Onboarding 2.0: A Fresh Approach to Product Adoption
Hey, everyone I'm looking for your thoughts on an idea. We are building an Onboarding / Product adoption product to solve issues we experienced with current solutions on the market.
Why another tool? Because the existing tools are:
- Expensive
- Slow
- Hard to customize
- Too restrictive
- Complex and clunky
We want to change that. Our vision is to create a highly customizable and developer-friendly tool. It will have a self-serve version that you can implement in your codebase, as well as a cloud-based option. The cloud-based option will allow you to decouple changes from release cycles, provide a “no-code” experience for product teams, and analytics to track the performance of flows.
All of this will be open-source (or open-core) and GDPR compliant → We don’t want to store any user data. Oh, and did I mention it would be CHEAPER? There's no reason these tools are so expensive, as they often exclude fellow Indiehackers.
In addition to these improvements, we plan to enhance the flows themselves with advanced options such as conditional steps, function-calling steps, wait steps, and nested steps.
Here is a quick POC we slapped together to validate our ideas → https://flows.rbnd.studio/
Does this sound like a thing you’d use in your projects?
What experience do you have with other user onboarding solutions like Appcues, Intercom, IntroJS, Usetiful etc?
Interesting idea but curious why about one question: why wouldn't someone just use one of the many no-code, low-code, dev-friendly solutions for product tours (e.g., chameleon, appcues, etc)?
I see three key benefits for our product:
The first one is speed and reliability. Many of these tools have become bloated and slow over time as they expanded offerings for enterprise customers. We don't aim for that level of complexity; instead, we prioritize staying as lean as possible while delivering most of the value.
The second benefit is customization. While most no-code apps offer custom CSS and perhaps some custom content in tooltips or modals, we're planning advanced steps and near-total customization. Our motto is that you should be able to create anything you can imagine.
Last is price. The products you mentioned are quite cost-prohibitive for early-stage apps. Dropping ~$300/month for an onboarding tool can be a tough ask when your project is just getting off the ground. I know making price your differentiator isn't a good practice, but at the same time I believe that having a customer-friendly pricing creates better experience and people stick more.
I see. So this is a cheaper and more customizable product tour solution? Curious if you have taken a look at oss tools like introjs etc. I'm also interested in the space so just wondering how you're viewing things as you build :)
Yeah, IntroJS or DriverJS are great tools, but they only handle showing the onboardings. You need to create your own segmentation/delivery settings and performance tracking.
We used IntroJS with Mixpanel in my other project (Atmos) but we had to hack it around to get to where we wanted it. And it was still pretty simple and limited.
I wrote some more about our approach on our blog where I plan on posting about the journey so you can keep an eye on there 🙂 https://flows.sh/blog/announcing-flows
Cool - good luck on the build!
I totally relate to the frustration with existing onboarding tools! 🙌
It reminds me of a time when I struggled with a clunky software myself.
Your vision for a customizable and developer-friendly solution sounds promising.
Can't wait to see how it evolves! 😊