approach, hiding all the driver and parameter settings behind a sleek mobile app. That way, people aren’t scared off by computer driver or complicated setup issues. If we eventually turned that controller into a compact device, we’d get something very much like the ASI Air: it lowers the biggest tech barrier for beginners and gives people a shortcut. This solution shortens the distance between the funnel’s second and third layers, guiding more people from “first attempt” into “buying gear.”

Step two: fill the gap in assembling gear and cost. Even with a universal controller, where’s the bottleneck now? For many, it’s realizing they still need an equatorial mount, telescope tubes, a lot of adapters, plus thousands in expenses. They’re deterred at the funnel’s second layer. They’re afraid of buying the wrong part or worried the gear will be huge and heavy to haul around, only to collect dust at home. To get more people over this hurdle, we have to spare them from piecing everything together themselves, ideally offering a device that’s ready right out of the box. That means integrating the telescope, camera, control system, and mount all in one, so even total novices can operate it with a smartphone. In practice, that’s pretty much what the Seestar S50 is: it saves you from messing with myriad adapters and an equatorial mount, and it costs just a few thousand RMB (roughly a few hundred dollars). That shift further increases the conversion from the funnel’s second layer to its third.

Step three: now that we’ve largely addressed the second-to-third layer bottlenecks, we can either move upwards, tackling the spark-of-interest crowd (like making Seestar S30), or go downwards, helping those who are already shooting evolve into advanced enthusiasts (like making Seestar S100). From a market perspective, the top funnel is often the bigger opportunity. If you can bring in more new faces at the high-level entry point, they will eventually follow the rest of the funnel and keep spending. So you look at whether some people still think “An all-in-one unit is great, but it’s still not portable enough or slightly too expensive.” That means some portion of the top funnel remains stuck between stages two and three. They’re just casually intrigued and reluctant to invest too much. They might still drop out. If you want to capture this more casual, wider audience, the smartest approach is to develop something smaller, cheaper, and easier to carry—so they can click “buy” on a whim, like picking up a new gadget, and experience the fun of shooting the night sky. Inevitably, that drives the birth of a smaller integrated scope: the Seestar S30. It uses a more compact body and a friendlier price tag to reel in folks who just want to see if they like it.

By laying out these three main steps, you’ll see that breaking through the funnel from initial interest to successful shooting will inevitably revolve around lowering the tech barrier, simplifying gear, and reducing cost and size. Once these ideas come together, you end up with products very much like the ASI Air, Seestar S50, and Seestar S30. Thinking backwards through the funnel clearly shows why they exist—each step tackles the hardest, most drop-off-heavy stage of the process. The final solutions that flourish in the marketplace usually aren’t random; they emerge from systematically smoothing over the friction points where most people give up. This process is precisely the value of funnel thinking.

Can We Use Funnel Analysis in Research? — On Seestar’s Academic Potential

Understanding how ZWO’s products impact a commercial funnel might spark the question: is this approach only for e-commerce and consumer markets? Definitely not. Scientific research also has numerous drop-off points, except these are about the elimination or interruption of research projects in the competition for academic resources, rather than consumers opening their wallets.

We tend to view the world’s top observational instruments (like the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Keck telescopes, or large facilities in Chile) as the ultimate weapons in astronomy. To secure observing time on these resources, you must submit a proposal, pass expert reviews, then wait for scheduling, all while competing against excellent projects worldwide. Many promising research ideas never progress through this research funnel because they lack the required credentials or the priority ranking. Others get stuck due to the time allocation process. Furthermore, a project needing long-term or global coverage might not fit the narrow scheduling windows of these grand observatories, which usually focus their limited time on the most critical, high-impact targets.

If we consider large telescopes as the bottom of the research funnel, then an affordable, widely distributed system like the Seestar offers a new parallel pathway. Because Seestar devices are more accessible in price and operation, they could be deployed globally as part of a software-linked observational network, granting advantages the giant telescopes lack:

1. Quantity and distribution. Multiple units could be stationed in different time zones and geographic locations, “handing off” observations so that each isn’t bound to a single telescope’s timetable.
2. Time-domain observation. Many transient astronomical events (supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, gravitational lensing) need immediate and continuous response. A distributed network is perfect for “spot it, then track it” collaborations.
3. Large sample sizes plus long time baselines. Big telescopes can give you exquisite resolution and depth, but they can’t keep watch over many targets for extended periods. A Seestar network can scale to monitor large numbers of targets for longer durations, providing coverage that’s hard to get through a congested queue for top-tier facilities.

In other words, Seestar can significantly widen the top end of the research funnel, allowing many ideas that might never secure time on large telescopes to get preliminary observations or continuous monitoring through a more decentralized, crowd-enabled model. If the resulting data supports initial findings, then bigger resources may eventually join in. Projects that would have been dropped in the traditional research funnel might finally find their place. For the scientific community, this is more than just a hardware upgrade; it’s a whole new collaborative ecosystem. The software infrastructure to power such a distributed network does not yet exist, hinting at a potential turning point in research processes.

Taking Funnel Thinking Even Further

Whether in business or academia, the main goal is to ensure more great ideas can successfully convert into tangible outcomes. Funnel thinking helps us spot the bottlenecks and actively smooth them out. In e-commerce, the bottleneck might be a frustrating checkout process. In astrophotography, it’s the steep technical learning curve. In scientific research, it might be overly centralized resource allocation. Whatever the setting, the key is to locate the problem area and do everything possible to raise its conversion rate.

Looking back at ZWO’s product strategy, it’s easier to see why they could make such inroads in a highly competitive astrophotography market. Instead of pouring all their R&D resources into marginal improvements in a camera’s quantum efficiency, they focused on addressing the real reasons users drop off, tackling the integration, ease-of-use, and cost-reduction angles to break down roadblocks. ASI Air, Seestar S50, and Seestar S30 target different tiers of potential customers, layer by layer, and ultimately not only build a devoted user community but also expand the overall landscape for astrophotography.

In research, Seestar shows the same potential: its distributed, compact capabilities give more researchers and enthusiasts a shot at meaningful observation. It breaks away from the reliance on limited time slots at elite observatories. Regular colleges or grassroots groups can leverage Seestar for continuous time-domain studies or rapid-response event monitoring. With ample baseline data, ideas that previously failed to get telescope time have a better chance to blossom.

All of this highlights a simple truth: if you reevaluate an industry or a pursuit through the lens of funnel thinking, you often uncover overlooked sticking points. Solving these can dramatically boost your flow efficiency, which in many cases offers more value—whether in the market or for academia—than merely pushing for extreme performance gains at the bottom of the funnel. In fact, many strategic decisions boil down to choosing between “adding finishing touches” for existing users and “addressing urgent needs” for those who aren’t even in the game yet. The former might push a high-end product even further, pleasing experts but not really growing your user base. The latter simplifies the entry barriers, allowing a new wave of people to get involved.

So if your goal is to get more people to appreciate the magic of astrophotography, or to bring more imaginative research directions into reality, you must start with lowering that “first threshold”—making it easy for the newly curious to join instead of scaring them away at the door. When everyone who’s even slightly interested can actually give it a try, you greatly increase the likelihood they’ll eventually end up at the bottom of the funnel as loyal users or yield genuine academic breakthroughs. ZWO’s journey with ASI Air and the Seestar lineup serves as a remarkable demonstration: even in a seemingly niche market, making the right calls can open up a surprisingly big space.

Bringing it back to daily life, no matter what kind of conversion challenge you face—attracting new customers, retaining existing ones, boosting repeat purchases, securing budget approvals, or furthering academic projects—you can always start by drawing a funnel diagram. Identify how many people (or ideas) make it from one stage to the next. Find out which stage sees the biggest drop-off. That’s the place to concentrate your efforts. Maybe you need to redesign processes, maybe you need to cut prices, or maybe you just need a whole new collaboration model. ZWO did it for astrophotography, and Seestar is doing it for research resources.

Once you get the hang of funnel analysis, you’ll realize it’s really a dynamic network perspective: you’re not only examining vertical flows from one step to the next, but also lateral differences among user types, channels, or audiences, plus how they interact with your product or organization. You soon discover that funnel analysis is not just about reading a stats chart; it’s about understanding people, grasping how resources are allocated, and continuously iterating to make everything flow more smoothly. It’s not confined to commercial enterprises or academic labs, but to any scenario where you hope more possibilities can become reality. Hopefully, after reading this article, you’ll have a deeper, more intuitive feel for funnel thinking, along with broader imagination for its cross-domain uses. You never know—maybe the next big bottleneck you eliminate will be the key that lifts your own project to success. Here’s to forging ahead on the path of exploration.