Today, we’re back with a playbook for how to build and scale onboarding, from the architect of Superhuman’s white-glove, human-led onboarding.

Obsessing Over Onboarding for 10+ Years — The Architect of Superhuman's Onboarding Shares His Playbook

Right here on The Review, Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra wrote a viral essay about how the company achieved product-market fit. But an untold part of this story is their unique approach to onboarding, starting with an at-scale, white-glove, human-led experience that shattered industry norms.

Here to tell it is Superhuman's Gaurav Vohra, startup advisor and growth leader, who, amongst many other functions, built and scaled how the company onboards customers. Gaurav Vohra personally onboarded hundreds of Superhuman customers, was leading a team responsible for onboarding tens of thousands of paying customers per year, and eventually took those learnings in-product, transitioning to fully self-serve.

He goes into immense detail about every step of these processes. You can expect to learn:

• Why Gaurav Vohra believes every founder should spend time manually onboarding customers, from creating world-class experiences to driving loyalty.
• How to think about onboarding, like what to make mandatory vs. optional, breaking down the cost-benefit analysis and how long to practice human-led onboarding depending on the type of product and business you have.
• When to transition to self-serve onboarding and what to consider as part of that process, and how Superhuman drew inspiration from popular video games to productize onboarding.

“Each conversation is an opportunity to develop a deeper, more intimate understanding of your customers. And companies with deep understanding — from real conversations — have an advantage that no LLM can replicate,” says Gaurav Vohra. “When you begin scaling, you’ll understand your customer’s first mile deeper than anybody else.”

This is one of the most detailed analyses of onboarding you’ll ever read. It's valuable for early-stage founders and early hires across product, growth, sales and success. Even if you're in product or customer experience at a later-stage company, many lessons here apply to you.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing.

-The Review Editors