🛬How do you onboard new users?

We're building Protocall (messenger + calls + calendar in one place), and ended up mixing a couple of these: on first use, we show inline hint messages inside the chat itself explaining what each thing is for, right where you'd actually use it, rather than a separate tutorial you click through before getting in.

The idea was that a tour before you've done anything gets ignored, but a hint that shows up exactly when a feature is relevant sticks better.

We went the other way and made onboarding a question instead of a tour.

Sorti organizes everything people save on their phone, screenshots, links, saved reels, and the hard part was never explaining the features. It was that two users want completely opposite things from the same screen. One is saving recipes she will actually cook, one is saving products she wants to buy in three weeks.

So the first thing we ask is what they actually save. That answer gets stored on their profile and it configures the app, so the first screen they land on already has categories that look like their life.

The second piece is that we seed a small demo state so the app is never empty on day one, and we flag that demo data so it stays out of our analytics. An empty product teaches nothing, and an empty product with a tutorial overlay on top of it teaches even less.

The thing I would gently push back on in this thread is the assumption that a complex product needs a guided path. Ours got easier to onboard when we stopped explaining it and started asking one question.