For the first month of public availability we ran a small ritual: every weekday at 4pm WIB, three of us watched two new users go through onboarding live, with screen share. No interventions, no leading questions — just notes. After a hundred sessions we have a pile of patterns. Here are the seven that came up most, and what we are doing about them.
1. The AKK setup is the first wall
The Agent Konde Key (AKK) is how Studio authenticates with our APIs. It is currently set up by copy-pasting a token from a settings panel into a CLAUDE.md file. About forty percent of new users either pasted the wrong key, pasted the right key in the wrong file, or never realized they needed to do this step at all.
Fix: A first-launch flow that auto-generates the AKK and writes it to the right files for you. Shipping in v1.1 (early February).
2. Module discoverability is poor
Konde Studio ships with eight modules. Most users find Projects and Agents within five minutes, then stall. Caster, DBarn, and Tunnels stay invisible to roughly half the cohort even after a thirty-minute session, because the sidebar is tucked into a corner and modules render as small icons without labels.
Fix: A proper module launcher (Cmd+K) and labeled sidebar by default. Power users can hide labels later.
3. The Projects canvas is too clever
We are proud of the Projects graph view. New users find it intimidating. Their first reaction is "what am I supposed to do here," not "oh nice, a graph." The fix is not to rip out the graph — it is to ship a list view as the default and let people discover the graph when they have enough projects to care.
Fix: List view default, graph as a toggle. Already in nightly.
4. Agents need a "what now" prompt
Once you spin up an agent, you stare at a blank terminal. Power users know to run claude and start typing. New users do not. Roughly thirty percent of sessions ended without the user ever sending an agent a single message.
Fix: Default to a starter prompt in every new agent session. Something like "Hi! I am Yoona, your Konde agent. What are we working on today?" — friendly, low-stakes, gives users a thread to pull.
5. Tunnels is hidden behind a checkbox
The embedded Cloudflare Tunnel is one of the most-loved features in our private beta. New users almost never find it because it lives behind a checkbox in project settings. The setting is correctly off by default — security — but we never tell users it exists.
Fix: A "Share dev server" button in the project header that turns it on with one click and shows the public URL inline.
6. The first error message kills momentum
When something goes wrong on a fresh install — usually a missing CLI dependency or a port conflict — the error appears as a red toast that disappears in three seconds. By the time the user reads "Error: ENOENT" they have no idea what to do. Five percent of sessions ended at this exact moment.
Fix: Errors stay until dismissed. Each error includes a "What this means" expandable section and a one-click "Fix it for me" button when an automatic remediation exists.
7. People do not read the changelog
We ship updates almost daily. Users discover them by accident. The changelog page is great, but no one navigates there spontaneously.
Fix: A dismissible changelog drawer that opens automatically after every update with a one-line summary. If you do not want it, click don't show again and it is gone.
The principles underneath
Pulling these patterns together, three operating principles fell out:
Default to discoverable. If a feature exists, show it. Hidden features only get discovered by power users, and power users were not your problem.
Default to visible state. When something happens — an agent starts, an error fires, an update lands — the UI should make it obvious. Auto-dismissing toasts are an anti-pattern for new users.
Default to safe defaults that move forward. It is better to ship a starter prompt and let confident users delete it than to show a blank canvas and lose half the cohort. The cost of the default is low; the cost of the blank canvas is the user.
What is shipping when
The seven fixes above are split across v1.1 (early February) and v1.2 (late February). The full list is on the changelog as it lands. If you have your own onboarding pain points to add, we are running another batch of sessions through March — sign up at konde.io/research and we will book you in.
Watching real people use the thing we built was the single highest-leverage hour of the day. Recommend it to every founder reading this.