Sign up for almost any platform aimed at investors or founders and the first thing you're asked is your name, role, firm, jurisdiction, check size, AUM, stage focus, industry, accredited status, country of residence, phone number, and a bio paragraph.
You haven't even opened the product yet.
Where the friction came from
Most fundraising platforms inherited their onboarding flows from compliance-heavy ancestors. Funds, broker-dealers, and reg-D platforms have real reasons to ask twenty questions: they're regulated, they need accreditation proof, they handle money.
A modern platform that doesn't handle money has none of those reasons, but it kept the form anyway. Habit, mostly. The product team treats onboarding as "the thing where we learn about the user" instead of "the thing the user has to get through to start." That's the wrong framing.
A founder filling out a twelve-field investor profile gets nothing in return for the next ten minutes. They lose ten minutes. The platform gains data it could have inferred or asked for later.
What good onboarding actually does
Good onboarding asks the smallest possible question to get the user to the next moment of value. For most marketplaces, that's "tell me who you are in a sentence, or paste a LinkedIn URL, or upload a resume." Three modes, all of them low-effort, all of them parse to the same structured profile.
LLMs make this trivial. A paste of a LinkedIn "About" section produces a usable profile in under a second. A resume PDF does the same. The platform asks one question; the user gives one answer; the structured fields populate themselves.
If your onboarding flow takes longer than ninety seconds, the product is fighting the user before it has had a chance to help them.
The objection, and why it's wrong
The standard pushback is "but we need that data for matching / compliance / personalization." Two answers.
First: most of the data isn't actually used in matching. Look at what your platform actually filters on. It's usually four or five fields. Ask for those. The rest is collected because it's traditional, not because it's load-bearing.
Second: data you ask for upfront is data the user lies about or skips. Data you infer from real activity is more accurate. A founder's check-size preference is more reliably revealed by what they click than by what they typed in a dropdown on day one.
What it means
Audit your onboarding form. Count the fields. Cross out everything that doesn't change what the user sees in the next screen. Cross out anything that an LLM could extract from a paste or a file. What's left should be three to five questions, and most of those should be optional.
Then time the flow. End-to-end, click-through, on a phone. Under ninety seconds, or you've left value on the table.