How much friction should you actually remove from your app's signup process?

We spent almost three weeks building a detailed six-step on boarding survey to collect user demographics before giving them access to the workspace. We thought collecting deep setup preferences upfront would help us personalize their dashboard experience. Looking back, nearly half of our trial signups dropped off right at step three without ever seeing the app. Once we bypassed the setup wizard and let users land directly on a sample project, our activation numbers jumped instantly.

​Is upfront user profiling just an unnecessary barrier that kills early adoption?