Onboarding Is Your Most Important Feature

When I joined Sonic Linker, one of the first things I did was set up Mixpanel funnels to track our onboarding flow. What I found was painful. We were losing a big chunk of users before they ever saw the core value of the product.

The problem wasn't the product. It was the path to value.

Users were signing up, landing on a dashboard with too many options, and bouncing. They never made it to the moment where they see their first AI citation data.

What we did: 1. Mapped the exact "aha moment" for our product, which was seeing your first AI agent citation 2. Stripped the onboarding to the minimum steps needed to reach that moment 3. Added progress indicators so users knew they were close 4. Shipped targeted fixes across 2 sprint cycles

The lesson is simple. Before you build any new feature, audit your onboarding. Every hour spent reducing time-to-value is worth more than a week spent on a feature that churned users will never see.