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 2 months ago

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

Sofia Rossi 2 months ago

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

Zoe Mitchell 1 month 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 month 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.

Femi Chowdhury 1 month ago

Grace, this is the post I wish more founders read. The reframe I'd add from the community side: onboarding isn't done when someone CAN use the product, it's done when they've PRODUCED something small - a first comment, a first vote, a tiny stake. An audience consumes; a community produces, and the gap between the two is usually one well-timed nudge. In every Discord I've run, the members who posted once in week one stayed; the pure lurkers churned no matter how slick the tour was. So I stopped optimizing the tour and started engineering the first contribution. Delete the fifth form field, sure - but also hand them one thing to make on day one.

Grace Adeyemi 1 month ago

"Engineer the first contribution" - stealing that, Femi. That's the whole thing in four words. The tour optimizes for "can they", the first contribution optimizes for "will they", and only the second one has ever predicted retention in my tests.