When Simplicity Fails: My Battle with Onboarding Friction
Hey Indie Hackers 👋
I’m Julien, founder of Linkeme — an AI-powered tool that helps solo founders and small teams consistently publish social media content without stress or writer’s block.
It’s a “set-and-forget” SaaS — once it’s configured, it works in the background to generate, validate, and schedule your posts.
Sounds simple, right?
Well…
What I Thought Would Happen
User visits the site
Clicks “Try for free”
Creates an account
Confirms email
Lands on onboarding
Configures their brand, connects social media, done ✅
Smooth.
What Actually Happens
I watch replays in Microsoft Clarity and my heart sinks.
They reach onboarding
Try to click everything but the one button that matters
Scroll up/down
Click frenetically on irrelevant blocks
Miss the “Modify” button that unlocks the setup
Exit
These are users who wanted to try.
They went through 4 steps to get there.
But friction kills momentum.
And I sit there thinking:
“But it’s just 3 columns and 3 buttons… how is this still unclear?”
Why It Hurts
Because Linkeme is not a daily-use dashboard.
It’s a tool you set up once, and then it quietly delivers value week after week.
So if you lose the user before setup…
You lose everything.
No content = no aha moment
No post = no conversion
No rhythm = no retention
What I’ve Tried
✅ Simplified UI
✅ Removed distractions
✅ Logical flow
✅ Clear text
Still, it’s not enough.
What I’m Asking
If you’ve built a tool with:
Slight complexity under the hood
Invisible value (like automation)
Setup required before results…
How did you crack onboarding?
Tooltips?
Embedded video?
Interactive assistant?
Forced walkthrough?
Bonus question:
Have you ever made something too simple — and watched users get lost because of it?
Any advice welcome.
Still shipping. Still learning.
Julien
Building the onboarding experience is an art... I know what you feel. I tried your app, some feedback:
After I gave you my website, you tell me "We analyse your website..." But TBH I don't know if I should wait or scroll? I user needs to wait show him the loading bar or spinning wheel.
You have chosen probably the worse signups method, verification code on email. It's such a pain to rewrite the code from an email - why I can't just paste the code, man?! It's just mean... Better, just send a link to click on it. Btw. I would prefer magic link or Google oauth for the signups.
My business summary got outputted in french for some reason 😅
After login i see the page where I should fill the info, connect socials and define the strategy. These should be 3 steps with breadcrumbs not one page.
Keep grinding 💪
Hi Stephan,
Thanks for testing I saw your journey on clarity and you perfectly pointed 3 big pain points I have at this time:
1: the page when you wait is clearly too dense in information and people don't know that have to do, where they need to click ( the create account button who is lost (and even more especially on mobile devices))
2: French bug, will be corrected before end of the week. Totally not normal.
3: Globally the mobile experience need to be improved. On Desktop, the You don't see yet the three colo, they appear one by one when you fulfill the first (and second ...). He was a huge debate between a one page or 3 pages ... we made compromise with a one page where column appear one by one (but don't work on mobile, did't saw this bug before you point out).
for the login, you have good points.
Thanks for all.
This resonates a lot. Had a similar experience with an onboarding flow that felt too simple, yet confused users.
For me, adding a short walkthrough (3 steps max) + one inline video helped a lot.
Keep going Julien — Linkeme sounds promising!
Hey Julien, I really felt this.
I had a similar problem with the Marketing Starter Kit I made for early-stage founders.
It’s full of useful templates and marketing ideas, but if people don’t open the Notion page or try a few things, they don’t see the value.
Here’s what helped me:
I showed a short video before they got started, so they knew what to expect
I gave them quick wins — like templates they could use in 30 seconds
I sent a few short emails over 5 days with simple action steps
I added a checklist that said: “Do these 3 things first” — and that actually helped a lot
Sometimes making it clear is better than making it minimal.
P.S: Here's the link to sign up to marketing starter kit: https://wirehaired-protest-b61.notion.site/1e97648c55c880ddb946c598bdeda50f
Still learning, still improving thanks for sharing your story!
Hey Julien,
just a quick bit of feedback:
Your main CTA (Free Trial in pink) doesn’t actually work.
There are too many elements that look clickable but aren’t.
Not saying this will change everything, but it’s probably a good place to start.
Hi Davy, thanks for your time to test, I'm like very curious about you config and your Internet browser when you test, because obviously we have test actively this CTA (and all the others) and we never had a case, when he actually don't work.
Chrome : Version 138.0.7204.101 (Official Build) (arm64)
I am on Mac
I have an adblock too
Hope it helps.
Totally feel this. I ran into similar friction while helping users onboard in a 3D printing tool — even small UI missteps caused drop-offs. Simplifying the flow and guiding attention really helped. Might be worth checking how Orca Slicer handles setup: theorcaslicer