How we won our first three clients without an optimized onboarding flow

The reason why a good onboarding flow is so important is because it builds confidence in the client's heart that you can follow through with the service you've promised. Bad onboarding does the opposite, it erodes trust, and quickly. It's one of the critical keys to building a good reputation.

When you're a new company (like us), still building the plane as you're flying it, this can pose a real challenge, because you (or we) haven't optimized the onboarding experience so that it's seamless and silky as our standards want it to be.

Thankfully we managed to strike the balance, and onboarded three clients with the following simple steps:

1. Make sure that the product can back up your promises

This is the clear key that needs very little explanation. You can sell the dream, but when it comes time for the client to use the product, it has to work. If not, buy yourself time until you can deliver. Our http request/API gateway actually works, as well as sign in and security measures.

2. Do things that don't scale: Onboard clients in live sessions

While a new user technically can self serve, our process does still need to be optimized and automated even more so that it's truly seamless. That said, as soon as we saw development for enabling secure use becoming available, we started onboarding clients immediately.

Even if it's not perfect, and it doesn't scale, walking clients through the onboarding process saved them time, and boosted our conversions substantially. We also learned valuable lessons and feedback during the live sessions, which we never would have gotten without going live with clients.

3. Be open enough but also confident

The progress of your product is where it is, and if the value proposition is compelling enough for a given audience, clients will be willing to work with you through that process. In our case, we make network management 90% more cost effective, enabling live monitoring of microservices for React/Node developers, so teams who struggle with bottlenecks for devops/cloud deployments, or companies that can’t hire enough devops/an SRE, seem to immediately need what we offer (snowowl.co , docs.snowowl.co). And they’re willing to work with something that works but isn’t 100% mature yet.

With these three simple principles in mind, we onboarded three clients. We’re excited to get to the point where clients can onboard themselves with ease, but until then, we know we can deliver on our promises and gain valuable feedback by doing it live!

How about you, do you have good experiences/horror stories with client onboarding? Let us know in the comments below!