We recently launched our company/product (https://vectara.com) a few weeks ago. Just as background is a new neural search SaaS product (think a bit like Elasticsearch or Algolia I guess, but with natural language understanding). We know we have a lot of work to make our UI/UX in the administrative console better, but we've received really good feedback from users that do enough onboarding to reach the "aha" moment of doing a search (and seeing that it provides very good relevancy for text without any configuration).

Looking at our adoption funnel, we've had some discussions on how to get users to that "aha" moment faster and more reliably. There are a variety of tools that provide in-product walkthroughs, which is one idea. However, the prevailing thought that has emerged from past dev-tools product/design teams I've been on is that console walkthroughs "are a crutch for bad UX" (but maybe a crutch is needed for us right now), and not particularly helpful for products where the main ongoing usage is outside of the product like an API-focused SaaS product. Instead, the prevailing discussion has always led to “helpful post-registration trickle e-mails to encourage onboarding, good in-console help links/hover-over, good documentation, and example code” is a better use of time.

I realize there’s no single/correct answer here and we’ll likely need to tackle/improve a variety of facets. But as a largely technical community here, what are your thoughts on the best and most helpful ways to onboard to an API-first product?