Common onboarding mistakes and onboarding debt

Perry Rosenbloom, founder of LaunchBay, previously built and sold Brighter Vision before starting his second SaaS company focused on onboarding. After running hundreds of onboarding processes per month, he saw a consistent problem: what happens after the sale is messy, manual, and often ignored.

LaunchBay helps SaaS and professional services teams manage customer onboarding with structured workflows, shared client portals, and automation. The company has grown past $1M in ARR, doubling in 2025, with a focused approach on helping teams reduce onboarding time from 60–90 days to significantly faster activation.

Perry shares practical lessons on onboarding as a core growth lever—not just an operational task. He explains why onboarding debt compounds, why charging for implementation improves outcomes, and how better onboarding drives retention, expansion, and long-term revenue quality.

Key Takeaways

• Onboarding Debt Compounds - Most SaaS companies duct-tape onboarding early, but delays, inefficiencies, and churn risks compound quickly as sales scale.
• Activation Matters More - The real bottom of funnel isn't closed-won deals—it's when customers actually reach value and start using the product.
• Stop The Chase - Much of onboarding is manual follow-ups and coordination; removing this admin work unlocks higher-leverage customer success teams.
• Charge For Setup - Charging for onboarding improves completion rates, sets expectations, and ensures customers have real skin in the game.
• Segment The Process - Treating all customers the same breaks onboarding—different tiers and workflows are required for different customer types.
• Visibility Is Critical - Without clear visibility into onboarding progress and bottlenecks, problems are only discovered after deals are already at risk.

Quote from Perry Rosenbloom, Founder of LaunchBay

"There's only so long that you can duct tape a process like onboarding new customers, with just hustle to make it work. A lot of companies are using Google Docs, shared Slack spaces, shared spreadsheets, and it almost works, until it doesn't. And the biggest mistake is continuing to let it not work.

"When you're founder-led and you are doing one to three implementations a month, you can get by without a dedicated tool for that. It's not going to be the best customer experience, but you can get by without a tool for that.

"But when you want to start scaling, you need to build out repeatable processes that can enable every single customer to have a phenomenal experience that is consistent, that is unified and that delivers value. "That's when you start looking for a specialized solution to solve those problems and don't build up more onboarding debt. Onboarding debt is real and early-stage SaaS companies in their processes and customer experiences."

Links

• Perry Rosenbloom on LinkedIn
• LaunchBay on LinkedIn
• LaunchBay website
• Free ebook: The Paid Implementation PlaybookROI calculator: Implementation margins

LaunchBay helps B2B software companies automate client onboarding and implementation so customers activate faster and everyone stays aligned.

If your onboarding includes data collection, setup steps, approvals, training, or any level of customization, LaunchBay replaces the messy mix of emails, spreadsheets, and meetings with a clear, all-in-one onboarding system.

Teams use LaunchBay to onboard clients faster, stay on top of follow-ups automatically, and deliver a smoother experience, without hiring more people or adding more tools.

Visit launchbay.com/practical and get 25% off your first 3 months on any LaunchBay plan.

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