No. 2Onboarding & activation13 min read

Good onboarding, bad onboarding

11 May 2026

Nobody sets out to build a bad onboarding. It gets built one reasonable-sounding decision at a time. This is a teardown of the decisions themselves: the version that sounds right in a planning meeting, next to the version that actually works, with the reason the first one loses.

The short version

→Bad onboarding is rarely lazy. It is usually a series of individually defensible choices that each add a few seconds and collectively add four minutes.
→The reliable tells: a welcome modal, a progress checklist with more than three items, a required field nobody reads, a tour that fires on an empty screen.
→Email verification before first use is the most expensive single gate most products have, and almost nobody measures what it costs them.
→Asking for a credit card up front does not 'qualify' users — it converts a top-of-funnel problem into a smaller top of funnel. Sometimes that is right. Know which trade you are making.
→Every 'we'll ask them, it's only one question' is paid for by every user forever. The questions compound; the answers usually don't get used.

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