Are you building the cart before the horse?

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I've had countless talks with people about things like onboarding flows.

My take always pisses them off:

Don't build anything secondary until you have product-market fit.

Here's why I say that (and why this matters more than you think):

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Founders obsess over:

Perfect onboarding sequences

Tooltips explaining every feature

Welcome emails and tutorials

Smooth activation funnels

Before PMF, all of this is premature optimization.

Yes, some confused users will give up. That's fine.

You need to learn why they're confused, not hide the confusion behind onboarding polish.

The Real Cost

Building elaborate onboarding before PMF has a hidden cost: it makes pivoting brutally painful.

When you realize (and you will) that your value proposition needs to change, that onboarding flow becomes technical debt.

Every step needs rewriting. Every explanation is now wrong.

What Actually Matters Before PMF

Only one thing: Are people willing to pay for what you're building?

Not "would they pay if..." or "they said they might pay..."

Actual payment. Real money. Today.

Everything else is distraction:

Fundraising? You need traction first

Feature polish? You might be polishing the wrong thing

Pricing optimization? Doesn't matter if nobody wants to pay

Onboarding perfection? Doesn't matter if the product isn't valuable

→ Let me tell you with some examples how ‘makeshift’ the first versions were:

Airbnb:

Started by renting out air mattresses at a conference. Terrible "product," but people paid. They found PMF before worrying about smooth booking flows.

Stripe:

Early version required manual integration help. No automated onboarding. They focused on making developers love the core payment experience.

Slack:

Internal tool that teams begged to use despite zero onboarding. They knew they had PMF when people figured it out themselves because the value was obvious.

None of these companies perfected the aesthetics before proving people desperately wanted what they built.

Before you touch onboarding:

Talk to people constantly. Not surveys. Actual conversations about their problems.

Update your value proposition obsessively. Based on what you learn, not what you assumed.

Watch for payment willingness. Are they pulling out credit cards or making excuses?

Accept confusion as signal. If they're confused about your core value, that's the problem to solve, not the onboarding flow.

When these things actually matter:

Once you have clear PMF signals:

People asking "how do I sign up?"

Payment happening without heavy convincing

Users staying and getting value

Clear patterns in how people use your product

THEN invest in onboarding. At that point, you know what you're onboarding people to.

You understand the "aha moment" you're optimizing for.

You know which features matter and which are distractions.

I have my own examples to give too:

Tweet Hunter: Launched with basically zero onboarding. Search tweets, schedule them. Figure it out. We knew we had PMF when people paid despite the confusion.

Outrank.so: Started with a clunky interface and no guidance. But the core value (automated blog growth) was clear enough that early users pushed through.

SuperX.so: Spent 6 months in private beta with minimal onboarding, just working with power users to validate the core value first.

In each case, we only built proper onboarding AFTER proving people desperately wanted what we were building.

The Bottom Line

Finding PMF should be your obsession when getting started.

It's the ONLY thing that matters.

Everything else - pricing optimization, beautiful onboarding, fundraising decks - is procrastination until you've proven people will pay for your solution.

So stop building that onboarding flow. Update your value prop. Start talking to users.

Make sure you're building the right thing.

Onboarding can wait. PMF can't.

What do you think about this? tell me by replying below 👇🏻

Tweet of the week

This is worth your 5 mins this week:

I will see you next week!

Until then,

Keep building

Tibo 💻

P.S. If you're working on onboarding right now but don't have paying customers, close that tab and go talk to a potential user instead.