A user's first interaction with your product is a make-or-break moment. A smooth, welcoming onboarding process can lead to higher engagement, better retention, and ultimately, a more successful product. But a clunky, manual, or slow onboarding experience can send users running before they've even had a chance to see the value you offer.
The challenge? As you scale, manually managing welcome emails, provisioning accounts, and updating CRMs for every new user becomes impossible. It's slow, prone to error, and inconsistent. The solution is workflow automation, and the engine to power it is trigger.do.
This guide will walk you through how to transform your user onboarding from a manual chore into a seamless, instantaneous, and scalable process using event-driven triggers.
Before we dive into the "how," let's quickly recap the "why." Automating your onboarding workflow isn't just a convenience; it's a strategic advantage.
trigger.do is a platform designed for modern business automation. It operates on a simple, powerful concept: your business logic can be defined as code and initiated by event-driven triggers.
A trigger is simply an event that kicks off a predefined workflow. In the context of onboarding, the "event" is a new user signing up. This event, sent via a simple API call, can trigger a complex, multi-step workflow you've defined once and can reuse forever.
This is the core of Business-as-Code: your critical business processes, like user onboarding, are no longer siloed in various UIs or manual checklists. They are version-controlled, testable, and robust pieces of code ready to be executed on demand.
Let's build a robust onboarding workflow. Imagine that when a new user signs up, we want to perform the following actions:
Here’s how to automate this entire sequence with trigger.do.
First, you'll define a workflow on the trigger.do platform named new-user-onboarding. This workflow will contain the code that executes the four steps listed above. It will be designed to accept a payload of data—specifically, the new user's ID, email, and plan type.
Now for the magic. In your application's backend code, right where the user is created in your database, you add a few lines of code to trigger the workflow. This is where the trigger.do SDK comes in.
Using our TypeScript SDK, the code is clean, simple, and expressive:
import { Do } from '@do-sdk/client';
const client = new Do({ apiKey: process.env.DO_API_KEY });
// This function is called right after a user signs up in your app
async function onboardNewUser(user: { id: string; email: string; }) {
try {
// Trigger the workflow we defined in Step 1
const { workflowRunId } = await client.trigger('new-user-onboarding', {
payload: {
userId: user.id,
email: user.email,
plan: 'premium', // This data comes from your signup form
},
});
console.log(`Workflow ${workflowRunId} triggered successfully.`);
return { success: true, workflowRunId };
} catch (error) {
console.error('Failed to trigger workflow:', error);
return { success: false, error };
}
}
// Example: Trigger the workflow for a new user
onboardNewUser({ id: 'usr_abc123', email: 'jane.doe@example.com' });
Let's break that down:
That's it. Your application's responsibility ends here. It has fired the event. trigger.do takes over and reliably executes every step of the complex onboarding process, even if it involves multiple services and takes several minutes to complete.
This pattern is incredibly powerful and applies to countless scenarios beyond user onboarding:
If you can code it, you can trigger it.
What exactly is a "trigger" in this context?
A trigger is an event that initiates a workflow on the trigger.do platform. It’s most often a secure API trigger, but it can also be a webhook, a scheduled event, or a signal from another service. It's the starting pistol for your automated business process.
How do I secure my trigger endpoints?
Security is paramount. All trigger.do API endpoints are secured by default using API keys. You can create, manage, and revoke keys with specific permissions from your dashboard, ensuring that only authorized applications can initiate your workflows.
Can I pass dynamic data to a triggered workflow?
Absolutely. The payload field allows you to pass any JSON data your workflow needs. This is what makes the automation dynamic and context-aware, allowing you to operate on specific user details, order information, or system events.
A seamless user onboarding process is no longer a luxury—it's a necessity. By leveraging event-driven triggers with trigger.do, you can build robust, scalable, and error-free workflows with just a few lines of code.
Define your business logic once, trigger it from anywhere, and deliver a world-class experience to every single user.
Ready to automate your first workflow? Explore trigger.do and get started today!