What I learned building onboarding for SaaS

Hey everyone

I’m Raj, the maker of TourKit.

I’ve been building a developer-first onboarding platform for SaaS, and one thing surprised me more than I expected:

• The hardest part of product tours isn’t creating the tooltip.

• It’s making sure the tour still works when the product changes.

A simple selector like:

#signup-button

works great today.

But then the UI gets refactored, a component gets renamed, the same element appears on another page, or the layout changes, and suddenly an onboarding step can break.\

I also experimented with using AI coding agents to generate onboarding configurations by inspecting an existing codebase.

It’s surprisingly good at creating the initial tour.

But there’s an important difference between:

“AI found the right element”

and

“AI generated something reliable enough to keep working as the product evolves.”

That became one of the biggest technical problems I’ve had to think about while building TourKit.

So I’m curious about how other SaaS developers handle this. Do you use CSS selectors, IDs, data attributes, custom onboarding components, or something else?

And how do you keep onboarding reliable when your UI changes frequently?

Would love to hear how others are solving this.