I'm starting a new series called 🏃‍♂️🕐 First 5 Minutes. I sign up for popular SaaS tools and record myself going through onboarding as a brand new user. Because apparently the best way to market an onboarding consultancy is to publicly judge other people's onboarding. The irony is not lost on me.

First up: Notion.

Their landing page right now is all AI. "Meet the night shift. 24/7 agents that keep the work moving." I was genuinely excited to see how that plays out once I'm in the product.

The signup flow is solid. Smart details like recognizing my email, Slack invite links, and an AI agent with a pre-populated prompt based on my earlier answers. No cold start. That's great.

But I got asked to install the desktop app three times before I'd done a single thing in the product. The onboarding is split across two surfaces that don't know about each other. And the night shift army of AI agents from the landing page? I got one chat agent. The rest of the night shift apparently called in sick.

Notion is a tool I use every day. This isn't a takedown. It's an observation from someone who thinks about onboarding too much, which at this point might be a clinical condition.

Full teardown in the video. 👇