Why Perfect User Onboarding Creates Imperfect Customers
The counterintuitive truth about user activation that most founders get wrong.
The Problem Every Startup Faces
You've built something people need. Users sign up. Then they disappear.
The typical response is to make onboarding easier. Remove steps, add tooltips, automate everything. Get users to their "aha moment" faster ( and that’s accurate ).
But what if this approach is creating the wrong type of user - one who expects constant hand-holding and abandons your product the moment they face any real challenge?
In this article, we will take a deep dive into why, sometimes, you need to give space to explore on your own, and maybe struggle with our product a bit.
What is user onboarding?
User onboarding is the process that takes someone from "I just signed up" to "I know how to use this product to solve my problem." It's everything that happens between account creation and independent product usage.
For most startups, this includes: account setup, initial configuration, first meaningful action, and early feature adoption. The goal is to enable users to use your core functionality successfully without requiring guidance.
The traditional approach optimizes for speed and ease. The alternative approach optimizes for user capability and independence.
The Hidden Cost of Frictionless Onboarding
When you remove every possible obstacle from onboarding, you train users to expect your product to do all the thinking for them. They learn to follow prompts instead of understanding how things work.
This creates users who:
Need support for anything beyond basic use cases
Struggle when they encounter unexpected situations
Never develop confidence in using your product
Churn when they face their first real challenge
Why Effort Creates Attachment
Psychology research reveals the reasons behind this phenomenon. When people invest effort in learning something, several things occur:
They develop ownership. Work creates psychological investment. Users who put effort into understanding your product feel like they've built something, not just received something.
They build confidence. Overcoming initial challenges develops what psychologists call self-efficacy - confidence in one's ability to handle future problems with your product.
They learn principles, not just steps. Users who work to understand how something works develop transferable knowledge. Users who follow step-by-step instructions are only aware of those specific steps.
I’m not just talking theory here. It's clear how your most engaged users act. They're usually the ones who overcame the initial complexity and gained real competence. At the end, you are looking for an attached user who can fit your long-term retention expectations and basically stick around for the longest.
When to Remove Friction vs. Add Effort
Remove friction that doesn't teach anything:
Technical bugs and slow loading times
Confusing interface elements
Unnecessary form fields
Steps that don't connect to the core value
Preserve effort that builds capability:
Meaningful choices about how they'll use the product
A configuration that requires understanding their workflow
Practice with core functionality
Demonstration that they can solve real problems
What Productive Friction Might Look Like For Your Business?
So my goal is not to make everything more complicated for the user during their first interaction with your product. This doesn’t mean making your product deliberately confusing. It means designing onboarding that builds capability, not just completion.
Here are a few angles I usually love to explore with the products I work on.
Instead of auto-populating everything, ask users to input their real data. When they have to think about their workflow, goals, or context, they start forming mental models of how your product fits their needs.
Instead of showing them exactly where to click, present problems they need to solve. Provide them with sufficient guidance to succeed, but require them to determine the specific approach tailored to their situation.
Instead of generic demo content, have them create something tangible. Users who build something they actually need during onboarding develop immediate value and deeper product understanding.
Instead of skippable tutorials, require demonstration of core concepts. Users should prove they understand key functionality before moving to advanced features.
A Framework For a “Smarter” Onboarding Optimization
Before removing friction from your onboarding, run each step through these filters:
Does this step teach something they'll use repeatedly?
The best onboarding effort builds transferable knowledge. If users learn a principle, they'll apply it throughout their experience, and the effort compounds. For example, teaching users how to set up custom filters isn't just about that one task - it's about understanding how your product organizes information. They'll use that mental model dozens of times later.
Will they be more independent after this step?
Productive onboarding should reduce future support needs, not increase them. If completing a step means users can handle similar situations without needing to contact support, keep the effort. If it just creates another dependency, eliminate it. Ask yourself: three weeks from now, will this user be more self-sufficient because of this step?
Can they see why this matters for their goals?
Users will invest effort toward outcomes they care about, but effort that serves your business needs while ignoring theirs creates abandonment. Don't make users categorize their industry because you want better segmentation data - do it because understanding their context helps the product serve them better. The "why" behind each step should be apparent to the user.
Are we solving the right problem?
Sometimes, what appears to be an onboarding problem is actually a product-market fit issue. If users consistently struggle with the same concept during onboarding, the issue might be that your product doesn't match how they think about their work. No amount of optimization fixes fundamental misalignment. Before tweaking onboarding flows, make sure the underlying product makes sense to your target users.
What happens when they get stuck?
Plan for friction, don't just hope it works smoothly. When users hit a challenge during effortful onboarding, how do they get help? Build support systems that teach rather than solve. Instead of giving answers, guide users to discover solutions. This maintains the benefit of effort while preventing abandonment.
As a conclusion, I would say that the startups that survive and scale don't just activate users quickly. They create users who become genuinely good at solving their problems. The choice isn't between conversion and retention - it's between optimizing for users who complete onboarding and optimizing for users who master your product.