Hi HN!<p>We recently launched our company/product (https://vectara.com) a few weeks ago. Just as background is a new neural search SaaS product (think a bit like Elasticsearch or Algolia I guess, but with natural language understanding). We know we have a lot of work to make our UI/UX in the administrative console better, but we've received really good feedback from users that do enough onboarding to reach the "aha" moment of doing a search (and seeing that it provides very good relevancy for text without any configuration).<p>Looking at our adoption funnel, we've had some discussions on how to get users to that "aha" moment faster and more reliably. There are a variety of tools that provide in-product walkthroughs, which is one idea. However, the prevailing thought that has emerged from past dev-tools product/design teams I've been on is that console walkthroughs "are a crutch for bad UX" (but maybe a crutch is needed for us right now), and not particularly helpful for products where the main ongoing usage is outside of the product like an API-focused SaaS product. Instead, the prevailing discussion has always led to “helpful post-registration trickle e-mails to encourage onboarding, good in-console help links/hover-over, good documentation, and example code” is a better use of time.<p>I realize there’s no single/correct answer here and we’ll likely need to tackle/improve a variety of facets. But as a largely technical community here, what are your thoughts on the best and most helpful ways to onboard to an API-first product?
> what are your thoughts on the best and most helpful ways to onboard to an API-first product?<p><i>puts on thinking cap</i><p>Three things that I think you should take note of here<p>- Developers want to try your product (I do, Hi!)<p>- Developers don't want to deal with the friction of signing up to try stuff (I don't, sorry)<p>- Free-tier API abuse is a legitimate problem, but there are holistic ways to prevent it<p>If I were you, I'd set up a nerfed version of your API front-and-center for people to test. Be sure to rate-limit it and maybe even add artificial latency to deter people from using it in production. You could invalidate keys after 10 minutes of use or 5 queries (or really anything), and you'd probably start getting a lot of interest. People like frictionless tools, and while paying for a public lite-version of your API might seem stupid, it's really just an investment in good marketing IMO.