The Onboarding Trap

I watched the operator demo their onboarding flow with visible pride.

KYC verification in under two minutes. First deposit in three taps. Bonus credited instantly. The happy path was beautiful -- fast, frictionless, exactly what every product team dreams of building.

Then I asked what happened when a player's ID verification failed.

The room got quiet.

The Unhappy Path

When KYC failed -- which happened roughly 18% of the time across their markets -- the player entered a limbo state. The system sent an automated email asking them to resubmit documents. That email had a 22% open rate. Of those who opened it, fewer than half completed the resubmission.

The rest simply vanished. Not because they were fraudulent. Because the process made it easier to leave than to try again.

The operator was spending $85 per acquired player on marketing. Nearly one in five of those players were hitting a wall in onboarding and walking away. The math was brutal: over $300,000 per quarter in acquisition spend was being funneled directly into an experience designed to lose people.

What I Witnessed

The team had metrics for every step of the happy path. Conversion rates, time-to-deposit, first-bet latency. All world-class.

They had almost no visibility into the failure paths. No tracking on resubmission rates. No measurement of how long players waited in the verification queue. No data on how many players who failed KYC ever came back.

The trap wasn't the onboarding itself. It was the assumption that optimizing the best case was the same as optimizing the whole experience.