FINDING 01·Bootstrapped SaaS founders with complex or configurable products·1 source
Users drop off during onboarding due to misconfiguration and lack of guidance
Early-stage SaaS products lose the majority of trial users who silently fail to configure the product correctly and never return, rather than reaching out for help. This results in poor activation rates.
Source
“User uploads videos but they did not configure the settings correctly so they end up with bad data. User tries a few more times or gives up or reaches out to me. The majority of people are just giving up and never returning.”
FINDING 02·SaaS product teams building AI or work-management tools·1 source
Empty initial workspace kills user activation
Dropping new users into a blank workspace with no pre-filled context forces them to do setup work before experiencing value, leading to abandonment. Builders are actively seeking ways to auto-populate workspaces to accelerate the 'aha moment' (2025).
Source
“Instead of dropping users into an empty workspace or walking them through dropdowns and presets, we built an agentic onboarding system to auto-generate a fully configured workspace.”
FINDING 03·Web app developers building paid SaaS products·1 source
Payment + registration flow creates unnecessary friction and architectural complexity
Developers building onboarding flows that combine account creation with payment face UX friction (multi-step flows) and backend complexity (e.g., how to pass user data to Stripe webhooks before the user record exists).
Source
“The problem is that it causes some friction, so I want to have step 3 and 4 in one step: Validation return the Stripe Payment view, and if valid it create and activate the user. The problem is that I can't figure how to give application users informations to Stripe to create user on webhook.”
FINDING 04·Early-stage B2B SaaS founders and small teams·1 source
Scaling personal onboarding support is unsustainable for growing SaaS teams
Small teams rely on manual, high-touch onboarding (e.g., video calls) to compensate for poor self-serve flows, but this approach cannot scale as the user base grows. Reducing time-to-first-value without losing the personal touch is a key unsolved challenge (as of mid-2025).
Source
“The onboarding currently is Google Meet video calls + followups video calls to explain confusing parts. This is clearly not going to scale, I'm looking for tactics to get time-to-first-value under 15 minutes without losing the personal touch that early users loved.”
FINDING 05·Web developers building Next.js / auth-gated onboarding flows·1 source
Users can bypass mandatory onboarding steps, undermining activation
Developers implementing onboarding redirects (e.g., with NextAuth.js) find that users can skip required onboarding pages by navigating directly to app URLs, leaving them in an incomplete or unconfigured state.
Source
“I have setup nextauth.js and redirection to an onboarding page if its the first time the user has signed up with google... User is able to skip the onboarding”
FINDING 06·SaaS founders and indie developers·2 sources
Existing onboarding tools are rigid, expensive, or require too much custom code
SaaS builders consistently find that off-the-shelf onboarding tools force a trade-off between costly/inflexible SaaS products and writing significant custom code. This pain appears across multiple years (2022, 2024) and remains unresolved.
Source
“We had to either use a rigid product like Appcues and settle for subpar experience. Or write a lot of code to get something beautiful.”
Source
“The ones that target SaaS and self-serve are terrible. They require much work, installing extensions, and lack A/B testing ability. They all have so many limitations it's incredible I couldn't find a suitable option out there.”
FINDING 07·Mobile and web app developers·3 sources
Onboarding flows are hard to iterate on and A/B test
Developers struggle to properly A/B test onboarding flows, particularly the very first experience a user sees, due to platform limitations (e.g., Firebase Remote Config lacking a first-open activation trigger). Existing SaaS onboarding tools also lack built-in A/B testing. This is a recurring pain across multiple years.
Source
“If you're setting up a Remote Config based AB test there's no activation event based on user first opened. We want to AB test our new onboarding flow against the previous onboarding experience however without a startup trigger we're not sure how to properly create this experiment.”
Source
“They all have so many limitations it's incredible I couldn't find a suitable option out there. Any thoughts on this?”
Source
“Onboarding flows are deceptive. They are super easy to build technically, but very difficult to perfect in terms of conversions. Should I ask questions or show features? Should I add more steps? Less steps? Should I prompt to give a rating? Should I force users to sign-in? That's why iteration is key.”