What did you remove from onboarding that made the product easier to understand?

I used to treat confusion as a copy problem: add another sentence, another tooltip, another example. Lately I’m more suspicious of the step itself. If a new user needs a paragraph to understand why a screen exists, the screen may be arriving too early—or asking them to make a decision they don’t have enough context for.

For those who’ve simplified onboarding, what was the first thing you cut? A setup question, a permissions request, a tour, or an empty-state explanation? And how did you tell the shorter path was actually clearer rather than merely faster?

I’m thinking about this while shaping how products are presented on IndieNeed; the same question comes up when deciding which context belongs up front: https://www.indieneed.com/submit