I fix the part where
new users give up.
I'm Bal Sieber. Twenty years across marketing and product, working with teams at Microsoft, Google, Intel, and many more. Today I run OnboardingLoop.
Titles changed. The two disciplines never did.
I spent the first half of my career in marketing as a creative director, and the second half in product, moving from UX strategy through to product management.
Across twenty years and dozens of SaaS products I kept running into the same thing. Good product, bad first impression, users who never reached the part that would have kept them. Nobody owned that gap, so it stayed broken.
OnboardingLoop is what I built to close it. Not another layer of tooltips over a confusing product, but the first run designed properly, so people reach the point where paying makes sense.
Bal has been featured in:
Rebuilding Heatmap from scratch.
No onboarding, and a full week before a new user saw value. It was and still is the hardest activation problem I have ever worked on.
Heatmap's own figures, used with permission.
After
Before1. We tried Appcues, and nothing moved.
Tooltips and a checklist laid over a product that had nothing to show yet. A tour cannot explain something whose value arrives next week.
2. The empty dashboard was the real problem.
So I rebuilt the first run with the onboarding inside the product, and made it worth opening on day two, before the real data landed.
3. We built an immediate activation moment.
We built a feature that scans a new user's website and provides AI insights and immediate value.
The twenty years behind it.
Half in marketing, half in product. Onboarding turns out to be the one job that needs both.
Focus: User-onboarding
- 2026
Founded OnboardingLoop
Packaged twenty years of doing this into a system other teams can buy and run.
Focus: Product
- 2024
Hired to rebuild Heatmap
Brought in to redesign the entire product experience, onboarding included.
- 2018
Product Design Manager, enterprise SaaS
Four years leading teams on software complex enough that thousands of people had to be taught it before they could use it.
Focus: Marketing
- 2014
Director of Digital Creative
A 600-person agency, a 200-person creative department, Starbucks and Pepsi on the roster. Reported to the chief creative officer.
- 2007
Art Director to Creative Director
Joined an interactive studio as the eighteenth hire and left it at 250 people and an acquisition. Campaigns for Google, Microsoft, Intel, BMW and Disney.
- 2004
Canadian Designer of the Year
Won it for my own portfolio site while freelancing for clients across North America and Europe.
The craft underneath the system.
Product design, creative direction and campaign work for brands you already know.
More of it on Dribbble.
People I built things with.
They said it better than I could.
"Bal turns complex workflows into onboarding that feels effortless."
Cory Leger, Director of CRO, Heatmap
From 8.2% to 4.9% churn • 250% growth
Created from two decades of work across teams at
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