Most SaaS onboarding feels like work. Create an account. Confirm your email. Fill out a company profile. Upload a logo. Pick colors. Configure integrations. Invite teammates. By the time you reach 'Done', you have already spent 15 minutes doing unpaid labor before seeing any value. I think that is backwards. If a product needs setup before it provides value, most people will never reach the value. So when I started building getsig.nl, I set one rule: if onboarding takes more than two minutes, I have failed.
I wanted someone to go from 'I am curious what this is' to 'It is live on my site' without reading documentation, watching a video, or touching a dashboard. That meant removing configuration wherever possible.
The obvious onboarding flow for a feedback widget is standard. Ask for company name. Ask for website. Ask for logo. Ask for brand colors. Ask for contact email. Ask what the widget should be called. Then show an embed snippet. It works, but it is friction.
Instead, I flipped it. Step one is just: type your website URL. From that single input, I can pull the site's logo, detect primary brand colors, infer a default contact email, and name the agent after the site. Suddenly the user is not configuring anything. They are just confirming defaults. By the time signup is done, the widget already matches their branding, knows where to send messages, and has a working embed snippet. No dashboard exploration. No setup checklist. No tutorial.
Early-stage tools do not fail because features are missing. They fail because setup feels like commitment. People want to try, not adopt. Curiosity dies under configuration. Reducing onboarding friction is not a growth hack. It is respect for attention.
There is still more I want to automate, like suggesting default conversation flows, pre-configuring integrations, and improving branding extraction. But the principle remains: do not ask users for data you can derive yourself.
I do not know yet whether this onboarding approach will convert better. I have not earned those metrics. But I would rather bet on removing friction than adding features. If nothing else, it makes building more fun.
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