👋 Hey, Sahil here - welcome to today’s edition of Venture Curator, where we break down how great startups grow, how top investors think, and what’s shaping the future of tech.
P.S. Get access to 100+ startup & VC resources, investor databases, fundraising templates, 150+ premium archive posts and exclusive startup research - all in one place.
FROM OUR PARTNER - SEMRUSH ONE
Your customers are searching on Google AND ChatGPT. Can they find you on both?
Search has changed. Ranking on Google still matters, but buyers are also asking AI tools which products to use, which companies to trust, and how different options compare.
Semrush One brings both sides into one place. You can track your Google rankings and AI mentions, see the prompts driving demand, compare your visibility against competitors, and find gaps you can actually act on.
It monitors 239M+ relevant LLM prompts globally, alongside the SEO data Semrush is already known for.
Partnership With Us
Get your product in front of an audience of 125,000+ - Our newsletter is read by thousands of tech professionals, founders, investors and managers worldwide. Get in touch today.
📜 DEEP DIVE
How fast should your AI product show value? Inside the onboarding of 30 AI products
Recently, we pulled apart the homepages of 34 funded AI startups to see what gets a visitor to click. A lot of you wrote back with the same follow-up question: fine, they clicked, now what? Because the signup is where most founders stop measuring, and it’s where most of the loss actually happens.
Here’s the shape of it. Someone lands on your page, likes it, and clicks “Start for free.” Then they hit an email verification screen, four questions about their role and company, a pricing table, and finally a blank workspace with a button that says “New project.” You count them as a signup. They never come back.
RevenueCat’s 2026 data says 55% of three-day trial cancellations happen on day zero, the same day the person signed up. And in their data, AI apps churn 30% faster than everything else, even though they earn 41% more per paying user. The product isn’t the problem. The first ten minutes are.
So I did for onboarding what I did for landing pages. I went through the documented signup flows of 30 self-serve AI products, from Perplexity and Lovable to Clay, Synthesia and Cursor, and logged what stands between a new user and their first real output: whether you can try it before creating an account, how many questions it asks, whether a card is required, whether pricing shows up before you’ve seen anything, and roughly how many minutes it takes to get to a result. Then I did the same for the emails that follow, across 11 documented sequences.
The numbers split the 30 products into two clear groups, and the gap between them is bigger than most founders think.
Here’s what we’re covering:
How long does it actually take to get a first result at 30 AI products, and where is the line that separates the fast ones?
What do the fast products do differently, and what do the slow ones put in the way?
How many questions are too many before the product? (The corpus has a clear answer.)
Has “free forever” beaten the free trial, and what does the RevenueCat data say about the trade-off?
What does the first screen look like at the products that activate well?
When do the onboarding emails actually arrive, and where’s the gap that loses people?
The first-session template: six steps, from try-before-signup to the first upgrade prompt
The seven-day email sequence: every email, the day it sends, and what it does
The full corpus: all 30 products, with what each one asks and gives