The best user onboarding specialist depends on what prevents a new user from reaching value. This comparison covers twenty people whose public work addresses first-run UX, activation, trial conversion or the messages supporting that journey.
The guide concerns people onboarding into software products. An audit, a workshop, an embedded product role and a behavior-based email project have different deliverables. Decide which one your team needs before comparing the names.
Compare the twenty options
| Specialist |
Relevant focus |
| Kareem Mayan |
B2B SaaS trial-to-paid onboarding |
| Asia Orangio |
Activation research, measurement, and a prioritized roadmap |
| Yaakov Carno |
Self-serve SaaS activation |
| Nicholas Heim |
Embedded onboarding and self-serve delivery |
| Samuel Hulick |
Behavioral diagnosis and experiments for high-volume self-serve SaaS |
David Spiegel
 |
Usage-based onboarding diagnosis and broader product implementation |
| Daniel Park |
Customer education within onboarding |
| Hila Qu |
Onboarding within a PLG experiment program |
| Jim Zarkadas |
Onboarding UX audits and product design |
| Ben Williams |
Growth for developer tools |
| Sam Awezec |
PLG and pricing migrations |
| Andrew Capland |
Onboarding advice for an existing SaaS team |
| Georgiana (Gia) Laudi |
Customer research connecting onboarding with lifecycle strategy |
| Paulina Spaccarotella |
B2B SaaS activation systems |
| Aggelos Mouzakitis |
PLG strategy and first-growth-hire support |
| Krystal Higgins |
Onboarding journey design and team workshops |
| Étienne Garbugli |
Implemented activation and conversion messages |
| Jane Portman |
Behavior-based onboarding through Userlist |
| Samar Owais |
SaaS onboarding email strategy and copy |
| Josh Garofalo |
Lifecycle copy around the product journey |
How we selected these onboarding specialists
We recommend starting with dedicated post-signup audits, trial-conversion research, activation design and embedded product delivery. Mayan offers bounded B2B SaaS onboarding formats; Orangio adds customer and behavioral diagnosis; Carno connects audits with design; Heim can embed to carry decisions into the product. Hulick follows as a particularly relevant option for established self-serve volume, with roughly 1,000 weekly signups as a useful testing floor.
The order considers the work actually sold, what the client must implement and the volume needed to learn. Broader product support, technical-audience advice, messaging components and workshops meet different needs. Sources are first-party services and project accounts; confirm capacity and the assigned team, and treat reported results as historical accounts rather than forecasts.
Choose the engagement model
For research and first-value strategy, compare Orangio and Mayan. Carno offers activation audits and design, while Heim can embed to carry decisions into product work. Hulick’s diagnostic and measured experiments are aimed at established self-serve volume. Park addresses customer education; Higgins teaches onboarding methods through workshops. Messaging options include Garbugli, Portman’s Userlist services, Owais and Garofalo, with their respective volume, platform and implementation boundaries kept explicit.
Kareem Mayan is the principal at TrialToPaid, where he focuses on product-led B2B SaaS trial conversion. His approach considers what customers need to achieve both inside and outside the application.
His services separate an onboarding UX audit from a broader growth plan and a deeper engagement to investigate users’ first meaningful value. The published scope covers customer segments, conversion obstacles, in-app recommendations, and supporting email touches. Wireframes and product specifications are described as an additional service.
Mayan is worth a conversation when a trial contains several steps but the team cannot tell which ones help someone decide to pay. Discuss the difference between account setup, useful product behavior, and the purchase decision. His service structure also gives buyers a practical scoping question: do you need a critique of the current flow, or research to decide what the flow should become?
Asia Orangio is DemandMaven’s founder and lead growth strategist. Its activation and onboarding engagement combines an experience audit with product-data analysis, customer interviews, and a defined activation measure. Outputs include an activation map, prioritized recommendations, analytics reports, and low-fidelity design direction.
That combination makes Orangio and her team a strong option when the question is still “Why aren’t users activating?” A funnel can identify where activity stops; interviews and observation can help explain whether users are confused, unconvinced, or trying to accomplish something the flow does not support.
The engagement’s delivery boundary is clear: DemandMaven describes strategy and low-fidelity work rather than finished interface designs or frontend code. Confirm Orangio’s involvement and assign a product owner who can turn the roadmap into changes after the project. The same service page explains those outputs and limits.
3. Yaakov Carno: a specialist focus on self-serve onboarding
Yaakov Carno’s Valubyl publishes a SaaS onboarding audit and customized growth advisory. Its stated focus is getting users to experience product value and progress toward an upgrade, with self-serve SaaS at the center of the practice.
Carno is a useful candidate when new users arrive with intent but cannot connect the product’s capabilities to their own job. That can require a different starting point, clearer initial content or fewer dependencies before the first useful action. The appropriate intervention depends on the account and the use case.
Discuss whether you need an audit of the current flow or help rebuilding the activation system. Confirm Carno’s involvement, the people designing and implementing changes, and how product guidance will coordinate with lifecycle messages. Ask what will count as a successful first session and what should happen on the return visit.
4. Nicholas Heim: fix onboarding alongside the upgrade path
Nicholas Heim’s Purpose Labs includes onboarding, conversion and product-growth execution within its self-serve SaaS practice. The service page distinguishes advising from embedding, where Heim joins the team’s tools and routines to build alongside it.
He is a useful option when first value and monetization have been designed separately. If users encounter a limit before understanding the product, changing the tour may be less important than moving the limit or revising the initial use case. His combined pricing and product remit supports that conversation.
Bring the current trial or free plan and examples of accounts that stalled. Ask which product changes he would ship directly and how the team would compare activation with eventual upgrades. Choose the engagement mode explicitly; advisory and embedded delivery require different internal staffing and decision rights.
Samuel Hulick’s Value Paths practice focuses on self-serve SaaS activation. Its current service begins with a three-week diagnostic identifying early behaviors associated with paid conversion and estimating their business value. A measured experiment program can follow. Hulick is also known for UserOnboard’s teardowns and The Elements of User Onboarding; the recommendation here centers on the presently described Value Paths engagement.
This is a mature-volume option, with established self-serve traction and roughly 1,000 signups per week described as a useful testing floor. The practice accepts at most two engagements at a time. Those constraints matter: a new product with little usage data should compare the research, audit and design options elsewhere in this guide rather than assume this experiment program is the default.
Bring cohort data and a clear view of which users should be eligible for the journey. Agree which behaviors represent customer value, how different intentions will be handled and who can ship the proposed experiments. The diagnostic and subsequent implementation program are separate buying decisions; decide what the onboarding flow needs to accomplish before commissioning new screens.
David Spiegel’s current CV describes a Memelord consulting assignment across a B2B agent platform and a consumer app. He studied usage to understand onboarding, engagement and retention, identified behaviors separating active or subscribed users from churned users, and delivered a prioritized plan of improvements and tests. His Sandbox consulting account also describes research and redesign across the homepage, marketplace and onboarding.
This supports a direct product diagnosis when the team needs help interpreting how users progress, with a broader consulting offer spanning UX, analytics and implementation. The Memelord account establishes analysis and recommendations, not a shipped SaaS redesign or an independently verified activation result. The two cases should not be treated as a standardized end-to-end onboarding package.
Choose one journey and agree whether the work ends with a plan or continues into design and delivery. Identify the engineers, product owner and measurement responsibilities before work starts. For a dedicated SaaS onboarding engagement, compare that proposed scope with the more focused services earlier in this guide.
7. Daniel Park: help users learn enough to get useful work done
Daniel Park approaches SaaS onboarding through customer education, instructional design and content. His audit includes a diagnostic, prioritized recommendations and a narrated screencast; he also describes a turnkey option that produces onboarding content and works alongside the team on improvements.
Consider him when the product is valuable but requires users to understand a process before they can use it successfully. The answer may involve content or guidance at the point of action, especially in a high-touch journey where customer-success staff repeatedly explain the same setup tasks.
Bring the questions new users ask and the work they must complete. Ask which guidance should live in the product and which belongs in help content or human support. Clarify whether the engagement ends with a roadmap or includes production and measurement, and keep necessary setup distinct from avoidable instruction.
8. Hila Qu: connect first value with retention and conversion
Hila Qu’s growth advisory explicitly includes onboarding, activation, retention, free trials and pricing. Her process narrows a company’s growth opportunities to one or two priorities, then works through analysis, research and experiments. She also publishes workshop, audit and interim leadership options.
Qu is a relevant choice when onboarding sits inside a broader product-growth problem. Users may complete setup but never establish a repeat behavior, or reach value without understanding the paid plan. Examining the whole path helps the team avoid improving a welcome flow that does little for the business.
Start with the activation behavior and the cohorts that retain. Ask how the engagement will investigate their relationship and which parts of the product journey it will change. Agree whether the company needs advisory for its existing team or a leader with responsibility for execution.
9. Jim Zarkadas: turn first-run friction into a usable product flow
Jim Zarkadas’s Love At First Try provides onboarding UX audits, workshops and product design for SaaS. Its activation work focuses on the journey from trial signup to paid use, within a broader design service covering the product and its growth paths.
The published fit is product-led SaaS above $1 million ARR. This is a useful option when the team needs more than a written critique. The practice describes working prototypes and dedicated design teams, giving a company a way to examine alternative first-run experiences before building them. The brief should connect the proposed screens to an actual user task, rather than treating a polished welcome sequence as the outcome.
Ask which parts of the journey the audit covers and who will design the revised flow. Confirm Zarkadas’s involvement and the assigned delivery team. Define the implementation handoff, required product data and how the company will learn whether new users reach value more reliably. The published team listing marks Zarkadas’s own team as fully booked; confirm the assigned designer and his personal participation directly.
10. Ben Williams: onboarding for developers who evaluate by doing
Ben Williams advises developer-tool companies on activation, engagement, retention and product-led growth. His published practice is grounded in products for developers and technical audiences, including growth and end-to-end developer-experience work at Snyk.
He is relevant when a generic welcome journey cannot accommodate the work required to evaluate an API or developer tool. A user may need documentation, a local setup and a successful result before an account event says anything meaningful about activation. The commercial buyer may be a different person altogether.
Ask how he would define the developer’s first useful outcome and the account-level signal that follows it. Compare the documentation and setup journey with the product interface. Confirm whether the engagement gives your team strategic guidance or includes deeper involvement in designing and running the activation program.
11. Sam Awezec: onboarding across free plans, paywalls and new interfaces
Sam Awezec includes activation and onboarding in his PLG consulting, alongside free plans, paywall design and experimentation. His current positioning also addresses agent-readable signup, documentation and trial paths, while a separate practice covers usage and hybrid pricing.
He is worth considering when the onboarding question is also a question about access. What should a new user be able to accomplish before paying? Which setup should an assistant or integration handle? Those decisions influence the journey before any welcome screen is designed.
Bring the account states, plan limits and intended first use case. Ask which parts of the flow need a human decision and which can be automated. Agree how to measure useful activation without counting automated account creation as customer value, and specify the product and lifecycle changes included in the engagement.
12. Andrew Capland: review onboarding with the team doing the work
Andrew Capland’s SaaS advisory includes new-user onboarding, activation, free-to-paid upgrades and the handoff to sales. The offer targets established B2B SaaS companies with an execution team, and includes review of flows, roadmaps and test plans.
Consider him when the people needed to build onboarding are already in place, but the team is stuck choosing what to change. His background leading growth at Wistia and Postscript is relevant to a brief that crosses first-session behavior, commercial intent and the distinction between self-service and assisted accounts.
The delivery boundary is explicit: execution remains with the client. Bring the current flow and your team’s proposed changes, then ask how he would challenge the assumptions. Agree the activation measure, the experiment decision and the internal owner who will carry feedback into a release.
Gia Laudi is Customer-Led’s chief strategist and a co-author of Forget The Funnel. The team page says she leads engagements personally and describes the consultancy’s work on onboarding and retention strategy informed by customer research.
Customer-Led’s sprints begin with customer understanding, map the sources of value in the experience, and prioritize growth opportunities. This makes Laudi a useful choice when the onboarding problem spans positioning, product messaging, and the customer’s expectations after signup.
Consider this approach if marketing promises one outcome while the product introduces a different set of features. The hiring conversation should establish which customer group matters most and how research will translate into the actual journey. Laudi works with a consultancy team, so specify the research, messaging, and design deliverables your organization needs, along with ownership of implementation.
14. Paulina Spaccarotella: a clear activation path for a defined customer
Paulina Spaccarotella’s Product Clarity focuses on B2B SaaS activation. Her public offer connects users’ first session with retained customers and describes an activation system that can be handed over as an operating playbook.
This is a relevant approach when the product has a single onboarding flow for several very different jobs. The important question is which customer the first experience should serve and what that customer must accomplish to see value. A playbook is useful if it records those decisions and gives the team a consistent way to maintain them.
Ask how the work will use customer conversations and observed behavior, then request a concrete example of the intended handoff. Define which screens, events and follow-up messages the project will address. Keep the internal product owner involved so the recommended journey can become working software.
15. Aggelos Mouzakitis: senior guidance when activation ownership is unclear
Aggelos Mouzakitis advises B2B SaaS teams on PLG, including onboarding, activation, free-to-paid conversion and product-qualified leads. His two public tracks separate strategic advisory from mentorship for a founder’s growth hire.
He is a useful option when onboarding has become nobody’s clear responsibility. Marketing owns the welcome email, product owns setup and sales owns the next conversation, yet the customer experiences one journey. A senior advisor can help the existing leaders agree where the handoffs and decisions belong.
Bring the journey as customers encounter it, including what happens outside the app. Ask which responsibility gaps he sees and which user behavior should guide the next change. Establish whether the engagement is primarily developing your growth hire or helping leadership make product decisions. Production design and engineering still need named owners.
Krystal Higgins is a UX designer with a sustained focus on onboarding and the author of Better Onboarding. Her public site connects that work with broader product and systems design.
Her Better Onboarding Journeys workshop teaches teams to define onboarding’s start and end points, map the actions between them, and decide how guidance should support each action. The published format combines instruction with practical activities for product and design teams.
Higgins is a particularly useful expert to consider when everyone has a different definition of onboarding, or when the team keeps returning to a long introductory tour. Her workshop approach can help establish a shared design method. Discuss a workshop or teaching engagement directly; the public offer should not be read as a promise that she will take on a complete production redesign.
17. Étienne Garbugli: build behavior-based onboarding into the email system
Étienne Garbugli’s lifecycle consulting serves product-led SaaS companies. His current offer begins with a funnel and analytics audit, customer-journey mapping and segmentation, then moves into writing and implementing activation, conversion and other lifecycle sequences in the client’s email platform.
Consider him when the company already has onboarding messages but cannot explain which account states they should respond to or what they help users accomplish. His service connects the strategy to configured triggers and launched sequences, rather than leaving implementation as an unspecified follow-up project.
His published fit emphasizes self-serve products with at least 1,000 signups per day, so traffic volume is a material qualification. Bring the product’s actual volume, event model and email platform to the first discussion. Agree which useful user actions the sequence should encourage, what will suppress irrelevant messages and how any post-launch experiments will be evaluated.
18. Jane Portman: onboarding expertise through Userlist services
Jane Portman’s Userlist combines an email platform with done-for-you setup services. Its User Onboarding Kit covers planning, writing and configuring behavior-based onboarding workflows; related packages address technical setup, loyalty and ongoing improvement.
This is a useful option for a team already choosing Userlist and needing help translating its activation plan into working messages. The platform context makes segmentation and account behavior part of the engagement, rather than leaving the team with copy that nobody has configured.
The service is delivered through Userlist’s team, so confirm Portman’s involvement instead of assuming every task is personal consulting. The published FAQ limits the packages to Userlist customers and leaves data integration with the client’s engineers. Agree that integration and the activation events before the messaging work begins.
19. Samar Owais: connect onboarding emails with long-term retention
Samar Owais specializes in SaaS onboarding and retention email strategy and copy. Her homepage explicitly defines the delivery boundary: strategy and copy, with no claim to provide an end-to-end email marketing operation.
That makes her a relevant specialist when the product team understands the desired behavior but the messages fail to help users reach it. The assignment can include clarifying why a step matters, addressing hesitation and sending help at a moment when the user can act on it.
Bring customer research and the product milestones behind the sequence. Ask how each message changes for an account that has already acted, stopped halfway through or invited a teammate. Assign technical workflow implementation and event tracking internally or to another supplier, then review the experience together before it reaches customers.
20. Josh Garofalo: make the next product action easier to understand
Josh Garofalo of Sway Copy writes conversion-focused copy for SaaS across the customer lifecycle, including emails, websites and landing pages. His public offer connects acquisition with retention, making him a relevant copy specialist for the messages surrounding a new user’s first experience.
Consider him when onboarding friction comes from language: the user does not understand the benefit of connecting a tool, starting a project or choosing a plan. The work should start with what customers are trying to accomplish and the doubts that prevent the next action, then translate that understanding into copy.
Ask to scope the exact touchpoints, including any in-product language rather than assuming it comes with an email project. Keep navigation, account-state logic and engineering responsibilities explicit. A copy engagement is easiest to assess when the team already knows the journey and can measure whether users complete useful actions.
Define first value before you rewrite the flow
Start with a sentence a customer would recognize: “I have sent my first invoice” or “My team can now see the same project.” Then work backward to the necessary actions. A completed profile may enable that outcome, but it is rarely enough to prove the product is useful.
Ask the specialist to separate required setup from avoidable effort. Connecting a data source may take time and still be necessary. The design question is how to explain the request, support completion, and help people recover if they stop halfway through.
Agree on a measurement plan that follows users beyond the welcome screens. Useful questions include how many eligible new users reach first value, how long it takes, and whether those users return. Segment the analysis when different customer groups follow different paths. A higher checklist-completion rate alone is a weak basis for declaring success.
Make the lifecycle handoff part of the brief
Onboarding continues when the user closes the tab. Write down which product behaviors should trigger help, what the message should ask the user to do, and when it should stop. Someone who has completed setup should not keep receiving reminders to complete it.
Before hiring, request a sample deliverable and agree on who owns research, interface design, event instrumentation, and implementation. Include the return visit in the scope: the user should be able to resume useful work without repeating instructions. The strongest proposal will connect these decisions to a customer outcome your team can observe.
Sources
Frequently asked questions
What does a user onboarding flow specialist do?
A user onboarding flow specialist studies how new users get started, identifies where they lose momentum, and recommends changes that help them reach a meaningful outcome. Work can include customer research, flow design, activation measurement, in-product guidance, and lifecycle messaging. Confirm whether the engagement includes production design and implementation.
How is user onboarding different from user activation?
Onboarding is the experience that helps a new user get started. Activation is the meaningful behavior or outcome you use to judge whether that experience is working. Completing a tour or creating an account may be onboarding steps without proving that the user has received value.
Should we hire an onboarding consultant or a UX designer?
Choose an onboarding consultant when you need help defining first value, understanding abandonment, or coordinating product and lifecycle changes. A UX designer is a suitable choice when the problem and success measure are established and you need detailed flows, prototypes, and interface design. Some specialists cover both; compare the actual deliverables.
