Ask HN: Onboarding as a service startup idea? Please help evaluate | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Onboarding as a service startup idea? Please help evaluate

8 pointsamukbils12 comments

Hi folks,

I'm thinking about adding an onboarding as a service product to our offerings. I can see why it's valuable to have great onboarding and how pretty much all SaaS needs it, and many don't build it because it's challenging to make an excellent onboarding flow.

I found many existing solutions, but they are all built as a task list for employees to onboard new customers, not as a self-serve dev tool. The ones that target SaaS and self-serve are terrible. They require much work, installing extensions, and lack A/B testing ability. They all have so many limitations it's incredible I couldn't find a suitable option out there.

Any thoughts on this?

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This is pretty much what we’re building at Dopt (dopt.com). A user adoption platform built for devs and PMs. We’re a visual flow builder that lets you define the logic and targeting of your flows with APIs and SDKs that let you build with your own UI components.

We’ve seen a ton of discontent with the existing tools as you mention (they’re brittle, don’t match the brand, force you to use a limited set of modalities).

We’ve seen a lot of companies forgoing them to go the route of building their onboarding flows themselves, but then they’ll run into another set of issues (logic/targeting/state management is complicated and hard to build/iterate on, non devs struggle to understand what users will actually see).

As you mention it makes it hard to move quickly and test experiences, which is what you need to do if you want to figure out what works for your product and users.

Your landing page looks very promising. I joined the beta list. Any idea when I can play around with it? I could be one of your first beta users (given the product is stable enough). I'm so surprised no one has built a viable solution here.

Send me a note (my email is in my profile). I can get you access this week.

done.

We're building a product to tackle the time to value problem for API integration at Speakeasy (speakeasyapi.dev) . This is the onboarding problem you described but specifically for APIs which have a whole set of special needs and table stakes like dev portals with request logs, client sdks, usage limits, key rotation etc. Lots of companies building partner and public APIs often spend weeks if not months getting new partners to make a successful API call and move the integration into production. We've seen that only the biggest API as product companies have the time to invest in this internally by building out API platform teams. You still need a lot of this dev ex even if you a smaller company so usage of your API grows quickly. If what you are doing is API centric shoot me a note and happy to have you test out the product or just jam on ideas :)

Because many tools in this space are so bad I think you'll have a hard time persuading saas companies to evaluate your thing. Saas founders also don't want their onboarding to be too smooth as that impedes evaluation of product-market fit.

Thanks for sharing.

That's one of the reasons entering this market is challenging. 1. So many existing solutions are bad, so people will assume you're also bad. 2. You will be lost in all voices and blogs and ads for these bad products.

But for the point about making it too easy hurts PMF, I think it's not going to have that much of an impact and it's never a bad thing to have your product perform well.

I'm more worried about companies opting to build their own flow because it matches their brand and design. Any thoughts about this?

Brand and design is used as an argument when the product isn't doing anything critical. If your solution solves a real pain point nobody cares what it looks like.

The onboarding for my SaaS products could be a lot better, but somehow we never get around to fixing it. But also, we're not tempted to look for solutions out there, because we want onboarding that is very specific for our software, and we don't want a generic solution or a another dependency that could break or keeps changing on us.

That's very interesting. Thank you for sharing this feedback. This could be the thinking of many companies as well.

Regarding the product solving a real pain, I agree. Aesthetics are overlooked if the need is there.

On the other hand, wouldn't you want to optimize this part of your funnel? Maybe even see if there's a problem between signups and conversions? You'd want your users to get value from your product as soon as possible, and a good onboarding truly helps (see courier.com, for example).

I'm pretty surprised that your aversion to another dependency outweighs the possible benefits of having a good onboarding flow.

The challenging part is the process is actually integrating an onboarding system into your app - doing the right thing at the right time in a way that looks seamless/intentional and works consistently. If you want to build a successful solution, I think this is probably the hump you're going to have to get over. No product out in the market is perfect, because everyone wants something different, and generic products are easier to extend/change. Make sure you aren't building YOUR version of an onboarding system and expecting others to buy into it - they probably won't.

That's a great point. Any integrative solution worth its salt offers some level of customization. But you're right; maybe because everyone's needs are a little different, it might not be viable. Any idea how to validate this part?

BTW, I was actually thinking of redirecting users after signup to a beautifully designed (customizable) onboarding flow that includes an A/B test as part of it so that product managers can play with it as much as they want without devoting engineering resources.

Thoughts?

> Any idea how to validate this part?

Productized consulting until you find commonality

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