onboard your first 10 users by hand

October 25, 2026 · by kuba · 3 min read

You’ll want to automate onboarding from day one: a welcome email, a product tour, a checklist with confetti. Don’t, yet. You can only automate what you understand, and your first ten users are how you get to understand it. This is the last part of our weekend series on selling when you’re small.

why ten

Ten is enough to see patterns. Three people getting stuck on the same step isn’t bad luck, it’s your product.

Ten is also few enough to do by hand. At fifteen minutes each, it’s a couple of evenings. You spend longer than that choosing a font.

A pink slide: why ten. A card with ten boxes, the first three ticked, and a note: enough to see a pattern, few enough to do by hand.

Within the hour, if you can. From you, with your name, not from a no-reply address.

“Hey, it’s Kuba. Saw you signed up. What are you hoping to use it for? Happy to set it up with you if you want.”

Two things happen. Some people reply and tell you exactly what they came for, which is worth more than any analytics. And the ones who got stuck have someone to tell, instead of quietly leaving.

A light slide: message every signup. A chat widget: Kuba writes hey, saw you signed up. what are you hoping to use it for? The user answers my shop. can’t find where the code goes.

watch them set it up

If they’re up for it, share a screen for ten minutes. If not, just ask: “Which step are you on?” and “What did you expect to happen there?”

Don’t help too fast. Watch where they hesitate, where they reread, where they click the wrong thing. Every pause is a line in your to-do list. You’ll learn more in ten minutes of watching than in a month of dashboards.

fix what hurts the same day

If someone gets stuck on something you can fix in an hour, fix it before the next user signs up. Then tell the person who found it: “Thanks, that’s fixed.” That one message turns a user into a fan.

This is the part a big company can’t copy. They need a sprint and a ticket. You need an evening.

A lime slide: fix what hurts the same day. Four stacked cards: they get stuck, you fix it tonight, you tell them, they tell a friend.

write it all down

Keep a single note: every question, every stuck step, every “I expected it to…”. After ten users, read it top to bottom. The things that came up three times go on your landing page or into the product. We wrote about turning that into copy in write your landing page from your chat log.

after ten

Now automate. But only the parts that were the same every time. If all ten needed the same snippet explained, that goes in the welcome email. If all ten asked where the settings are, move the settings.

Keep the rest human. The “what are you hoping to use it for?” message is worth sending forever. It takes ten seconds and tells you who your customers are.

A pink slide: after ten. A card: same every time goes to automate it, different every time goes to keep it human, the what are you using it for message goes to forever.

the whole series

Four weekends, eight posts, one idea: talk to the people on your site. Start with you are not facebook if you missed it. Answer questions like buying signals, because they are. Drop the demo button. Ask the ones who didn’t buy. And onboard the first ten by hand.

how spookat helps

Spookat puts a chat on every page of your site. You answer from a Slack or Discord thread, or from our inbox and its phone app, so talking to your first ten users doesn’t mean one more tab to watch. Until someone clicks, it makes 0 requests to our API.

It’s $4.99 a site a month, with 14 days of pro and no card. We launch on October 31. See how it works.