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Launch HN: Onboard (YC W22) – Better customer onboarding and implementation

56 pointsby jeffeppabout 3 years ago
Hi HN, Jeff Epstein &amp; Will Stevenson here – we’re the founders of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Onboard.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;Onboard.io</a> (YC W22). We make software for companies looking to manage, automate and streamline their customer onboarding and implementation at scale.<p>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%.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 &amp; 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&#x27;t an easy way to manage onboarding teams, clients and process for scale.<p>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.<p>Various products solve some of this, but you have to cobble them together. Our company is built specifically to solve this problem.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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).<p>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 ;)

9 comments

dmkirwanabout 3 years ago
Congratulations on the launch! I don&#x27;t have much constructive feedback, other than the custom launch plan idea resonates well with me. It&#x27;s something that other vendors miss IMO.<p>I have two questions if you don&#x27;t mind:<p>1: onboarding is something that users should do once only. Unfortunately, engineers only see it once also. It&#x27;s easy to forget there&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s have had to think about onboarding at some stage so I&#x27;m curious about that.
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jedwhiteabout 3 years ago
Congrats on the launch! In a previous life I worked on a media SaaS startup. We never solved onboarding.<p>The customers ranged from small independent and solo publishers through to global media companies. It didn&#x27;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.<p>How does Onboard help with that kind of trade-off?
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quercusaabout 3 years ago
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.
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melenaosabout 3 years ago
The onboarding part is the most crucial to keep new clients, but i touch it last.<p>I want to use these tools, but two thing are my pains; pricing and the analysis it needs to set up onboarding correctly
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mfrye0about 3 years ago
Congrats Jeff. Funny seeing you pop up here after all those years back at Ambassador together.
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wsulabout 3 years ago
We have a pretty complex onboarding process (bug bounty programs for startups), really excited to give this a try.
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mritchie712about 3 years ago
Great domain.<p>What do you think of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arrows.to&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arrows.to&#x2F;</a>?
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debarshriabout 3 years ago
What do you think about <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rocketlane.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rocketlane.com</a>?
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jrdornabout 3 years ago
Congrats on the launch! Product looks great and there&#x27;s so much room for improvement when it comes to onboarding.
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