Onboarding new users is never easy. Especially, when it comes to web applications.
Businesses struggle teaching their new users how to use their platforms, how to get familiar with their features, and how to navigate comfortably in their systems.
This often results in unsatisfied and confused users, heavy loads of support requests, and eventually user churn.
Bonboarding was built to solve these challenges.
The founder, Johnny Fekete, experienced them first hand and created a nifty tool with which anyone can easily add rich onboarding functionalities to their platform.
The company was established on the 1st of June, 2021, but its origin story starts years before.
An Idea Is Born
Bonboarding is not the first venture in which Johnny was involved.
He was a co-founder of a successful Danish startup, Recruitio. This SaaS provides advanced recruitment tools that help recruiters and hiring managers in filling their job openings with the best candidates.
However, as the company grew, so did the time spent on onboarding and supporting new users.
This sparked the idea to create a new product that can be used in similar startups to easily set up user onboarding flows without much configuration or coding.
An initial market research found that adding onboarding product tours is often treated as a "nice to have" part of online applications, and they allocate development resources on other features.
Moreover, adapting to changes can also be time and resource-consuming.
The research also found that most startups had close to no idea (and definitely no quantifiable data) about how well their users know their platform, how comfortable are they with using it, which features are confusing.
This just reinsured that there is a vast business demand for a tool that can help to answer these questions.
Starting by Small
The prototype of Bonboarding was coded in a small café in Barcelona in the span of a warm afternoon.
All it did was highlight different elements on a website in a given order, and add tooltips with descriptions.
But it looked dope.
And it worked on any web platform where the small JavaScript snippet was embedded.
After this small viability test, it took two more years until the final product was finally born - with loads of slick features and configuration options.
The Name of the Product
Bonboarding is a wordplay, a combination of the words - "Bon" (good) and "onboarding."
It represents the main focus of the app: creating great onboarding experiences.
The logo symbolizes three pagination dots from our popups, and the middle one is extended to look like a lightbulb, representing "idea."
Slow but Steady Progress
Bonboarding was always an ambitious project.
While many startups aim to have an MVP (minimum viable product), Bonboarding wanted to be stable and user-friendly from the first moment.
That doesn't mean that it has all the features from day one. But that the existing ones are working smoothly and they can already bring tremendous value to customers.
This meant developing the web application, an easy-to-use editor, the integrated script that takes care of delivering the onboarding experiences. What is more, Johnny built the website and even an example page to demonstrate Bonboarding's distinctive capabilities.
The Launch
Finally, after more than a year of hard work, Bonboarding was ready to launch.
Bonboarding SL. - the company - was registered in Barcelona and started operating on the first day of June 2021.
Its first clients are other small startups, who understand the importance of product-led growth.
At this period everything happens rapidly, new challenges arise every day. But that's the fun part of running a startup.
Bonboarding aims to grow slowly but steadily while constantly adding stunning new features to its repertoire. The company intentionally stays lean and avoids external investor funding.
Its goal is to provide easy access to tools that can enhance any kind of web experience while generating actionable insights about the users' behavior and adaptation.
Acknowledgment
Although Bonboarding was mainly built by its founder, Johnny received help from his friends and family.
Veronika Kiss, an outstanding software developer worked on some of the web app's UIs, and she also helped to build the Bonboarding website and blog.
Petra Kaiser, an excellent strategist helped with business models, strategic planning, and with creating a marketing page for the project with a badass product video.
The founder's two brothers - Boris and Norbert - helped with the initial marketing strategy and creating the first versions of the marketing website.
And finally, Mauricio Bertoni (Johnny's boyfriend) - helped with social media and visual marketing, he acted as emotional support and created the first Bonboarding merchandise, a yellow mug with Bonboarding logo.
Bonboarding's Philosophy
Bonboarding wants to help SaaS businesses to reach their full potential by eliminating user confusion.
It's a firm believer and advocate of product-led growth.
It provides tools to guide users through the whole process, so they can fall in love with the product.
The venture pledges to always stay a good company, transparent and honest. Making customers happy is what drives this project, and this objective is reflected at every step and business decision.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Bonboarding's still in an early stage, but with ambitious plans!
New features are coming out each week to make the product even more useful and adaptable to anyone with all kinds of user flows.
Besides building the company, we're working on new innovative tools to help our partners create the most effective onboarding processes while adding product-led growth techniques to their platforms.
Bonboarding is already a robust tool.
But stay tuned!
There's a lot more to come.
