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 ;)