A new member's first five minutes: the three gates, and what to put in them

The most expensive moment in a community is the thirty seconds after someone joins.

They have just done the hard part. They found you, decided you were worth it, and possibly paid. And what most communities show them is a chronological feed of a conversation between people they do not know, about something they missed. So they read four posts, feel like they walked into the wrong room, and close the tab. They do not cancel — that comes in month three — but the relationship was decided here.

Klaas gives you three gates between "joined" and "arrived". They run in a fixed order, and each one is optional.

Gate 1 — the welcome takeover

A full-screen screen, shown once. It can carry a video (uploaded, or embedded from an allowed provider) and formatted text.

It is deliberately hard to dismiss: no close button, no escape key, no clicking the backdrop. The only way out is Continue, which records that they have seen it, and they never see it again.

That is an unusually aggressive pattern and it needs justifying. The justification is that this is the one moment in a member's entire life in your community where you have their complete attention, and it lasts about forty seconds. A dismissible modal is a modal that gets dismissed reflexively, because everyone has been trained by cookie banners to close things without reading them.

What to put in it. Not a feature tour. A 60–90 second video of you, saying three things: what this community is for, what to do first, and where to ask for help. If you cannot record a video, three sentences of text beat a beautifully designed feature grid.

When to skip it. If your community is a free open community with a high signup rate and low intent, a takeover is friction on people who are still deciding. Save it for paid.

One thing to know: "new member" is a rolling seven-day window from when the membership was created. So if you enable a welcome screen today, somebody who joined a fortnight ago will never see it. That is a deliberate trade — the alternative is showing a "welcome!" takeover to a member of two years — but it means turn this on before you launch, not after.

Gate 2 — the introduction

Redirects a new member to a screen with a composer already open, pointed at one channel you choose, and asks them to introduce themselves before they go any further.

This is the highest-leverage gate of the three and the most commonly misused.

Why it works: a member who has posted once posts again. The gap between zero and one is enormous and every gap after it is small. Forcing that first post is the single most effective retention mechanism in community software, and it is not close.

Why it fails: because the prompt is "introduce yourself", and everybody writes the same three lines — name, job, "excited to be here" — and nobody replies, and the new member's first experience of your community is being ignored in public. You have now used your best mechanism to manufacture a small rejection.

What to do instead. Set the channel's prompt to ask for something answerable and specific, and something other members can react to. "What are you working on right now, and what's the bit you're stuck on?" produces a post people can actually help with. Then — this is the part hosts skip — make replying to introductions somebody's actual job. Yours, or a moderator's. An introduction with two replies is a member. An introduction with none is a bounce with extra steps.

When to skip it. If you cannot commit to replying to every introduction for the first few months, do not turn this on. An unanswered forced introduction is worse than no introduction.

Gate 3 — the landing resolver

Once they are through, where do they land?

Klaas lets you answer that separately for four audiences: new members, existing members, logged-in non-members, and logged-out visitors. Each can point at a specific channel or a section of the app.

Most communities never touch this, which means everyone lands on the same feed — the failure I opened with. The version that works:

• New members → a #start-here channel, or the first course. Somewhere with a small number of things and an obvious first action.
• Existing members → the main feed. They know where they are.
• Logged-in non-members → your about or join page. This is someone who has an account and has not joined this community; they are further along than a stranger and should not be treated like one.
• Logged-out visitors → whatever your best public surface is.

One useful behaviour: the resolver only applies at the bare root of your community. Deep links are never hijacked. If somebody clicks a link to a specific post in an email, they get that post — not your onboarding sequence. This sounds obvious and is very commonly got wrong, and it is infuriating when it is.

The questions you ask at the door

Separately from the gates, you decide what a member is asked when they sign up.

Klaas seeds a set of default profile fields, and you can add your own — written answer, multiple choice, or checkbox. Each field has three independent switches:

• Required — they cannot finish signing up without it.
• Ask during sign up — as opposed to something they can fill in later from their profile.
• Display publicly — whether other members can see the answer.

Those being three separate switches is the useful part, because the three most valuable questions have three different shapes. "What do you want to get out of this?" should be asked at signup and shown to nobody but you. "What are you working on?" should be public, because it is what makes the member directory worth browsing. "How did you hear about us?" should be optional, because making it required to buy something is a good way to lose the sale.

The discipline: every required field costs you signups. Ask for the minimum that lets you do your job, and put everything else behind an optional prompt later. A twelve-question signup form produces excellent data about the small number of people who were determined enough to finish it.

If you have set the community to require approval, those answers are what you approve on — and a member waiting for approval sees a banner explaining exactly that on every page, with a button to withdraw the request. Not knowing whether your application went through is its own small misery, and it is avoidable.

Two behaviours worth knowing

Every gate fails open. A missing configuration row, a deleted channel, a hiccup reading the settings — all of them resolve to "do not gate" rather than trapping the member. The worst outcome of a broken onboarding gate should be a member who skipped the welcome video, never a member who cannot get in.

You are exempt from gates 1 and 2. As host, you do not see your own welcome screen or introduction gate, because the alternative is locking yourself out of your own admin panel with your own configuration. The practical consequence: you cannot preview these by looking at them. Use a second account. We removed the Preview buttons from those tabs entirely rather than show you something fabricated — there is a whole post about that habit.

If you only do one thing

Turn on the introduction gate, point it at a channel with a specific question, and answer every single introduction personally for the first three months.

Everything else on this page is optimisation. That one is the product.