Kliq
Replacing Kliq’s demo call with self-serve onboarding
New Kliq creators waited days for a mandatory call before they could start building. Over three releases, I led the design of a self-serve route from sign-up to publishing.
Problem
Every creator had to wait for a call
Kliq lets creators build an app or web space for their community and earn from it. But every new creator had to complete an onboarding call before they could start, and the wait was three to five days.
Booked calls were often missed, support repeated the same walkthrough again and again, and creators came away thinking Kliq was a done-for-you agency rather than a platform they could use themselves.
My role
I was lead product designer on a contract from October 2023 to February 2025, working with one product manager and four engineers. I led the design across three releases. Building, releasing and measuring each one was shared work, and the results here are the team’s.
Our question was whether a new creator could go from sign-up to a live, paid space without anyone holding their hand.
Groundwork
Fixing the console before building a funnel
Kliq began as RemoteCoach, a tool for personal trainers. When it opened to every kind of creator, our own admin console was the biggest obstacle. Screens were cluttered, basic tasks such as uploading a logo sat three clicks deep, and new users arrived and asked, “Now what?”
Any self-serve flow would have dropped people straight into that console, so we rebuilt it first, keeping the features trainers relied on.
Research
Borrowing proven patterns so testing could focus on Kliq
I benchmarked ten products that make sign-up and onboarding feel easy, including Shopify, Wix, Linktree and Canva. The same patterns kept coming up: a welcome dashboard with one clear next step, a visible progress bar, a highlighted “most popular” plan and one-click sign-in at the start. Building on familiar patterns let us spend testing time on the parts that were specific to Kliq.
How we worked
We worked in two-week loops. Each release went from Figma prototypes to acceptance testing with the developers and a five-user Maze test, then out behind a feature flag. For two weeks afterwards we watched Hotjar recordings and funnel data before choosing the next change.
Release 1
A first release with no call
I sketched three candidate flows with our product manager and engineers. We chose one we could build in a single sprint, because data from a working release would settle more than further debate.
Self-serve checkout took a creator through basic details, creator type, plan and payment, then straight into Admin. Inside, a checklist asked them to set their look and feel, connect Stripe, create a subscription tier and upload a first programme. When it was complete, the Publish button unlocked.
A few details carried the flow. Sign-up fitted on one page with Google or Apple sign-in, a progress rail showed creators where they were, and a short “Setting up your space…” moment made the move into Admin feel deliberate. Tutorial videos sat under the checklist, so help was visible before anyone needed support.
Releases 2 and 3
Following the drop-off through two more releases
What release 1 taught us
Two weeks after launch, sign-ups were up 12% and support tickets were down 67% compared with the call-based journey. Creators could reach Admin without help. But only 6% had published within 14 days, and Hotjar showed a heavy drop-off right before payment. Nearly every product we had benchmarked offered a free trial, so our hypothesis was that creators weren’t ready to pay for a platform they hadn’t tried.
Release 2: a 14-day free trial
We added a trial banner to the first screen and moved payment to the end of the trial. The trial helped sign-ups, but publishing within 14 days only moved from 6% to 7%, and most trials ended without converting to paid. That pointed us towards problems inside Admin, where creators still weren’t reaching the moment when the product made sense to them.
Release 3: less to fill in, a clearer path to Publish
We took plan and payment out of sign-up altogether, so self-serve became one page: email or one-click sign-in, a 14-day trial, then straight into Admin. A short, skippable quiz asked how soon creators wanted to launch, which platform they needed and what their first module would be. Admin Home became a three-item checklist with a live preview, and Publish lit up when all three were done.
Eight moderated think-aloud sessions shaped this release. Without the price step, every participant finished sign-up, and everyone understood the checklist and stopped searching the side menus.
After the final release, the team observed sign-ups 29% higher than the original call-based journey, and publishing within 14 days at 11%, up from 6% after the first release.
Outcome
From a booking link to a self-serve funnel
Over three releases, the team replaced the mandatory call with a self-serve route. The results it reported:
Sign-ups: 29% higher than the original call-based journey, after the final release
Publishing within 14 days: 11% after the final release, up from 6% after the first release
Support tickets: down 67% compared with the call-based journey, two weeks after the first release
Each release taught us something different. The first showed creators could get started without a call. The trial helped sign-ups but barely moved publishing, which pointed us inside Admin. After the quiz and checklist were added, the team observed more creators reaching Publish within 14 days.
What I would do differently
Our analytics showed where creators dropped off but rarely why. Next time I would build a little qualitative research into every sprint, such as two short interviews with free-trial creators, and keep a decision log linking each change to a quote, clip or metric.
