Introduction
When we started Intercom, our mission was to make business personal. So we took it upon ourselves to email every new customer, to ask how easy setup was, and to see if there was anything confusing them. It was a manual process, but repeatedly talking to people who are trying to set up your product is a surefire way to help you learn you need to fix your onboarding. Even though onboarding wasn’t as well documented as it is today, one thing was apparent: onboarding was and is the one truly universal problem every piece of software has. It’s the only one thing literally all your customers are going to do, and you’re guaranteed thousands of your users will run into some kind of difficulty with it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve tried every marketing technique in the book, if you’re not onboarding users successfully it counts for nothing. Why would you invest so much in trying to attract users, but not go the extra step and try to keep them? One of the obvious traps startups fall into is seeing onboarding as just three screens after signup. They fall for the snake oil of optimization and think a blue button instead of a red will magically deliver engaged users. In reality, onboarding is much more than tooltips pointing out buttons and menus that should be self-explanatory in the first place.
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