Blog
Originally published on Substack
Nobody knew where to click
We watched real user sessions and found an embarrassing problem: people landed on MonkeeTools and never opened Settings.
Settings is where the good stuff lives. Your business details, which autofill on every invoice. Ways to get paid. The remember-on-this-device choice. But new visitors didn't know it was there, so for them it might as well not have existed.
So we built a setup tour. It's a three-step coach-mark walkthrough of the real Settings fields:
1. Your business details.
2. Ways to get paid.
3. The remember-on-this-device choice, with Yes, Not now, or No thanks right inside the tour, so nobody gets asked twice. If you already made that choice, the tour just shows Finish
.
Sixty seconds, start to finish. And three rules we refused to break:
- It never starts on its own.
- It's skippable at every step.
- It never nags.
You'll find it under the headline: "New here? Take the 60-second setup tour." You can replay it anytime from Settings.
Here's the product lesson. Most onboarding tours are hostage situations: modal pop-ups that hijack your screen and lecture you about features you didn't ask about. We think onboarding should be a door, not a pop-up. Available when you want it, invisible when you don't.
If your users can't find it, it doesn't exist. And if your tour annoys them, they'll remember the annoyance longer than the feature.
The setup tour shipped Sep 14 (changelog #175). All 20 logic tests pass.
Try it at monkeetools.pages.dev.
Get new posts by email.
One post a week: honest build logs and leverage-through-technology pieces for freelancers and bootstrapped founders. No spam, unsubscribe anytime. Subscribe on Substack.