4 · Support & onboarding

TL;DR

Objective — make the path to value short and the path to help obvious, because a customer who can sign up but can’t get help — or can’t reach first value — churns.

User part + done-when

👤 User part — design judgment is a person’s: shaping the five-minute first-run experience and choosing what “first value” means are human calls; an agent can build the support surface and instrument the funnel once the shape is decided.

Done when the support surface is reachable, a five-minute time-to-first-value flow exists, and the activation funnel is instrumented end to end.  ·  ⏱ ~varies  ·  🔀 mixed (👤 UX design, 🤖 instrumentation).

Background

A customer who can sign up but can’t get help — or can’t reach first value — churns. Make the path to value short and the path to help obvious before launch.

Steps

1. Build the support surface

A help page or FAQ, a working contact form, an in-app help icon, and a bug-reporting path — all reachable before launch.

1. Wire the help page, contact form, help icon, and bug-reporting path.

   • ✅ Every support entry point is reachable before launch.

2. Design time to first value

Design a five-minute first-run: signup → a brief welcome with a skip option → a guided first action (a pre-filled sample) → next steps (invite a teammate, create real data).

Who does this

👤 User designs the first-run experience — deciding what the guided first action and “next steps” are is a product call only a person makes.

1. Build the five-minute first-run flow from signup through the guided first action to next steps.

   • ✅ A new user reaches a meaningful first action within roughly five minutes, with a skip option on the welcome.

3. Instrument activation tracking

Instrument the funnel (verified → reached onboarding → created first item → marked onboarded → day-7 retention) so you can see where new users drop off and fix the worst step first.

1. Track each funnel stage so drop-off is visible by step.

   • ✅ The funnel reports verified, reached-onboarding, first-item, onboarded, and day-7 retention so the worst step is fixable first.

2. Hold each funnel stage to a numeric target and diagnose the worst gap. Track these daily for the first seven days — a stage well below target tells you exactly which step to fix.

   Stage	Target
   Signups	baseline
   Email verified	> 85%
   Reached onboarding	> 82%
   Created sample item	> 60%
   Marked onboarded	> 45%
   Day-7 retention	> 30%
   Upgrade rate	> 5%

   Reading the drop-off:

   • Many verify but few create their first item (e.g. 85% → 60%) → the first-run flow is unclear; simplify it.

   • Many create but few are active on day 7 (e.g. 60% → 20%) → the core value is unclear; improve the core feature, not the funnel.

   • ✅ Each stage is measured against its target, and the lowest-performing step has a named fix queued.

4. Run the launch-day runbook

The signoff (page 2) clears you to launch; this runbook is how you launch. Work the T-minus sequence, then hold the post-launch watch cadence. Keep the rollback command in your shell history before you open registration — you do not want to be looking it up while payments are failing.

Who does this

👤 User runs the countdown and makes every continue/rollback call — opening registration to real customers is a human decision. An agent can re-run the verification checks and watch the dashboards.

1. T-24h — final dress rehearsal. Re-run the full Phase 11 technical checklist, run the payment path once more, clear all test data from production (it must read 0 per technical readiness §3), and confirm a backup ran today.

2. T-1h — arm the safety net. Run the final verification script, check error tracking for new issues, confirm the uptime monitor is green, and stage the rollback command so it is one keystroke away:

   # Dry-run the rollback so it is rehearsed, not improvised
   dep rollback production --plan   # e.g. dep rollback production after plan review

3. T-0 — open the gate, then watch. Open registration (and enable any paid channels), then monitor error tracking continuously for the first 30 minutes, watch the first real signups land, and confirm the first real payment processes end to end.

4. T+24h — close the loop. Run a full error review, read early customer feedback, check performance, verify the backup ran, then transition to the routine monitoring cadence below.

5. Write down owners before T-0. Launch owner, support owner, rollback trigger, and the first 24-hour monitoring schedule must be explicit — not implied.

   • ✅ Launch owner, support owner, rollback trigger, and first 24-hour monitoring schedule are written down before traffic starts.

Post-launch monitoring cadence

Period	Frequency	Watch
First 24 hours	every 5 min	errors, health endpoint, payments
After 24 hours	hourly	error rate, payments, server resources
After 1 week	daily	overnight errors, payment volume
After 1 month	routine	normal monitoring

If issues appear during launch — decision tree

Symptom	Decision
Users can still browse (degraded, non-critical)	Continue with warnings; fix forward
Users cannot log in	Consider rollback — assess blast radius first
Payments are broken	Immediate rollback: dep rollback production

Rollback only un-does deploy-related breakage

A rollback reverts code, not data. If the failure is a config, DNS, or third-party outage, rolling back will not help — diagnose the layer first. Per destructive-ops discipline, confirm a current backup exists before any rollback that could touch migrations.

What’s next

Phase 11 is the last pre-customer gate. Once signoff passes, run Phase 12 · Deploy to production when you’re ready to go live. For every subsequent release, return to that same production checklist, and watch error tracking, uptime, and analytics closely for the first seven days. If a critical issue appears, follow the incident runbook and roll back if it is deploy-related.

Plan customer acquisition before you flip the switch

Launching the app and getting customers are different jobs — don’t let a quiet launch surprise you. Line up distribution before (or at) launch: a launch-day post (Product Hunt / your audience’s channels), direct outreach to your ideal first users, any paid channel you’ll run (Google Ads), and a referral hook. Track signups per channel so you double down on what works. Growth tactics live in Phase 9 · Growth & polish and the ongoing Continuous deploy loop.

Checklist

Do not mark this step done until every box below is checked.

• 🤖 Support surface live — help/FAQ, contact form, in-app help icon, and bug-reporting path all reachable.
• 👤 Time to first value — a five-minute first-run flow exists with a guided first action.
• 🤖 Activation tracking — the funnel is instrumented from verified through day-7 retention.

→Next step

Launch signoff — final go/no-go