“We’ve got a dozen paying customers, but potential new ones are not using the self-sign-up. This won’t scale.”
I get this problem several times a month. Founders believe they can grow like Lovable. Assume you are not Lovable. Assume your onboarding sucks.
V0.1 of your onboarding flow has 14 painstaking steps. The first screen asks for an account before explaining any value beyond ‘democratise devops’ or something equally vague.
Your first version doesn’t have PMF yet, so users aren’t eager to rip it out of your hands. Slightest friction and boom, they’re gone.
Your messaging is too vague, so users don’t feel the need to try you.
“But Jeroehoeeen, I really spent time designing that onboarding flow!”
I believe you. I can’t argue with the hours.
But have you designed and optimised ten onboarding flows as a professional UX designer? Or is this your first one?
Designing easy, low-friction onboarding is a wildly underappreciated skill. I’ve seen experts lift completion rates by tens of percentage points just by reordering screens and cutting junk.
Be real. You are not a UX expert. Assume your v1 isn’t as easy to use as you think.
Even Slack didn’t grow like Slack
Sure, Slack had a free trial that spread like wildfire. But do you also know that Slack’s CEO revealed on a podcast (that I can’t find anymore) that the lion’s share of new paying customers came from manually selling to enterprises that already had a few teams on Slack?
Do things that don’t scale. Then actually do them.
Founders love repeating Paul Graham. Then they don’t do it. Expecting your startup to take off automatically after a dozen clients is naive.
Pick up that phone. Send that email. Send that DM. Start selling.
Be the great onboarding flow you currently lack. You can improvise and be human. Your product can’t.
There's a parallel here with AI-native tools specifically: founders assume that because the product feels magical to them, users will push through friction to get to the value. But most people won't type a second prompt if the first one didn't obviously work. Curious whether you think there's a customer count or revenue point where switching from guided to self-serve actually makes sense, or is it more about the sharpness of the value prop?
I’ve been guilty of this. Building the product feels like work, so it’s very easy to convince yourself you’re making progress when the thing you really need to do is go and sell it.
Your comfort zone can look very productive 🔗 https://millennialmasters.net/p/work-comfort-zone-not-productive