Valubyl

Valubyl is a PLG consultancy that has helped 25+ B2B SaaS companies build product-led onboarding that helps new users quickly understand the product and reach value on their own.

Founder

Instantly.ai

PLG Advisor

Stockpress

Gymdesk

echowin

PI.EXCHANGE

Morgen

TrueClicks

Advisor

Databox

https://www.growthunhinged.com/p/the-evolution-of-product-onboarding-databox

DataTrails

Founder @ Valubyl | Product-Led Growth Advisor

Husband, father, and founder, currently building Valubyl.

Valubyl is a PLG consultancy that has helped 25+ B2B SaaS companies build product-led onboarding that helps new users quickly understand the product and reach value on their own.

Sound like something you need help with?

Feel free to send me a DM, email at yaakov@valubyl.com, or book an intro call with the link above.

Yaakov Carno

Everyone's adding AI prompt bars to their product. Almost no one knows how to design them right. So I mapped 40+ AI prompt journeys - from homepage to onboarding - across products like Canva, Notion, Vercel, Wix, and Airtable.

The result?
A full Prompt Bar Journey Library.

A teardown of how top teams are designing prompt-to-value flows that actually activated users - not just impress them.

Inside, you’ll see:
✅ Prompt examples that drive activation - not just “wow”
✅ How top products capture context without any setup friction
✅ The exact moment to execute a prompt (before or after signup)
✅ What happens after the first output (and why most teams lose users there)

If you’re building an AI feature or onboarding flow, this library will save you weeks of trial and error.
It’s for builders who care about activation, not aesthetics.

For teams who want to turn “Try our AI!” into actual adoption.

I built this for growth leads, founders, and PMs shaping how humans talk to AI.

Want the Prompt Bar Journey Library?

1️⃣ Make sure we’re connected
2️⃣ Comment "PROMPTBAR" below - and I’ll send it your way

Helped 30+ B2B SaaS companies upgrade their PLG self-serve onboarding. Building Valubyl and sharing the behind-the-scenes of our PLG revamps.

New Valubyl website is live! 🤩 

For the last 3 years, we've been building a simple and powerful vision:

Turn self-serve onboarding into your strongest PLG growth lever.

30+ clients later… we finally have a site that actually reflects what we do. 

Capturing onboarding and activation work in a website is hard. But this is version 1 and the first step toward showcasing the depth of what we deliver every day.

👉 Activation revamp sprints
👉 PLG execution and advisory
👉 Real results, real case studies

If you're focusing on getting more paying customers from your freemium or free trial, let's chat.

PLG onboarding & activation revamps for B2B SaaS companies

Has SaaS lost it's mind? We've entered the new UX era 🤯 

AI prompt bars are everywhere. And it’s fascinating to see how differently products are using them.

Some feel magical.
Some feel confusing.
And some are quietly redefining onboarding and user activation entirely.

Over the last month, I mapped out 40+ prompt-bar journeys from tools like Canva, Vercel, Lovable, Airtable, and Bolt to see how the best teams are solving this.

The results were wild!!!

A mix of brilliant patterns, clever UX details, and a few surprising misses. 

From “Ask me anything” chaos... 
to onboarding that teaches by doing.

This carousel shares the highlights, and the full deep-dive article (in the comments) breaks down exactly what’s changing in activation.

Thank you Kyle Poyar for another epic collaboration, just keeps getting better! 🔥 

If you’re building an AI product, you're going to want to save this one!

The New UX Era 🔥

“Why would you hire me when you could just do it yourself?”
That’s the question I asked Nathan from Freckle.io on a recent call.
(Yeah, probably not my smartest sales question 😅)

We were chatting about their PLG onboarding project I was working on, and I genuinely wanted to know.

Why choose to work with an agency like mine, Valubyl, when you could just handle it internally…
or even use AI to figure it out?

He paused for a moment and replied:

“There are certain business/product problems where it makes a ton of sense to bring someone in who’s seen that movie many times before, and onboarding and activation is one those.

If you think about a typical product manager or designer,
if they've been in their career for 10 years,
they've probably only worked on onboarding and activation flow maximum 3 times,
most of them maybe once or none”

And he’s right.

You can learn onboarding once. You can design onboarding a few times.

But when you’ve rebuilt 30+ onboarding experiences across SaaS products,
you start to see patterns that others miss.

That’s the superpower of a hyper-niche agency today.

In a world where AI can do “a bit of everything,” what actually stands out is being really good at one thing, not being average at everything. 

Nathan’s answer reminded me why I started Valubyl in the first place.

To go deep.

Not to do everything, but to do one thing. 
PLG activation and onboarding.
Better than anyone else.

New podcast drop with Alex Oppenheimer is live 🎙️ We went deep on what really drives PLG - and why most teams get it wrong.

Here’s what we covered:

> What PLG actually means: your product should do the job of Sales/CS - guide, qualify, and tell the story inside the experience.

> Why focus wins: one lever, done exceptionally well, compounds everything else - activation, retention, and CAC.

> AI ≠ magic: Prompt bars and “wow” moments drive curiosity, but long-term adoption still comes from solving a real problem with guided context.

> Why bring in specialists: Even great teams only tackle onboarding a few times. Repetition across dozens of SaaS products shortens the learning curve - and avoids the usual pitfalls.

And a whole lot more in our 30-min chat…

When I started Valubyl, the goal was simple: solve one painful, repeatable problem - self-serve onboarding and activation. 

At first, we were advisors - helping SaaS teams spot what wasn’t working and what to fix.
Now, three years later, we’ve evolved into an execution-first agency - not just telling teams what to do, but actually doing it for them.

Our core offer: In 2-4 weeks, we ship a redesigned onboarding experience your team can launch and see the results - no fluff, just outcomes.

If you’re trying to turn more signups into revenue, see what great activation actually looks like, and get a better understanding of what it takes to win with PLG - this episode’s for you.

Comment ALEX and I’ll DM you the link...

... just joking :) check the first comment.

One of the biggest ongoing challenges I’ve had as a founder is:
Our website still doesn’t do justice to what we actually do.

Every time I jump on a call with a new prospect, the same thing happens.
They say, “Oh wow - I didn’t realize how deep this goes.”

And that’s when I realize again: the visuals on our site just don’t capture it.

The moment they see inside a before-and-after Figma design from one of our onboarding revamps, or a real activation playbook - they instantly get it.

They see how much value actually comes out of these sprints. 

Not just pretty UX, but full product experiences redesigned around world-class activation.

It’s way more than “onboarding redesigns.”
It’s building the entire self-serve experience for first-time users.

And yet… that rarely comes across from the outside looking in.

I’ve been studying how other teams like Anthony and Rob from FletchPMM show their work - the before/after visuals, clear deliverables, and the way they walk you through what you actually get. It’s so well done.

So that’s my current project:
> Adding more visuals, walkthroughs, and real examples that show what our work actually looks like.

If you’re a founder or consultant, you probably know the feeling - that imbalance between how much depth you deliver and how simply it’s represented online.

I’m finally fixing that this month. 

Thank you Victoria Bakos for all the help! Super excited to share the new website soon!!

One of the clearest signs you’re working with a great team is the way they respond to bad results. 

Anyone can celebrate good results. But the best teams treat every experiment as part of the process, even when it doesn’t go the way you hoped. Learning is everything.

A small moment from working with the Freckle.io team really highlighted this for me.

A few months ago, we shipped a fully revamped onboarding flow. Before launch, they asked me what completion rate I’d expect. 

I said something like:
“Hard to benchmark, but I’d be disappointed with anything under 80%.”

Fast-forward a few months... the data comes in: 30%. 

I won’t lie, it hit me hard 😅 

I care a lot about what we deliver, and I care a lot about our clients.

But I also know this is how growth works. Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you learn the hard way.

Still… something didn’t feel right. 30% just didn’t match what we had built.

Then a couple weeks ago, Andy sent me a message:

"Turns out the old tracking wasn’t counting users who made it all the way through to the table view properly. Once we fixed that, completion jumped to 82.5%."

That obviously made my week. 
But honestly, the part that stayed with me wasn’t the better result, it was how the team reacted when we thought it was 30%.

There was zero blame. Just growth mindset and a keen energy to fix whatever was broken. 

That’s rare and a true testament to the culture Nathan and the team are building.

This is the kind of team you want to build with. This is the kind of team that is going to win BIG! 

It's already clear - Freckle’s growing over 240% month-over-month in signups, and they're just getting started! 🙌

If you’ve ever test-driven a car and suddenly couldn’t imagine giving it back…
you already understand why reverse trials work so well.

When Maja and I were writing our latest piece, we realized the real magic of reverse trials isn’t in the monetization model - it’s in the psychology behind it.

We went into the 4 biggest triggers that make it so powerful 👇

1️⃣ The Endowment Effect
> Once users “own” a premium feature, even temporarily, they value it far more.

↳That’s why free samples work in retail - and why SaaS users feel attached to features they’ve already used.

2️⃣ FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
> When users see the premium side of your product in action, they don’t want to lose it.

↳ FOMO exists in B2B too lol.

3️⃣ Loss Aversion
> We hate losing more than we love gaining.

↳ Kyle Poyar shared his experience when he tried to downgrade from the premium plan:

"I went to cancel my Canva for Teams account today -- but Canva's cancellation flow was so good that I changed my mind. 
And, no, it wasn't because they made me jump through hoops.

1) They reminded me that I have an amazing deal. I still pay $12.95/month, but prices have increased to $29.99/month. I'll lose my deal if I cancel.
2) They created loss aversion by reminding me of the premium features I've put to use.
3) They made some clever UX choices that subtly influenced my decision."

↳ That’s not manipulation - that’s smart UX reinforcing real value.

4️⃣ Full Product Experience
> Reverse trials let users see everything your product can do before asking them to pay.

↳Would you buy a car without driving it first?

Reverse trials make users feel like the product is already theirs - and that’s the most powerful growth engine there is.

Read the full breakdown/guide below 👇

Took a step back to rethink content here on LinkedIn. Looks like it's paying off 🤯 If you're building in the SaaS and PLG space, we've got some killer content coming up:

More of the good stuff that folks are asking about:

- Behind-the-scenes of how we build world-class PLG self-serve onboarding and activation journeys for our client's at Valubyl 👏 

- Epic free assets like the Prompt Bar Journey Library (about to hit 100K hits 🔥) - see my post from last Wednesday. We're going to be releasing more libraries, breakdowns, and tons of assets from how we're building our PLG canvas V2.

- 3rd collab with Kyle Poyar for Growth Unhinged, wrapping up what's about to be the best guide out there for building AI prompt bar experiences 🤓 

... and lot's more.

See you around 👀

ATLAS SkillTech University

ATLAS Skilltech University is a New Age University focussing on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Mumbai.

In my capacity as the Director, my responsibilities include :

> Head of Department for Entrepreneurship :
More than 20 Courses on Entrepreneurship are taught to over 2000 Students at the University

> ATLAS Venture Labs
Venture Labs is a one stop destination for students to transform their entrepreneurial ideas. We incubate, mentor and enable students of ATLAS to Launch their Entrepreneurial Ventures

> ATLAS Entrepreneurship Collective
Enabling partner schools and universities to dispense high quality entrepreneurial education

> Skilltech Venture Fund
Pre Seed Investments in high growth Student Startups. Coming Soon!

If you would like to collaborate with University, please email at omkar.pandharkame@atlasuniversity.edu.in

Director

Supervity

Supervity helps you to be more creative at work by automating redundant tasks.

GTM advisor

Atal Incubation Centre-Rambhau Mhalgi Prabodhini

Mentor

JITO INCUBATION & INNOVATION FOUNDATION

BHyve

I do what it takes at BHyve!

BHyve is a future of Work Technology that helps organisations to manage their tacit knowledge and increase Employee Productivity.

BHyve's algorithms connect employees with questions to internal subject matter experts instantly

BHyve is backed and partnered by  Sequoia Spark, Accenture, 100x.VC, seeders, JITO and Letsventure. BHyve was incubated at AIC RMP & Google Accelerator.

Founder and CEO

Indian School of Management & Entrepreneurship

Entrusted with three major domains to Educate - Engage - Evangelise

Educate :
Faculty for Entrepreneurship for Undergraduate and Post Graduate Students. Designing a world-class study curriculum which emulates the best academic practices from around the world

Engage :
Build a startup community at ISME ACE to enable an ecosystem to support, nurture and build student startups.

Evangelise :
Create an entrepreneurship HubSpot to guide and mentor startups housed at ISME ACE.

Program Director

SkillStreet

SkillStreet is an upcoming startup in the space of sharing economy and social learning. As the CEO, I fulfill the responsibility of guiding the team and aligning every stakeholder to the vision of the company. Managing Investor relations, communication of the goals and target setting for the leadership teams and leveraging the team's talent to create great synergies.

Founder & CEO

DesiHangover

At Desi Hangover, a pioneering Indian D2C footwear brand, we are on a mission to showcase the craftsmanship of Indian rural artisans to the global stage. In my role as CMO, I am at the forefront of:

- Architecting and executing tailored marketing campaigns across our global markets, enhancing international brand presence.
- Spearheading market intelligence initiatives to gauge product appeal and strategize market penetration.
Pioneering innovative engagement strategies that highlight our social mission, connecting customers with our brand ethos.
- Developing and managing a comprehensive social media strategy to solidify our online brand identity and foster digital engagement.
- Curating the brand narrative and ensuring consistent, impactful representation across various media outlets, including print, television, and radio.
- Stewarding the brand image, maintaining the integrity of our corporate identity, and cultivating strategic partnerships.

Chief Marketing Officer

Autoritatea Nationala pentru Sport si Tineret

Part of a 20 member International team to implement the Project ‘Explore Romania beyond Dracula’ facilitated by the Ministry of youth of Romania.
Motive of the project was to travel across Romania and create content for promotional of Romanian Tourism. Create Marketing Strategies for the developing tourism in Romania and attracting international Tourists.

Marketing Specialist

The Linde Group

A recruit into a holistic cross functional training program stretching over an year. Gaining experience and exposure in various technical know how of gas manufacturing and endeavoring into various projects in the field of Sales, Marketing, Distribution, HR and Finance
. 
The projects undertaken were:

- Completed a thorough analysis to locate the root cause for the tepid response to a company initiative known as the Product Service Offering, which was launched. Causes of concern were identified and a four-step solution was developed - which was subsequently presented to the leadership team.

-Assessed the oxygen market in West Bengal and developed a sales tool which could help re-acquire the lost market share in the business. The tool included marketing on the frontiers of ingenuity, reliability, assurance, safety and pure ( GRASP) to enable the sales force to pitch the product better.

-Streamlined the workflow of the National Scheduling Centre responsible for supplying gases (industrial and medical) to over 1500 customers on a daily basis. Also developed a tool which can asses the timely delivery of the supplies at the customer end.

- Analysed different tests for identifying sales personnel' aptitude and ability to perform. Also researched for material which can enhance the performance of the First Line Managers of the Company.

-Carried a market Intelligence survey in Surat to analyse the scope of the Medical gases market. Evaluated the market attractiveness of the city by deploying various marketing tools.

- On the job training as a Sales Executive. Responsible for Industrial Gases Sales and Account Management for close to 50 clients including Government Companies. Developing business in Industrial zones in and around Mumbai and providing innovative solutions to their Gas needs.

-Think tank behind the theme and event of the Company's annual awards ceremony which commemorate the performances of distinguished people of the company.

Catalyst Trainee

Building India's Largest Student Entrepreneurship Ecosystem @ ATLAS Skilltech University | Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies | Angel Investor | Cross Cultural Psychologist | B2B SaaS Marketeer

Omkar Pandharkame is the Director of Venture Labs, the Entrepreneurship Ecosystem at ATLAS Skilltech University. In his capacity, he is the Head of the Entrepreneurship Department, leads the Student Incubator and various entrepreneurial research projects at the University.

Previously, he was the CEO and Founder of BHyve, an AI enabled Enterprise SaaS startup based out US and India. Under Omkar's leadership, BHyve raised venture capital from leading investors, achieved product market fit and gained early traction. His startup was incubated at AIC-RMP and has raised investments and grants from 100x.VC, Accenture, and Sequoia. 

Omkar has been associated with the Dutch Education Ministry and Romanian youth ministry towards developing entrepreneurship education programs. Over his career, he has trained 35,000 + Students and 1500 + High school leaders in entrepeneurial thinking , design thinking and fundraising. He has done several keynotes and workshops in the domain of building an MVP, Startup Fundraising and Mental Wellbeing.

Previously he was the Co-Founder of two High Growth Startups in the Consumer Applications and D2C.

Omkar actively invests and advises high growth Startups. Currently he is advising /investing an AI Enterprise SaaS Company, An EV Car Company and a D2C Company.

For speaking engagements, please write to omkar.pandharkame@atlasuniversity.edu

Omkar Pandharkame

I was at a hotel in Hyderabad and saw something that made me pause.




A self-service coffee counter.
No CCTV.
No attendant.
Just a QR code and a note —

“If you’ve made yourself a cup… we trust you’ll pay for it.”

I asked the staff, “So how many people actually pay?”
He smiled, “More than 90%, sir.”

That line stayed with me.

Maybe India isn’t a low-trust country.
Maybe we’ve just built systems that treat people like they can’t be trusted.

Imagine if we changed that.
Assumed the best out of people instead of the worst.
Fewer gates, fewer verifications, fewer “sir please send on email also” moments.
More trust. More speed. More humanity.

That Hyderabad coffee counter said something powerful —
When you trust people, most of them live up to it.

The next leap for India isn’t just about AI or tech.
It’s about turning distrust into trust.

Because the day we do that, everything else will move faster.

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