customer-onboarding-2

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name: customer-onboarding
description: Design and execute customer onboarding that drives activation and retention. Use when building onboarding flows for new users, reducing churn in the first 30 days, improving time-to-value, or creating onboarding sequences (email, in-app, or manual). Covers activation metrics, onboarding step design, friction reduction, and measuring onboarding success. Trigger on "customer onboarding", "onboarding flow", "user onboarding", "reduce early churn", "improve activation", "onboarding sequence", "time to value".
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# Customer Onboarding

## Overview
Onboarding is where you keep or lose customers. The first 7-30 days determine whether they stay or churn. Most solopreneurs focus on acquisition and ignore onboarding — then wonder why churn is high. This playbook builds an onboarding system that gets users to their first win fast, builds confidence, and sets them up for long-term success.

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## Step 1: Define Your Activation Metric

Onboarding isn't about completing a checklist. It's about getting users to experience value — the "aha moment" where the product clicks.

**Your activation metric is the action that predicts retention.**

Examples:
- **Slack:** Sent 2,000 messages as a team
- **Dropbox:** Uploaded and shared at least one file
- **SaaS analytics tool:** Connected a data source and viewed their first report
- **Project management tool:** Created a project and added 3 tasks

**How to find your activation metric:**
1. Look at retained customers (those who stuck around 90+ days)
2. Identify what they did in their first 7 days that non-retained customers didn't do
3. That action (or set of actions) is your activation metric

**Rule:** Onboarding is successful when a user completes your activation metric. Everything in your onboarding should drive toward this.

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## Step 2: Map Your Onboarding Journey

Before designing tactics, map the full journey from signup to activation.

**Onboarding journey template:**
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SIGNUP