Launch HN: Onboard (YC W22) – Better customer onboarding and implementation
onboard.ioHi HN, Jeff Epstein & Will Stevenson here – we’re the founders of https://Onboard.io (YC W22). We make software for companies looking to manage, automate and streamline their customer onboarding and implementation at scale.
In the B2B world, many things usually need to be configured or approved before customers can actually use their new software. It’s critical that this process go well—lack of momentum right after a purchase is a primary cause of customer churn. We experienced this at a previous company (Ambassador: acq in 2018) and ended up cobbling together several systems, none of which specialized in onboarding, to give our customers a better experience. Although it was far from optimal, it reduced churn by over 50%.
Later, Will did consulting work with SaaS companies and saw what a mess customer onboarding was at otherwise high-functioning startups. When he witnessed a startup doing $100M in revenue using spreadsheets to manage onboarding, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We decided to build a better way.
Most likely, your sales team promised the client they can get onboarded in record time, but the reality is that it will take much longer.
Current approaches are lacking in 4 major areas: (1) Lack of automation slows everything down and makes things inconsistent across teams; (2) buyers lack visibility & collaboration into what needs to be accomplished and when; (3) reminders and updates are often manual emails, wasting time while siloed in email outside the view of critical stakeholders; (4) there isn't an easy way to manage onboarding teams, clients and process for scale.
Most companies run all this using templates, which are rigid and hard to scale. When a new customer signs up, an onboarding specialist selects the closest template, then they read about this customer’s requirements and customize the template for them. Templates need to be kept in sync manually because the same tasks are duplicated between them. Often teams download them directly and forget to use the latest version. Worse, templates lead to an awful customer experience because there’s no way to coordinate and manage the process.
Various products solve some of this, but you have to cobble them together. Our company is built specifically to solve this problem.
Onboard automatically creates custom launch plans by enabling companies to have a single Task Repository, where each task is tagged to a specific customer attribute, plan choice, or use case. We connect these tasks to data learned in the sales process (can pull directly from your CRM) to automatically create a launch plan based on what you need to start using your new software. We provide visibility to the client with link access to view tasks, assignments and quick discussions (via stream) outside of email and in one place for all stakeholders to see. As the plan proceeds and tasks are completed, we send notifications to appropriate parties. Instead of emailing Excel files, there’s a transparent collaborative process.
We’re a SaaS and there is pricing on 2 vectors: platform fee and then per-user (internal users only; external users, i.e. users at your customers, are free).
We would love to hear about your (or your company) facing these challenges as a buyer implementing new software OR as a seller (how your company manages clients being onboarded on your software or service business).
We have a 14-day trial and if you are interested in trying out the product, feel free to sign up (cc required) or email us at HN@onboard.io and we’ll see what we can do ;) Congratulations on the launch! I don't have much constructive feedback, other than the custom launch plan idea resonates well with me. It's something that other vendors miss IMO. I have two questions if you don't mind: 1: onboarding is something that users should do once only. Unfortunately, engineers only see it once also. It's easy to forget there's an onboarding flow in your app as you build it. Do you have mechanisms in place to detect if somebody releases a breaking change? For example: an element you expected to exist is now gone, a url has changed, etc. 2: Can you share how you came up with the problem and if the product evolved over your time in YC? I think most engineers or PM's have had to think about onboarding at some stage so I'm curious about that. Thanks. You are right, none of the other vendors do custom launch plans. They are all building templates, which is what everyone is used to -- we built custom launch plans because we spent nearly a decade onboarding Enterprise SaaS -- we know that's what is needed ;) To answer your questions: 1) We don't have those types of elements right now, it's an interesting idea though! 2) Yes, we faced the problem of customer onboarding as we built my last company (Ambassador Software), especially as we moved up market and realized that "lots of people needed to do lots of things" before the buyer of our SaaS could actually use it. The product has certainly evolved during YC thanks to all of the conversations we've had with customers and prospects. We came into YC with more traction than some companies (and many paying customers) so, we had some market validation, however, it's been turbo-charged while being in YC and getting such great intro's & connections. Thanks again for your comments, happy to discuss further! Congrats on the launch! In a previous life I worked on a media SaaS startup. We never solved onboarding. The customers ranged from small independent and solo publishers through to global media companies. It didn't matter the size of the customer, we always struggled with onboarding them in an efficient way that also made them feel wanted. We also struggled with creating the expectation that our team would do everything for them, which eventually led us down the dangerous path of taking on more and more services work, which is a trap. How does Onboard help with that kind of trade-off? Thanks for the comment, you raise a great point. Often times customers want transparent communication, aka: understanding what needs to happen and by when for things to stay on track. We've seen that often times people get busy and when follow-ups and reminders are solely left to one onboarding specialist, it's possible they could lose track -- one easy solution is to automate the reminders and take it off their plates indefinitely. Another way to show clients they have to do some of the work is simply by assigning them the various tasks. The best way to show you care about their experience is explaining what they need to do is a simple manner, providing videos, articles and other resources so they can accomplish their tasks and move onto the next one. These are just some of the things that assist with the trade-off, happy to discuss further, feel free to email me directly: jeff@onboard.io Thanks Jeff, better documentation and explanation materials are something we need to put together for the current project we're working on also. It's a consumer app but the same issue applies - we get a lot of support tickets coming in about how to do things that we should explain somewhere. Good luck again with the launch! As part of a team going through several overlapping onboardings right now, this is very attractive. However, performance is worrying. It takes almost 4 seconds for the home page to load (on a reload, with almost everything in cache) on FF 97 with Adblock Plus. Thanks for the feedback. Would really love to hear about what are the challenges with the onboardings you and your team are currently undertaking. re: the website -- our marketing site and app serve very different purposes, regardless, we are in the process of overhauling our marketing site, so thank you for pointing that out! It's possible that the site is hanging waiting for GTM to load. Issues: Tracking deliverables across multiple customer divisions, having to go through customer-side project managers who don't understand the questions that are being asked, necessary documents spread all over the place, difficulty in slipping schedules as needed. Good luck! Thank you, super helpful and something we consistently hear (and have 100% dealt with). As you mentioned, all of these lead to delays, frustrations and ultimately under-delivering at a critical step of the customer journey Really appreciate your comments and feedback, thanks again! The onboarding part is the most crucial to keep new clients, but i touch it last. I want to use these tools, but two thing are my pains; pricing and the analysis it needs to set up onboarding correctly Thanks for the feedback. You bring up an interesting comment -- we're under the belief that companies will continue to trend toward investing in customer success. Instead of spending money on paid ads and other customer acquisition channels we all know that keeping (or expanding) a customer is more efficient than acquiring a new one. Congrats Jeff. Funny seeing you pop up here after all those years back at Ambassador together. Thank you sir! I hope you are doing well, it's been too long! Appreciate you supporting us! We have a pretty complex onboarding process (bug bounty programs for startups), really excited to give this a try. Thanks for the feedback, feel free to DM me directly and we can set you up. Looking forward to it! Great domain. What do you think of https://arrows.to/? Thanks, we like the domain too. We think that they are one of the companies helping validate the category and we look forward to competing with them while also building awareness to champion the customer onboarding and implementation space. What do you think about https://www.rocketlane.com? We think they are solving a similar problem and a rising tide lifts all boats ;)
We look forward to competing with them over the next decade to enable companies to onboard customers faster and better than ever before Look forward to it too! Would love to have folks try out both our tools while they are here. Since we have attention of folks who want to do better onboarding, some cool resources from us:
https://preflight.cx - our community for customer onboarding and implementation folks
https://www.rocketlane.com/propel - the first ever conference for customer onboarding I watched the video on the front page and I still have no idea what this product does, who it is for, or how it works. Still, it was more than OP's site, which has a big SIGN UP button above the fold, which is insane, because the first time you come across the site you have no idea what it is about, but you have a button there to click on to sign-up. Who is going to click that button? What a waste of prime space. I have no idea what OP's product does, either. Just out of curiosity, does the text at the top of the current thread not do a good job of explaining it? I edited it from a bunch of materials the founders gave me (this is the standard Launch HN process for YC startups). I thought it made sense; it does to me at least! Thanks for replying Dan. I'm not surprised I'm getting downvoted for my pithy reply. Honestly, I've worked in web dev for over 25 years. I have no idea what this product is for. I reread the summary at the top of the thread. Is this for SaaS providers having trouble with a badly designed sign-up process? Can't they just use standard analytics to improve their sign-up? Why are these companies using spreadsheets? Are these offline customers? I'm so confused about the whole thing. Maybe I'm getting too old. I'm clearly being dense and missing something as there are several competitors also posting on this thread, so whatever these companies do it must be popular and important. Good luck to them, someone obviously needs whatever service it is that they provide. Appreciate the enthusiasm and feedback, I will try to clarify what Onboard does, who it's for and why it's important! One way to think about when "Customer Onboarding or Implementation" happens is generally any time a product or software is SOLD. (ex: via online demo, salespeople or signing a contract..) Most companies that have sales people (Account Executives, "AEs") have a corresponding success people (customer success "CS", onboarding specialists, or account managers). Of course in SaaS, the focus is often on customer retention and ensuring they have a wonderful experience. The more companies think through the customer journey, the more they realize customers are losing faith in the products & services they use when the onboarding is poor. Sometimes, it can be fixed with product, other times however, it must be addressed by people & process. The product is for modern customer success teams specifically at SaaS and service companies who are looking to manage, automate & streamline THAT onboarding and implementation process. Companies are using spreadsheets today because its more organized than post-it notes and email. They are trying to make it easy for customers to receive value from their software/service and the first step is often to configure it so the rest of the buyers can use it effectively. Sometimes, or even oftentimes, software built for non-technical folks require other teams and departments to assist, integrate or sign-off on this process. It may become painful and disorganized, generally a lack of transparency and visibility lead to delays in configuration, implementation and causes frustration while creating a subpar customer experience and is one of the primary reasons for customer churn. Because of this, some companies are looking for ways to:
1) Automate the list of tasks (who needs to do WHAT, by WHEN, and HOW) & with notifications to remind folks they have tasks to complete
2) Provide visibility to all stakeholders (internal & external) so everyone can see where the blockers are and stay on track (transparency often creates accountability)
3) Streamline a scalable, repeatable process for an onboarding team can manage hundreds or even thousands of concurrent clients being onboarded at any given time This is what we are helping companies solve. seconded that your website copy doesnt do a very good job of telling me what it is you guys do. i have no idea who to send this to in my company whether its the sales person or customer success or PM or developer. just giving feedback that it needs work. i know this is hard. good luck. You did an awesome job, we appreciate all the time and energy you out into making these launches awesome! We'll take the feedback and go to work to make things better. Appreciate the feedback, we're always looking to improve the conversion metrics and better explain what we do. Congrats on the launch! Product looks great and there's so much room for improvement when it comes to onboarding. Thank you, we think so too! Excited to be part of the new startups bringing some innovation to the space!