u/knudipudi

Early stage founder here, just launched a thing and not sure if this onboarding choice was smart or dumb. Curious what people think.

Building an agile planning tool. You know the drill, sign up, empty board, no idea where to start, leave. Tried all the usual. Templates, sample data, guided tour. Nothing really stuck. Templates were honestly the worst, nobody wants our example projects they want their own. Sample data feels fake, guided tours get clicked through.

https://preview.redd.it/jj295h6z641h1.png?width=1467&format=png&auto=webp&s=d6fc8cfeae31ce20317f1eb469d16bb03b6c74c6

So we did something different. First thing you see now is just a chat asking "what are you planning?". Type a paragraph. Or upload a photo of a whiteboard from a workshop. Or paste a screenshot from another tool. Or drop a doc. Whatever.

AI then spits out a full plan, goals, the work under them, tasks. The board you land on already has your own stuff on it.

Reality check, we just launched, barely any users. So no real numbers yet. Feedback from the few who tried it has been pretty different from how templates landed but ime that means nothing until you can actually measure it.

Two things i'm curious about:

Anyone else ditched empty state for AI generated starting content? What stuck, what didnt?

The whiteboard photo input nearly got cut. We thought nice to have. Now feels like maybe the most useful one. Anyone had that thing where the feature you almost killed turned out to be the killer one?

Happy to drop the link if anyone wants a look, dont want to lead with that.

Quick context: I'm almost 50, 25+ years in the agile world – worked as an enterprise agile coach, instructor, and certified thousands of people along the way. And like a lot of people here I've grown tired of bloated, overcomplicated tools. So we started building something ourselves. The whole idea is to keep it dead simple – just the essentials a team actually needs to collaborate, nothing more.

Now I'm doing the classic founder mistake: building what I think teams need based on my own experience, and assuming everyone else feels the same way. Maybe I'm completely off base. That's why I'm asking here.

One thing in particular I want to sanity-check: collaboration across organizational boundaries. I've lost count of how many times I've been in a setup where the internal team uses Teams, the client uses Slack, an external partner uses something else entirely, and nobody can actually have a proper conversation without juggling four tools. So we built chat and video calls directly into the product, so the conversation lives next to the work.

Honest question to you all: is this actually a real pain point for you, or am I solving a problem that only exists in my head?

If anyone wants to poke holes in it directly, it's at refutu.com – it's free, no signup hoops. I'd genuinely rather hear "you're wrong, nobody needs this" now than find out later. Appreciate any honest take.

Did we just over-engineer our onboarding or did we actually fix something?

Honest gut-check from experienced agile folks