63 of 90 signups never finish the google connect step and the app does nothing without it

Before you decide anything, go and look at exactly which scopes you request, because that decides how much work verification is.

If you only ever need files the user themselves picks, the per-file scope covers it and it is not in the restricted bucket. Broad read-everything-in-their-drive access is a different category and drags you into a heavier review, which for a solo developer is the difference between an annoying week and a quarter with a security questionnaire attached.

The other thing to know before you plan around unverified: an app in testing is capped at 100 test users, and if you publish while unverified there is a cap on new users too. Those caps are not a soft warning, they are a wall you hit on a good week - and at 90 signups you are most of the way to it already.

So my order would be: check scopes, narrow them if you can, then start verification because the clock runs while you build the other things.

Reordered mine and it was the biggest single change I have made to a funnel.

Old order was signup, connect, pick, output. New order is signup, look at a full report built from demo data that is obviously demo data, then a button that says use my own files. Connect rate went from around 30% to around 55% and the number reaching a real report roughly doubled.

My caveat is that I only had about 140 signups either side of the change, so treat the exact numbers as a direction and not a law. The mechanism seems simple though - before the demo you were asking a stranger for access to their documents on the strength of a landing page. Afterwards you are asking someone who has seen what they get.

Solved something close to this two months ago so this is fresh rather than wise.

The unverified warning was killing me for the same reason. Two things helped before verification came through. First, a short page linked directly from the connect step, with a screenshot of the exact screen the user is about to see, an arrow pointing at where the advanced link is, and one line saying what we can and cannot read. Second, a plain sentence next to the button: we only ever read the folder you choose, we never see anything else, and here is how to revoke access in one click, with the link to Google's own permissions page.

The second line is doing the work, I think. People are not confused by the warning, they are worried by it, and a confident answer to the worry beats a walkthrough of the buttons.

Before rebuilding anything, split those 90 by where they came from. A signup from someone who read your docs and a signup from a directory listing are different species, and if half of the 63 came from one listing then you do not have an onboarding problem, you have an intent problem and a demo mode will not fix it.

General rule: never optimise a step until you know the drop-off is uniform across sources. Otherwise you spend a quarter building for people who were never going to connect anything.

One cheap thing while you decide: email the 63. Not a drip sequence, a single plain message a day after they stall, from your address, asking one question - what stopped you at the Google step. I sent 40 of those once and got 11 replies, and three of them said something I would never have guessed, which was that they were signed into three Google accounts and did not know which one the tool wanted. That was a one line fix in the UI.

Demo first, connect second, verification started today. The consent screen is not your worst problem, asking for document access from a stranger is.