Capabilities, not checkboxes

The setup-form trap

First draft of onboarding: 12 toggles. "Do you send proposals? Do you take appointments? Do you have a physical store?" Classic form. We built it. It was terrible.

Why it was terrible

Users don't want to answer 12 questions before seeing value. They want to say "I sell leather bags on Instagram" and get a site. The toggles were a way of making them do our job.

What we did instead

One box. One paragraph. ONI reads it with a classifier and flips the right capability flags itself. Inbox on. Proposals off (you sell direct). Revenue on (you take money). No questions asked.

The lesson

If you find yourself building a configuration screen, ask whether the AI could read the user's intent from prose. Usually it can.