How our onboarding stayed at 10 steps (not 3, not 30).

Every startup product blog says the same thing: shorten your onboarding. Three steps. Zero if possible. Get users to value before they can bounce.

We tried the short version first. A single "sign up and start chatting" flow with everything deferred to settings. Users signed up, started chatting, and about 20% never came back after the first session. The chats they had were fine — normal quality, normal length — but they weren't the chats that made someone stay.

The specific thing that was missing: users who signed up hadn't yet told the model who they were or what they wanted from it. So the model produced generic, appropriate replies to whatever they asked, and those replies felt like every other AI chat. Nothing wrong with them. Nothing memorable either.

So we tried the long version. Ten steps, called "Setting the Table," walking through:

1. Your name (how the model should address you) 2. Your role (student, developer, writer, founder, etc) 3. Your intents (what you're going to use LADLE for) 4. Your response style (concise, thorough, exploratory, or precise) 5. Theme choice (midnight, daylight, or system) 6. Memory preferences (opt in or out of the model remembering personal facts) 7. Response language (English, or specify your default) 8. Custom instructions (free-form voice guidance) 9. A first-prompt sandbox to try LADLE with everything set 10. Plan intent (which plan sounds right for you — no commitment)

Every step is skippable in one click. If you skip everything, you land in the same place you would have with the short version. But the users who go through them get replies tuned to who they are, and those replies are the difference between "this AI is fine" and "this AI is mine."

Numbers from the first quarter after we shipped the long version:

Retention week-2 went up materially (we don't share exact figures pre-scale, but "materially" here means the kind of shift that would have shown in a normal A/B test).

Median chat length went up — users who went through onboarding write longer, more specific prompts because the model has enough context to reply usefully to specific things.

Support tickets went down, especially the "how does this work / what does it do" bucket. The onboarding answered those questions in the doing rather than in the reading.

**What we cut from earlier drafts of the flow:**

A payment step. We refused to put "add your card" in onboarding. LADLE is a paid product; you subscribe when you're ready, not as a condition of trying it. (The demo is on marketing, three messages, no signup.)

A tutorial step. "Here's how to attach files, here's how to start a project." Every product designer will tell you tutorials get skipped. Instead the affordances are visible in the composer and the model itself explains them if you ask.

A "connect your accounts" step. Even if we wanted integrations, we wouldn't front-load that ask. Ask for permissions when the user needs the thing that requires them.

**The design principle:**

Onboarding isn't overhead — it's the first chapter of the product. Short onboarding is right when the product is self-explanatory (a to-do app, a note-taking app). Long onboarding is right when the product's value depends on the model knowing something about you. AI assistants fall in the second bucket.

Ten steps, each skippable, is the version that treats the user as an adult and the product as one that gets better the more of yourself you bring to it.