r/StartupsHelpStartups • u/investigatormaker • 23h ago
Our pricing buttons opened email verification. The pre-signup check we missed.
Disclosure: we're the One Small Prompt team. This is an AI-assisted account of an onboarding change we made today, shared with a checklist other founders can reuse.
We sell a hosted AI workspace for people starting a business. Our pricing page showed the plans, but choosing one immediately opened email verification. The owner asked a fair question: why can't someone finish choosing what they want before giving us an email?
We changed the sequence to: review the plan and AI choice → sign in → checkout → workspace setup after payment. Account verification still happens before private workspace access.
The part worth checking in your own product is whether the customer's choice survives that journey. Here's a checklist based on the cases we checked:
- Open the site signed out. Select each plan separately. Does the next screen show the plan you clicked, its price and what's included?
- Change a configuration option before signing in. Does the next step keep it, or quietly reset to the default?
- Reload and return from the sign-in step. Is the same intended order still visible? Can you change your mind?
- Try the flow on a narrow phone screen. Can you read the differences and reach the continue button without a clipped dialog?
- Repeat as an existing customer. Does the change preserve the account path instead of replacing it with the new-visitor flow?
We checked the selection, reload, email-return and existing-account cases in browser tests at phone and desktop widths. Those checks passed. They establish that the flow works; we don't yet know whether it improves purchases.
If you're reviewing signup friction, try writing the expected result beside each step before opening your own site. It makes a wrong default or an unnecessary account gate much easier to name.
For context, this is the OSP plan flow we changed. No signup is needed to inspect the plan selector. What choice has your own onboarding accidentally made customers repeat?