You don’t need another 40-page onboarding guide. You need to know, in the next twenty minutes, exactly where your signup flow is losing people. This is the checklist version, no theory, no framework lecture, just a scannable audit you run against your own product, right now, in an incognito window.

Four sections, each mapped to a real stage of the user’s first session: the First 60 Seconds (signup), Time to Value (welcome and first action), Friction Points (the seven deadly sins of onboarding, laid out as a kill list), and Post-Signup Engagement (what happens after the first win). Check every box against what actually happens in your product, not what you meant to build. Every box you can’t check is a bleeder. Every red flag you spot is a user quietly deciding to leave.

This is for founders who already suspect onboarding is the problem but haven’t sat down and audited it line by line. It’s the companion piece to The Onboarding Butcher Shop, if that’s the full surgical guide, this is the pre-op checklist you run before you even pick up the knife.

Walk away with a concrete bleed count, a prioritized list of red flags to cut, and one clear next move: fix the biggest bleeder, ship it, measure it, repeat.