Exploring Customer On-boarding in SaaS Startups

More and more software startups are moving to a subscription-based Software as a Service (SaaS) model. It is absolutely critical for these companies to make sure that their customers keep using their software over the long term (Skok, 2010), and one very important aspect of this is helping them get up and running with the software quickly and painlessly. This process is known as customer on-boarding and very little research has been done on it, especially in the case of SaaS startup companies. The purpose of this study is to explore the field of customer on-boarding in SaaS star-tups. In order to do this I relay my own first-hand experiences from participating in building a customer on-boarding organisation in a SaaS startup in Sweden. The obser-vations from this case are analysed in the context of existing literature from fields relat-ed to customer on-boarding. The result is a set of propositions that are presented as a starting point for further exploratory research and empirical testing.!5 Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincerest gratitude towards my academic supervisor, Henri