The onboarding system your product deserves.
Built from designing products used by millions.
Get the onboarding protocol stack. Activation. Retention. Expansion.
Get the Full StackCreated from two decades of work across teams at
Your most expensive problem is the weeks after signup.
Not pricing. Not features. It’s the gap between “signed up” and “I need this,” and that’s where the money quietly leaves.
You’ve bolted tools on before. They don’t hold.
Tooltips, tours, checklists. They sit on top of the product and point at it. They narrate the thing instead of changing it, so the user is still just as lost, now with captions. That treats the symptom, a confused user, and leaves the cause alone: an onboarding nobody actually designed.
And that layer is running out of road. As products get more AI-led, there’s less fixed screen left to stick a tooltip onto. The fix has to live inside the product, not float above it.
User-onboarding is not a funnel, it’s a game.
Game levels are built on loops, consisting of cue, action, reward until the user unlocks new tools and upgrades.
Games teach you while you play, a guide always at your side. That’s agent-led onboarding.
Good onboarding works like a game, not a manual.
Most people picture onboarding as the sign-up wizard. It’s not. It’s everything from the first win, to the habit that keeps them coming back, to the day they bring their team with them.
Great games turn strangers into experts without a tutorial anyone reads. They use a loop: a cue, one small action, a real reward, then the next cue.
The same loop carries a user past the first win, into the habit that brings them back, and on to the upgrade that feels like the next natural move. Curious user to power user, with no nudge that feels like nagging.
Agent-led means the guide does the work, not you.
It’s not a separate layer bolted on top with tooltips. It’s a guide that sets the product up for you, so you never have to go learn the dashboard, hunt for where things live, or figure out the UX on your own.
It does the work and hands you the win. One place to go for everything, instead of a map you have to memorize. The product onboards you to the product.
This is what agent-led looks like.
The product onboards you to the product.
The agent does the work.
Ask setup intent
In-app question: 'What kind of work is this?'
Build the workspace
Runs when the answer comes in.
Ask to add team
In-app question: 'Want to add a teammate?'
The user gets the win.
Hey Olivia, let's set up your first project.
The Activation Protocol
Get a new user to a real win on day one.
The Level Design model: why activation is Level 1, and how the agent runs it
How to define the one first-session win that matters
The path, the first quest, and the win moment, built for the agent to walk the user through
The Activation Protocol worksheet, plus how to run it with your favorite LLM
The Retention Protocol
Turn the first win into a daily habit.
The Level Design model: why retention is Level 2, and how the loop keeps users coming back
The one repeated action a habit is built on, and how the agent rewards and calibrates it
Why friction is a feature, and when the agent hands over the controls
The Retention Protocol worksheet, plus how to run it with your favorite LLM
The Expansion Protocol
Turn mastery into more seats and advocates.
The Level Design model: why expansion is Level 3, and why your best users are the ones most likely to leave
How to tell when a user has outgrown their plan, so the agent offers more at the right moment instead of nagging everyone
How mastery turns into more seats and advocates, with the agent inviting the right person by name
The Expansion Protocol worksheet, plus how to run it with your favorite LLM
Level Design Patterns
17 agent-led patterns behind the protocols.
17 named patterns, grouped by activation, retention, and expansion
Each with its mechanism, a real example, what works, and what goes sideways
The level-design lens that ties them together
A swipe file to pull from, or hand to your favorite LLM when you're building
How it works
- 1Download the four PDFs
- 2Upload to your favorite LLM
- 3Build your onboarding blueprint
Built specifically to collaborate with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever LLM you use.
The system every founder deserves.
Hey, I'm Bal.
I've spent twenty years across marketing and product, working with teams at companies like Google, Microsoft, and Intel. The same thing happened over and over. A team builds something genuinely good, launches it, and watches people sign up, look around, and leave before they ever get to the part that would have hooked them.
The product was rarely the problem.
The onboarding was the problem. So I spent years working out how to get a stranger to a real win and keep them coming back, until it became the one thing I do.
This is the same system I've used on enterprise B2B products that I charge 24K+ for. I packaged it so an early-stage founder can run it in an afternoon, without a team or a big budget. It's the closest I can get to a do-it-yourself version.
Bal has been featured in:
"Bal turns complex workflows into onboarding that feels effortless."
Corey Leger, Director of CRO, Heatmap
From 8.2% to 4.9% churn • 250% growth
FAQs
Everything you need to know.
What exactly do I get?
Why PDFs instead of skills, GPTs, or an app?
Anyone selling you prompts, skills, or prebuilt agents is selling to noobs. You don’t need to be an AI expert to use these, but if you’re getting real value out of them, you’re probably already the type who writes your own prompts, builds your own skills, customizes your own agents, maybe ships your own apps.
And every product is different, so there’s no prompt or agent that works out of the box for yours. What you need are the protocols that guide your LLM into building the right onboarding for your product, not someone else’s.
They’re PDFs instead of .md files in case you feel like sitting down and reading them yourself.
Does this only work for desktop SaaS?
Do I need an LLM to use these?
What if I don't have an agent in my product yet?
How long until I see results?
Get the complete system.
Three protocols. One toolkit. Activation to expansion, designed to build from.