Test your sign-up and onboarding flow with AI personas
Most people who give up on a product give up in the first few minutes: finding sign-up, creating an account, setting up, reaching the first moment it is useful. Meerkat sends AI personas through that journey in a real browser and shows you where each one got stuck.
Last updated 17 September 2026
What a run covers
The onboarding template has four steps, which you can edit or replace with your own words:
- Find sign-up: can a stranger landing on your site find where to start?
- Create account: does the form explain what it wants, and what went wrong when it rejects something?
- Complete setup: do the setup screens make sense to someone who has never seen the product?
- Reach first value: does the persona get to the thing the product is for, or stall before it?
A shorter sign-up template stops at the first signed-in screen.
Problems it tends to find
- Password rules revealed only after a failed attempt.
- Setup questions that use the team's internal words.
- An empty dashboard with no obvious first action.
- A required step hidden behind a link that doesn't look like one.
- A phone layout where the continue button is off screen.
Different people, same flow
Run the same task with a First-timer on a phone, an Everyday user, and a Busy power user. A step one of them breezes through and another abandons is exactly the kind of problem that stays invisible to the team that built it. Each persona has a patience limit and says when it would have left, then carries on so you still see the rest of the flow.
Before you run it
- Use staging. Personas create real accounts.
- Email or SMS codes stop a persona. It can't receive them; use a test environment that skips verification, or sign in yourself first and hand over the browser.
- Sign-in through Google or another domain is out of reach. Personas stay on your site.
- Set a limit with "Don't go past", for example before connecting a payment method, and stopping there counts as success.
After a fix, run it again: the report compares with the previous run and says which problems are gone and which are still there. For checkout flows, see testing checkout.
Try it on your own product
Sign up free and you get 10,000 credits, plus 3,000 more every month. A persona run usually uses about 1,000. Or read an example report first: it is a real, unedited run of Meerkat against its own website.