onboarding_skill

Overview

This skill helps founders design high-converting onboarding and activation flows that get users to their "aha moment" quickly. It focuses on practical patterns, measurable activation metrics, and concrete step-by-step flows to raise activation and reduce early churn. Use it to map your activation metric, pick the right onboarding pattern, and produce copy and UI guidance that drives results.

How this skill works

The skill inspects product goals, retention signals, and early-user behavior to identify a single activation metric (the aha moment). It recommends a tailored onboarding pattern (setup wizard, checklist, interactive walkthrough, templates, or progressive disclosure) and produces a prioritized flow with exact copy, pre-populated data suggestions, and tracking metrics. It also specifies what to measure and success thresholds to validate the design.

When to use it

• Designing first-run experience for a new SaaS product
• Trying to improve activation rate or reduce day-7 churn
• Defining the product's single "aha moment" and activation metric
• Creating personalized onboarding for different user roles
• Converting empty-state anxiety into fast value with templates

Best practices

• Make onboarding lead directly to the aha moment — nothing else matters
• Prefer interactive, in-product tasks over passive tours or videos
• Ask one early question to personalize the path (role or use case)
• Limit steps: 3–5 in a wizard, 4–6 items in a checklist
• Always allow skip and track skip/drop rates to iterate
• Measure activation rate, time-to-activate, and step drop-off

Example use cases

• Project management app: wizard that creates a project and adds first task to achieve activation
• Analytics platform: template that loads sample data so users see a dashboard immediately
• Team chat product: interactive walkthrough that sends a test message to trigger network effects
• Feature-rich product: progressive disclosure that surfaces advanced features only after core usage
• B2B onboarding: checklist for account setup, invite teammates, connect data source, and create first report