[HN Gopher] Launch HN: Onboard (YC W22) - Better customer onboar...
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Launch HN: Onboard (YC W22) - Better customer onboarding and
implementation
Hi 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
;)
Author : jeffepp
Score : 39 points
Date : 2022-03-01 14:00 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onboard.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (onboard.io)
| melenaos wrote:
| 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
| [deleted]
| jeffepp wrote:
| 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.
| quercusa wrote:
| 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.
| jeffepp wrote:
| 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!
| quercusa wrote:
| 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!
| srikrishnan wrote:
| dang wrote:
| You've posted repeatedly like this in this thread. That's
| not allowed in someone else's launch thread (YC company
| or otherwise)--it's extremely bad manners. Please stop
| now.
|
| It's _maybe_ ok to post one comment telling people about
| your alternative product, depending on how you do that.
| More than that, it starts to be spamming.
| [deleted]
| wsul wrote:
| Received your cold LinkedIn message... founder to
| founder, spending time on building a better product is
| always going to yield better results than scraping your
| competitor's launch announcement to send cold messages to
| all their commenters.
|
| If you are going to reach out, I've always found it
| helpful when a company speaks to their differences and in
| a positive tone, rather than throwing shade.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| jeffepp wrote:
| 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!
| mfrye0 wrote:
| Congrats Jeff. Funny seeing you pop up here after all those years
| back at Ambassador together.
| jeffepp wrote:
| Thank you sir! I hope you are doing well, it's been too long!
| Appreciate you supporting us!
| jedwhite wrote:
| 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?
| jeffepp wrote:
| 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
| wsul wrote:
| We have a pretty complex onboarding process (bug bounty programs
| for startups), really excited to give this a try.
| jeffepp wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback, feel free to DM me directly and we can
| set you up. Looking forward to it!
| dmkirwan wrote:
| 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.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Great domain.
|
| What do you think of https://arrows.to/?
| jeffepp wrote:
| 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.
| jrdorn wrote:
| Congrats on the launch! Product looks great and there's so much
| room for improvement when it comes to onboarding.
| jeffepp wrote:
| Thank you, we think so too! Excited to be part of the new
| startups bringing some innovation to the space!
| debarshri wrote:
| What do you think about https://www.rocketlane.com?
| jeffepp wrote:
| 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
| srikrishnan wrote:
| 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
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