I can’t stress this enough: the easiest way to lose a potential user is a clunky onboarding or a poor developer experience. Devs have limited patience for tools that are hard to setup or use – if it’s too frustrating, they’ll drop it and possibly rant about it to others. On the flip side, when a tool is a joy to use – well-documented, intuitive, minimal steps to get working – developers not only stick with it, they often rave about it. Think about why developers love tools like Docker or Next.js; beyond functionality, it’s how easy they made previously complex tasks.
So, as you grow, continually invest in making the developer experience delightful. Here’s how:
Streamline Onboarding Flow: Examine every step a new user has to take to get value from your product. Can any be removed or automated? For instance, if after sign-up they have to configure a bunch of things, maybe provide sensible defaults or a wizard. If installation is needed, provide scripts or one-liners (e.g., a Homebrew formula, a curl | bash installer, or a Docker compose file) to cut down manual steps. A great goal is the concept of “Time to First Hello World” – measure how long it takes for a developer to go from zero to achieving something basic (like their first successful API call, or first data ingested, etc.). Try to get that under 5 minutes for a SaaS, or within 30 minutes for a self-hosted tool (depending on complexity). We actually timed ourselves doing a fresh install of crowd.dev using our docs to see where we got stuck or slowed – that revealed a few unclear steps which we then fixed.
Usability and Developer UX: Developer Experience (DX) often mirrors principles of UX but for a technical product. It includes clarity of API design, consistency of CLI commands, informative error messages, etc. Ensure your APIs or commands are logical and consistent (if one command is yourtool deploy, don’t have another main action as yourtool_do – naming consistency matters). Provide helpful error messages and guidance – e.g., if a config is missing, the tool should say “Config X not found, please do Y or check docs at this link” instead of a generic stack trace. These little things significantly improve DX. As an engineering director said, the pillars of developer experience are usability, findability, and credibility. Usability meaning how easy it is to use and remove barriers (like unnecessary steps); findability meaning how easily they can find info (good docs, search, etc.); credibility meaning they trust the tool (which comes from reliability and open communication).
In-App Guidance: If your product has a UI or even CLI, consider guided tours or hints. For a web dashboard, highlight key areas for first-time users (“Click here to connect your repository”). For CLI, you should provide examples. Some tools print a quickstart guide on first run or have an interactive setup (e.g., terraform init does some nice prompts). These reduce cognitive load on the user to figure things out themselves.
Friction Logs: A technique is to perform “friction logging” – basically, go through the new user journey and log every point of friction or confusion. Or even better, watch a new user (maybe a friend or a hire who’s never used it) do the setup and have them narrate their thoughts. Every “hmm, what does that mean?” or every time they alt-tab to search docs is a friction point to potentially address. We did this during a hackathon by observing how participants used our API – it highlighted where they stumbled (like an unclear error message when they hit a rate limit). We then improved those rough edges.
Performance Matters: Part of DX is speed and efficiency. If your tool is noticeably slow at something (especially the first run experience), that leaves a poor impression. For example, if installing dependencies or scanning something takes a long time, see if you can optimize or at least show progress feedback. Developers often test a tool with something small first – if even that feels sluggish, they’ll worry about using it at scale.
Onboarding Communication: Don’t rely on the product alone – use emails or in-app messages in the first days to guide new users. For instance, Day 1 email: “Thanks for signing up! Here are 3 things to do first…”. Day 3: “Need help? Join our Slack or check the getting started guide.” These communications can significantly improve activation rates because they catch users who might otherwise drop off. Just don’t spam or be too pushy; it should feel like helpful nudges from a friend who wants you to succeed with the tool.
Collect DX Feedback: Encourage users to give feedback on their first experience. A simple survey (“How was your setup experience? Anything confusing?”) or asking in the community can surface issues. Power users might forget the newbie experience, so periodically seek fresh eyes or even do user testing with developers new to the product.
Smooth Path to Real Use Case: After initial setup, help users along the journey to deeper usage. For instance, once they’ve connected one data source, suggest connecting another (if that’s how your tool works). Or if they’ve run one analysis, point out how to schedule it or integrate it into CI. Essentially, lay out the stepping stones from novice to proficient usage. Many products call these activation milestones. Identify what a “really activated” user looks like (e.g., for GitHub it might be creating a repo, for Slack it’s sending X messages with Y people). For your tool, find those key actions and try to lead users to them early.
Documentation and Examples in Onboarding: Quickstart snippets should be front and center. In the UI or CLI output, reference docs for next steps. E.g., after installation success message, print “Next, configure your first project by doing XYZ (see docs link)”. Documentation is part of DX – it should be easy to find (maybe integrate a doc search or link directly from error messages to relevant doc sections).
Community and Support During Onboarding: Make it super easy for a new user to ask for help. Link to your community or support chat in onboarding screens or welcome emails: “Questions? We’re here to help – join our Slack or email support.” Early frustrations can often be remedied if the user asks and gets an answer quickly. If they silently struggle, they might churn silently. We made sure our Discord invite was in the welcome email and in the CLI output.
Continuous DX Improvement Loop: Developer experience isn’t one-and-done. As you add features, always consider the DX impact. Do you need to adjust the onboarding flow to introduce this feature? Are you inadvertently adding complexity? Sometimes you need to redesign parts of your product for better DX as it evolves. Maybe your config format could be simplified, or you introduce a GUI for what used to be manual config to help new users. Always weigh new powerful features against complexity cost. Often, better DX means simpler (hide complexity until needed).
A good DX is somewhat invisible – things “just work” and the user doesn’t have to think about the tool, they just use it to achieve their goal. When you reach that state, you get delightful comments like “Wow, it was so easy to get started, compliments to the team.” Those are the users who will tell their peers, “Check out [YourTool], it won’t waste your time setting up, you get value immediately.”
One more anecdote: I had tried an earlier competitor to our product and gave up because their setup required editing five different config files and running some DB migrations – it was a mess. We consciously made our setup a single command that handled all that. Many users who switched to us mentioned this difference explicitly, “We got running in 10 minutes with you guys, whereas we couldn’t even get Competitor X to work in a day.” This wasn’t fancy growth hacking, it was just better engineering and DX. But it absolutely was a growth driver – in the dev community, people share these experiences.
Action plan
- Perform a DX audit of your product’s new user journey.
- List out every step and see what can be trimmed or improved.
- Fix low-hanging fruit (like unclear messages, missing defaults) as soon as possible.
- If needed, plan engineering time for bigger improvements (like creating an installer script or improving performance on first run).
- Regularly solicit feedback especially from new users – maybe add a prompt after the first successful use, “How was your experience? [Thumbs up/down]”.
- Track activation metrics (e.g., what % of signups complete a key action) and set goals to improve that via DX enhancements.
- Keep an eye on support issues or community questions from newbies: if multiple people ask “how do I do X basic thing?”, that’s a sign your onboarding or docs didn’t cover it well enough, so address that.
In summary, make your tool as easy to adopt as possible. The less time a dev spends wrestling with your tool, the more time they spend experiencing its benefits – which creates a positive feedback loop of continued use and advocacy. In the competitive devtools space, DX is often the deciding factor between winning and losing similar products.
Learn more about Developer Experience
- What is Developer Experience (DX) and Why it Matters - Good introduction to DX