The Onboarding Game

Phewwwww I read through the challenges some onboarders go through and I was like “Ohh IB you’re not a bad teacher after all as people go through the same challenges too!”, It was relieving to see that the onboarding game can be a bit challenging sometimes and not just for me but for many onboarders too.

I’m fairly new in the game so I cannot say I have lots of experience but with the few people that I have been able to onboard on Hive, all I can say is that another name for onboarding people on Hive should be called PATIENCE, if you aren’t patient it might be a bit challenging for you to onboard people.

_{Image by @doze}

Hive is a wonderful place to be in, for me it’s a big part of my everyday activity, you can’t be close to me and don’t have a fair share of my Hive rambles☺️. I talk about Hive with so much enthusiasm that anyone listening would want to jump right into it but sadly a lot of people don’t make it to enjoying Hive eventually.

The first thing I let people understand before onboarding them is that you cannot “blow” overnight on Hive, you have to put in the work and trust humans to be humans they get discouraged without even trying.

I haven’t onboarded a lot of people but for the few that I have onboarded I have had to learn a vital lesson and that lesson is; “Patience”.

Teaching “my newbies” how to navigate Hive virtually is no easy feat, There were times I had contemplated leaving them alone to learn how things work around here by themselves, but then again I think about how far they’ve come, and leaving them hanging was not the best option.

If we look at it realistically we will understand that waking up one morning and explaining to Harry(newbie) that there’s something called web3 and it’s way different from the conventional Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok that Harry has known since he knew about social media. For me guiding a newbie on Hive is like holding a child’s hand to guide him or her to write strokes and curves to arrive at the alphabet, as a lot of people have so many ‘Firsts’ here.

While guiding this child, will he or she magically write the Alphabet in no time? No, will he or she magically begin to string the alphabet together to form words in no time? No, you’d have to go through the process over and over again until the child begins to get it. The same is applicable to a newbie you are trying to teach Hive.

One of the challenges I face as an onboarder is “my newbies” wanting to give up when they get overwhelmed with everything happening here, I really can’t blame them as it can be a lot to process at times. I have been here for a year plus and I have such moments too, Moments when I get really frustrated, maybe when the nodes are down and I need to make a community prompt before it expires or I need to make a post before my phone goes off but the network is terrible. So when newbies express their frustrations what I do is to tell them to take a break and continue when they are in the right frame of mind.

Giving “my newbies” accolades is one thing I do a lot, I learnt that from my onboarder @samostically. There were times when Samuel would come out of the blues and tell me how proud he was of my achievements on Hive, he’d make a very long voice note praising me and all I would do was smile, get motivated, and double my effort. Whenever I see my newbies drop a thoughtful post or achieve one milestone or the other here, I don’t fail to praise them and if I praise you, you’re finished!😂😂

I have also learnt to encourage “my newbies” to get involved in communities both on chain and off chain, when they become active in these communities, they begin to make friends and you know what friends do? They come to your post and drop lovely comments and these comments strike a chord in you and deep down you feel loved, you feel part of the community and you just have to stick around without anyone pressuring you😃

Sharing my Hive experience is one tactic I have come to adopt that keeps the whole onboarding process less rocky.
It’s one thing to go through a problem alone and it’s another to hear someone’s story of how they solve this same problem. Whenever “my newbie” comes whining about facing some challenges on Hive I immediately recount my past experience on a similar challenge and this helps to calm their nerves as they believe they too can get past it like I did and this solves the problem.

Onboarding people at the beginning might not be easy but it gets better with time.

_{All images are mine except otherwise stated.}

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