A scoped corporate onboarding diagnostic — three weeks, fixed fee, focused entirely on the business customer journey from signup to activation.
Step 1 — Scope Decision: B2B Only
The $100K/year quote was for full-platform analytics covering both business admins and end-users (gym members). The problem they actually needed to solve was in the B2B layer: why did some of their 9,000 business customers onboard successfully while others stalled? Scoped the engagement to corporate onboarding only — approximately 10,000 active business admin users at any given time. Event volume estimate: 2–4M monthly events. Mapping to PostHog pricing: free tier through to $110/month at the top of the expected range. The $100K/year problem was a scoping problem, not a tooling problem.
Step 2 — Onboarding Journey Mapping
Mapped the end-to-end corporate onboarding process from registration through the sales handoff, account configuration, and first value moment. Two stakeholder interviews — product and customer success — to surface known friction points and identify where the internal team’s intuition conflicted with what customers actually reported. Scanned 30 external reviews (G2, Capterra, Trustpilot) focused on the onboarding experience. Primary finding from reviews: “configuration complexity” was the dominant complaint category, but the reviews didn’t distinguish between setup complexity (first-time friction) and ongoing complexity (structural UX problems). That distinction had material implications for where to prioritise.
Step 3 — Event Taxonomy Design (20 Events)
Designed a 20-event taxonomy covering the full B2B onboarding journey across four stages. Registration stage (4 events): signup initiated, email verified, company profile submitted, trial activated. Setup stage (7 events): first facility added, membership types configured, payment setup completed, staff members added, class schedule created, onboarding checklist opened, onboarding checklist completed. Sales handoff stage (3 events): sales call scheduled, demo completed, contract signed. Activation milestones (6 events): first class created, first member added, first check-in processed, first payment processed, first member communication sent, activation confirmed (composite). Each event specified with name, properties (including user segment, customer type, plan tier), trigger condition, and implementation priority. Handed to the engineering team as a complete specification, not a request for discovery.
Step 4 — PostHog Configuration
Configured the PostHog workspace for corporate onboarding tracking only. Set up the event taxonomy, user identification logic (business admin user ID as distinct person), and person properties (customer size by member count, plan tier, acquisition channel, signup date). Built the core funnel: registration → first facility → onboarding checklist completed → first member added → first payment. Built cohort definitions for the retention analysis — activated customers (reached first payment) vs. non-activated customers (stalled before first payment). The retention curve comparison between these two cohorts was the single most important output the platform needed: it would show the LTV gap in actual weeks of retention data, not as a hypothesis.
Step 5 — JTBD Synthesis
Extracted the core jobs and blockers from the review data, stakeholder interviews, and internal support ticket patterns. Five primary jobs emerged for business customers in the onboarding phase: get a working system before the first paying member arrives (the launch deadline job — dominant emotional driver); prove to staff that switching was the right call; get a single location fully operational before scaling to the next; satisfy regulatory requirements (GDPR, data processing agreements) before going live; stop the manual admin that was the reason for switching in the first place. Three blockers appeared consistently: configuration complexity on the membership type setup (every customer hit this); the absence of opinionated defaults (platform required complete setup before anything worked); and the handoff gap between sales and product onboarding (customers who came through demos had a different experience than direct signups, but neither group was tracked).
Step 6 — Diagnostic Dashboard & Experiment Backlog
Built the live diagnostic dashboard with 10 key insights: registration-to-activation funnel with step-by-step conversion rates; time-to-activation distribution by customer segment (small gym vs. multi-location operator vs. franchise); drop-off analysis showing exactly which step had the highest abandonment rate; weekly cohort completion rates; activated vs. non-activated retention curves (the LTV gap visualised); feature adoption by activation status (which setup steps correlated with activation); and acquisition channel breakdown. Produced a prioritised experiment backlog of 8 specific onboarding changes ranked by estimated impact and implementation effort. Top priority: add opinionated defaults to the membership type setup step — the highest drop-off point in the funnel, with a direct analogue in Perpetua’s goal-based onboarding that had been validated externally.
