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When was the last time you actually read a tooltip?

If you're like most users, you probably dismissed it without a second thought—just another interruption between you and getting your work done.

Here's the problem: while 62% of users form their opinion about your product within the first 3 interactions, your onboarding is actively working against you. Companies relying on traditional tooltips and product tours are watching 90% of users churn within the first week—not because their product lacks value, but because users never discover it.

Yet, almost all of us product builders keep falling back to these same broken methods. Enterprise SaaS companies give up entirely, hiring armies of CSMs to manually onboard each user. We know we can do better, but we've hit the ceiling of what's possible with static interfaces, until recently.

AI hasn't just unlocked new product capabilities—it's fundamentally changed how users expect to interact with software. While your interface evolves from forms and buttons to conversational experiences, your onboarding is still stuck explaining where to click.

To understand how we got trapped in this outdated approach, let's trace the evolution of onboarding—from physical manuals to the tooltip-heavy experiences that are failing us today. This journey reveals why traditional methods feel increasingly disconnected from modern user expectations.

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