Onboarding flow feedback before you build it
Walk a grounded panel through your planned onboarding steps before a single screen is built, and find out where a new user would get confused or drop off.
Find the drop-off point before you build the screen.
Onboarding problems are usually diagnosed after the fact, from a drop-off number in an analytics dashboard that tells you where users left but not why.
thepanelist lets you describe your planned onboarding flow in plain steps — before any screen exists — and ask a grounded panel where they'd get confused, what they'd expect to happen next, and where they'd consider giving up.
Without a pre-build read
Onboarding gets built, shipped, and only then measured — and a drop-off spike at step three tells you something's wrong there without telling you what.
Fixing it means guessing at the cause, shipping a change, and waiting through another cycle of real usage to see if the number improved.
With thepanelist
Describe each onboarding step as a new user would experience it, generate a panel, and ask directly where confusion or hesitation would happen — and why.
You get a named reason attached to a named step, before any of it is built — enough to catch an obviously unclear step before it becomes a real drop-off number.
The entire value of this use case depends on timing — a directional signal before the engineering cost is spent, not a diagnosis after.
How to describe an onboarding flow usefully
Write out each step the way a new user would actually encounter it — what they see, what's being asked of them, what happens after they act — rather than an internal step name like "activation step 2."
Ask the panel to walk through the flow in order and flag the first point of hesitation, rather than reacting to the whole flow at once — this mirrors how a real first-time user actually experiences onboarding, one step at a time.
Use the same-panel follow-up to dig into any flagged step: ask what would have made it clearer, or whether a different framing of the same request would have reduced the hesitation.
More Decision Playbooks
AI focus group for SaaS pricing
Run a directional pricing gut-check against a synthetic panel grounded in your own product material before you commit to a number — or run three pricing pages against each other and see which one a panel actually reaches for.
Test a landing page before launch
Paste in your landing page copy and get a directional read on clarity, confusion points, and whether the value proposition actually lands — before you drive real traffic to it.
Customer research for indie founders
You don't have a research budget, a research team, or an existing audience — you have a product idea and a laptop. thepanelist is built for exactly that starting point.