The Best Onboarding Flows I’ve Seen From AI Startups Lately (and What We Can Learn)
The current market is flooded with AI products that all promise to be 10x faster, smarter, or more intuitive. I suspect there’s a party trick effect where users have large appetites to watch and play with something new. But, this has made onboarding the moment of truth and the true battleground for which products are here to stay. It’s where marketing hype meets actual product value — and where users decide whether to bounce or build a habit.
Large companies like Dropbox and Spotify are consistently iterating on onboarding because their growth teams understand that almost 40-60% of users abandon an app forever after signing in just once. Almost all of the early-stage startups I’m currently advising have also quickly realized that, and most are actively working on improving their onboarding flows as top priority on their product roadmap.
Here are two AI-native startups with very different approaches to onboarding flows I’ve seen recently that have both nailed it, along with the principles they illustrate. They’re not only doing onboarding well, but also using it as a strategic wedge to drive retention and differentiation early.
Gamma.app
Gamma is an AI design app that lets users generate extremely beautiful presentations, social media posts, and other docs in a few minutes. (Side note: This takes me back to my finance and consulting analyst days, when I could have saved hours from aligning graphs to gridlines!). I love their onboarding flows for a few things: personalized experience, progressive onboarding, gets users to “aha” moment quickly, and incorporates triggers to remind users to return to complete key actions.
The first thing you’re dropped into is a segmentation quiz to quickly identify what you plan to use Gamma for (work, personal, education), who you are (industry segment), what your use case is (creating presentations, building websites, etc.), and how you heard about them (attribution). Gamma pretty much hits it out of the ballpark with the right questions to ask early on to personalize the product experience and set themselves up for success to understand product data over time.
Once this is completed, Gamma guides you to complete your first presentation. It was as simple as describing what I’d like to make, with example prompts (and shuffle feature) to get those creative juices flowing. In a few seconds, a “pitch deck for myself as a growth advisor” turned into a pretty decent eight slide deck — I went from signup to “aha” in literally five minutes and two bites of my lunch.
From there, Gamma walked me through two key features to edit my newly created pitch deck: cards and editable blocks. The rest was up for me to explore with a checklist that popped up for things I could learn more about. If I were to improve one thing in their flow, it would be iterate on their onboarding checklist — while it gives users a clear sense of progress and guidance without bombarding them upfront with features, it also can be better personalized based on their segmentation quiz and shortened to the top key actions that drive new user retention.
Gamma’s onboarding flow is a great example of personalized, interactive, retention-focused design. I’m not surprised it’s being recognized as one of the most epic tiny teams in tech with a reported $10M+ ARR built by a team smaller than 30.
Cove.ai
Cove.ai is a visual workspace that helps you co-create with AI. What does that mean? I like to think of it as if ChatGPT, Figma, and Notion all came together and teamed up for a hackathon and built one UI for users to visually brainstorm on virtually anything in one app. Cove’s onboarding flow stands out to me for two things: its extremely interactive guidance that lets users “learn by doing,” and its surprising moments of delight.
Once you sign up with Google (only sign up option), you’re introduced to your first space where the team gives you a quick intro on use cases: e.g. plan a home renovation, train for marathon, and write a screenplay, among many. Then, you’re dropped in a 13-step (!) onboarding tutorial.
At first, I was alarmed by how many steps there were. The sweet spot that I’ve seen in the high-performing PLG products for onboarding flows is 3-5 core steps — long enough to deliver value, but short enough to avoid introducing friction:
1 step to get started (e.g. account or workspace setup)
1-2 steps to personalize the experience (e.g. segmentation and/or import data)
1-2 steps to reach a mini “aha” moment (e.g. create doc, start project, try generative AI, etc.)
But, Cove has a different approach of launching you off on essentially a live demo to build an app with a general use that all of us can relate to: planning a trip.
Despite how many times I had to click through the tutorial, I found myself hooked and engaged. Ultimately, this works because time to value matters more than the number of steps. In other words, how quickly a new user experiences actual, meaningful product value is more important than how fast they get through the onboarding itself. Ideally, both would be quick. But, it’s also fine if onboarding is spread out if those steps build towards a concrete, motivating payoff. In Cove’s case, it needs to differentiate from the slew of generative AI tools with broad use cases and quickly demonstrate why should users should use Cove instead of ChatGPT or Perplexity. I suspect that’s pretty hard to do in 3-5 steps, though I do see opportunity to reduce it from 13 steps.
As Cove continues to iterate, they could also experiment with personalization in their initial tutorial so that the payoff of their lengthy onboarding is an output you can actually then use (e.g. I am traveling to Portugal soon so would have loved to see it customized to that!). It also wouldn’t hurt to add in a segmentation quiz and better understand their users.
Lastly, Cove surprised me with moments of delight that surprisingly kept me engaged. These are unexpected easter eggs that appear in the interface in passing that you may stumble upon as you interact and use a product. There was a dancing Cove mascot that transformed as it was working through a query, a blinking Cove logo as it was filling out cards, and confetti that popped across the screen as it completed an action. In otherwise dull moments of learning to use a new product, it definitely piqued curiosity and sparked a little bit of joy.
Final take
In a crowded landscape of AI apps all vying for attention, onboarding isn’t just the first impression — it’s the first proof. It’s where users decide whether a product is just another cool demo that they forget about or something worth coming back to. Both Gamma and Cove.ai show that great onboarding isn’t one-size-fits-all: Gamma nails the “get value fast” model with smart personalization and a smooth path to creation, while Cove leans into an immersive, playful tutorial that builds curiosity and showcases breadth. What's the common thread? Each turns onboarding into a strategic product surface and not just a UX requirement. As the bar for AI tools rises, the best teams will treat onboarding not as a checklist, but as the first real chance to deliver on the promise of their product to users who are looking for something useful — and something they think is wroth returning to again and again.