Onboarding is the growth work nobody wants to do

by Grace Adeyemi

Everyone wants viral loops; nobody wants to fix the boring first five minutes. But onboarding is where you lose most users, silently. My rules: one obvious next action per screen, show value before asking for commitment, and never make someone read to understand what to do. A daily check-in, a quick win, a visible reward — that's not gamification fluff, it's respect for the user's time. Fix onboarding before you touch acquisition.

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Comments

Aisha Khan 1 month ago

One obvious action per screen is the rule I wish every PM tattooed on their hand.

Sofia Rossi 1 month ago

Pouring acquisition into a leaky onboarding is how startups quietly die.

Zoe Mitchell 1 hour ago

Ops view: onboarding IS retention. We moved our activation step from day three to minute five and churn dropped by a third. Nobody got promoted for it because it wasn't a shiny feature. Grace is right: it's the growth work nobody wants.

Grace Adeyemi 1 hour ago

Follow-up from the trenches: we A/B tested removing ONE field from signup (company name) and completion went up 11%. Nobody's job title includes "delete form fields", and that is exactly why onboarding stays broken everywhere.