What Every Startup Can Learn About Onboarding From Video Games

Build customer engagement into your product without expensive software

Joe Procopio
7 min readJul 5, 2021

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About a month ago, I got to listen in on a management meeting at a startup that I was considering advising. The meeting was just getting started when one of the management team folks asked the CEO one of the best setup questions I’ve ever heard: “Why is our customer onboarding so awful? And since it never works, why do we keep doing it the same way?”

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that question. I can tell you that I’ve asked that same question of my own startups and my own products. And I can also tell you that more often than not, there’s a very simple answer: Leadership is putting off spending time and money on a very formal and very expensive onboarding solution, one that probably requires a custom build or a third-party bolt-on.

You don’t have to do this. You don’t need to build widgets or wizards or Clippy. You don’t need to spend a lot of money on specially designed software to onboard your customers and keep them engaged. You just need a good plan.

Here’s how to devise your onboarding and engagement plan to lead your customers to success and generate longer lifetime value.

Stop the onboarding death…

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Building TeachingStartup.com. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com