What we learned onboarding 134 venues in the first week
Venue onboarding patterns observed during launch week. Fastest setup: under 30 minutes from sign-up to live agent. Biggest friction: knowledge pack ingestion when menus are PDF scans. Most requested feature: auto-detect business hours from Google.
We onboarded 134 venues in the first week after launch. Here is what we learned.
The fastest setup was under 30 minutes from sign-up to live agent. This venue had a well-structured website, a PDF menu with machine-readable text, and an owner who was available for the WhatsApp number verification step. The happy path works.
The biggest friction was knowledge pack ingestion when menus are PDF scans instead of real PDFs. Scanned menus require OCR, which adds 2-5 minutes of processing time and occasionally produces errors on hand-written prices. We added a fallback to image-based recognition but it is still slower than text.
The most requested feature during onboarding was auto-detecting business hours from Google Places. We did not ship this for launch — operators had to type their hours manually. It is in the pipeline for v0.5.
The most surprising pattern: operators wanted to preview their agent's responses before going live. We built a test-chat panel in the venue admin dashboard that lets them send trial messages and see how the agent would respond. Uptake was immediate — 80% of operators used it at least once during onboarding.
The most common onboarding error: venues trying to connect their personal WhatsApp instead of a WhatsApp Business number. We added clearer messaging in the flow but this is still the #1 support ticket.
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