I turned a sales-led, 7-step merchant onboarding that took 2–4 weeks and a room full of people into a self-service flow a merchant can start in minutes.

Role Co-Founder & Head of Product Design — led research, product strategy, UX and rollout
Company Techrar — SaaS that lets food and retail brands launch their own subscription apps
Team [ADD: e.g. Sales, Customer Success, 2 engineers, PM]
Timeline [ADD: start – launch]
Platform Web signup, merchant dashboard, native iOS/Android apps
Outcome Onboarding time from 2–4 weeks toward 5–10 minutes for self-serve merchants [ADD: final measured number]

Context

Onboarding was Techrar’s growth ceiling: every new merchant needed a salesperson, an account manager and the tech team before they could sell a single subscription.

Techrar gives restaurants, meal-prep and retail brands their own branded subscription app, a dashboard to run plans and deliveries, and payments through MyFatoorah. We had shipped 40+ native apps this way. But each one was hand-built through a process owned by people, not the product — so the number of merchants we could onboard was capped by headcount, not demand.

The problem

The old onboarding was a 7-step relay across Sales, Account Management, Finance, Design and Engineering, and every handoff was a place to stall.

The original Techrar onboarding process

The original Techrar onboarding process

The original Techrar onboarding process

The original onboarding process: two decision loops, a contract and kick-off meeting, then five more manual steps before handover.

Our internal playbook documented it step by step:

  1. Offer — Sales emails an offer (English and Arabic templates) plus an onboarding form and an information sheet to fill.
  2. Contract — the merchant signs a SaaS contract by email.
  3. Setup fee — Finance sends an invoice; the merchant pays by bank transfer and emails back a receipt.
  4. Kick-off meeting — booked by calendar link; the account manager walks through the information sheet to collect integrations, migration data and requests.
  5. App assets — the team designs app previews in Figma, requests a TestFlight build, and the merchant signs a project-acceptance form on DocuSign.
  6. Training and support — run largely through WhatsApp groups, with guides, videos and a points-upload template.