Cochapp
Software onboarding platform.
The problem
Most products lose users in the first five minutes. Onboarding is where activation is won or lost, yet teams bolt it on as an afterthought. Cochapp set out to make great onboarding the default, not a custom project.
Context
Cochapp was my first company — the leap from engineer to founder. I owned product, architecture, pricing, and the first customer conversations. Every technical decision was also a business decision.
Architecture
A Next.js application with embeddable onboarding flows, backed by an event-driven activation pipeline and a PostgreSQL source of truth. The design favoured fast iteration and clear activation analytics over premature scale.
- Embeddable flows that drop into any product.
- Event-driven activation tracking to measure what works.
- PostgreSQL as a clean, queryable source of truth.
- Static-first frontend for speed, dynamic where it mattered.
Technical challenges
Wearing every hat
As a solo founder I was product, engineering, sales, and support at once. The hardest skill was triage — deciding what not to build so I could ship what mattered.
Activation is a moving target
What “activated” means differs per product. The system had to be flexible enough to model different activation journeys without becoming a configuration nightmare.
Engineering decisions
Next.js for speed of iteration
A single full-stack framework let me move fast across frontend, API, and rendering without context-switching between stacks.
Measure before optimise
Activation analytics came first. You can’t improve onboarding you can’t see.
Technologies
Results
Cochapp shipped, found early users, and — just as importantly — taught me how to run the whole loop of a software business, from build to distribution.
- A working onboarding platform, built and operated solo.
- Hard-won lessons in distribution and product focus.
Lessons learned
- Distribution is as hard as the build — plan for it from day one.
- Talk to users before you write the schema.
- A founder’s real job is to find what’s true, fast.
What I’d improve today
- A no-code flow builder for non-technical teams.
- Tighter feedback loop between activation data and flow changes.