HACKER Q&A
📣 amukbils

Onboarding as a service startup idea? Please help evaluate


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?

  👤 alonmower Accepted Answer ✓
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.

👤 simplesager
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 :)
👤 gizmo
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.
👤 noodle
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.