Poor onboarding flow killed my SaaS

In January I launched Reviewbunny — a tool for sending email digests about pull requests waiting for your review.

In every startup I worked at, people would forget to promptly review each other's pull requests. This stalled development and made folks somewhat annoyed. So this was definitely a problem I wanted to solve for myself.

Unfortunately, in 6 months I haven't got a single paying customer. I had steady traffic to Reviewbunny from a blog post that went viral on Hacker News. People signed up, but no one was sticking around.

My main takeaway from Reviewbunny failure is that onboarding is super fucking important. If users can't start using my app within minutes, they lose interest and they don't come back.

No matter how cool your solution to their problem is, people will walk away. It's too easy to close a tab and look for something else.

Reviewbunny was an app tailored for teams, but I required folks to sign up individually. Obviously, it's hard to convince entire teams to do that.

Ideally, a CTO or engineering manager would sign up and set it up for entire team, but my app didn't work that way.

So once again, I learned that onboarding flow is an essential part of the product. Indie hackers, make sure to take care of it and review how effective it is 🙂

I wrote an extended post on my blog where I shared a few more takeaways, if you're interested.

Good luck everyone!