What We Learned Adding Friction to Our Onboarding

For a long time a brand new Hackathon Radar account landed on the same thing a returning power user sees: the full database, thousands of events, no context. Technically everything was available. In practice, a first-timer had no idea where to start.

The instinct is to remove friction — fewer clicks, fewer questions, straight to the product. But a case study I kept coming back to (Built for Mars, on why adding friction lifted their conversion) argued the opposite: a few well-placed questions before the value moment can make people more invested, not less. So we built a short, deliberate setup flow. Here is what we learned building it.

Ask before you show, not after

The single most useful thing we do now is ask one honest question up front: what brings you here? Someone looking to build in a hackathon, someone who wants to judge, and a company scouting events to sponsor want completely different things from us. Asking first lets every screen after that speak to the right person.

The temptation was to make this optional or to let people skip straight in. We learned that the moment a step becomes obviously skippable, it stops feeling like part of the product and starts feeling like a form. So we kept the steps as a genuine part of the experience — with a quiet "skip for now" for the people who really want it — rather than a modal you dismiss.

The payoff has to be real

A setup flow that just collects preferences is a chore. Ours earns its keep by ending on something concrete: a short, hand-picked shortlist of hackathons that actually match what you told us, ready to save to your radar. You do the tiny bit of work, and you immediately get something back.

That reframes the whole thing. You are not "filling in your profile." You are tuning a tool and watching it respond.

Defaults beat blank slates

Every question we ask has a sensible starting point. A couple of popular topics come pre-selected. The format defaults to "both, show me everything," which we mark as recommended, because keeping your options open genuinely surfaces the most events. Where you can narrow by region or city, "anywhere" is the default.

People are far happier adjusting a good default than staring at an empty set of choices. A blank multi-select is a small decision you have forced onto someone who just arrived.

Show people the size of the world

When you pick a location, we show a running count of how many hackathons we typically see there in a year — worldwide, then narrowing as you focus. It is a small touch, but it does two jobs: it reassures you there is real depth here, and it makes the act of narrowing feel like a choice with visible consequences rather than a shot in the dark.

We also learned to flag which topics are hot right now, straight from live event volume. It nudges without dictating.

Plan for the empty case

The uncomfortable truth of any "here's what matches you" feature is that sometimes nothing matches — a narrow topic, a small city, this exact week. If you only design the happy path, those users hit a wall.

So the shortlist quietly widens its net when a strict match comes up empty, and if there is genuinely nothing live, we say so plainly and offer to alert you the moment something lands. An empty result should still feel like the product working, not breaking.

One shape, three destinations

Rather than build three separate flows, we built one shape — a few tailored questions, then a payoff — and changed what the payoff is per person. Builders get events to enter and save. Judges get opportunities to weigh in on, filtered to events that have not started yet. Sponsors get a shortlist matched to their brand, saved as an ongoing watch. Same rhythm, three different endings.

The unglamorous half

A surprising amount of the work was invisible: making sure existing members never get dragged through a flow meant for newcomers, making sure finishing actually lands you in the app cleanly, making sure the little "here's a taste" previews cannot be abused to pull data for free. None of it shows up on screen. All of it is the difference between a demo and something you can ship to real people.

The takeaway

Friction is not the enemy — pointless friction is. A few deliberate steps that teach the product something about you, and immediately hand you something useful in return, beat dropping someone cold into a wall of data. If you are building a first-run experience, resist the urge to get out of the way entirely. Ask the one question that lets everything after it be relevant, and make the last step pay for the first.