How to Write a Getting Started Guide

Pick the first moment the product does something useful, work backwards to the shortest path to it, and delete everything else. One outcome, one path, one next step.

Last updated August 2026

By the time you finish you will have a getting started guide that takes a brand new user to one genuinely useful outcome by the shortest available path, with every optional step removed and a single next step at the end. The hard part is choosing the outcome; everything after that is deletion.

Before you start

Identify the first moment your product does something a new user would care about. Not the moment setup finishes - the moment they see a result. For a documentation tool that is a published page; for an analytics tool it is a chart with their own data in it.

Get a genuinely empty account to write against. Your account has the integrations connected, the sample project created and the permissions granted, and every one of those is a step your reader has to perform and you can no longer see.

Steps

Name the outcome in the title and the first sentence.
"Publish your first help page in ten minutes" tells a reader what they get and what it costs. "Getting started" tells them nothing and competes with every other product's page of the same name.
Work backwards from the outcome to the minimum path.
List every action strictly required to reach it. Anything the outcome does not depend on is not part of this guide, however useful it is.
Cut every optional step, then cut the tempting ones.
Inviting teammates, configuring notifications, connecting the second integration, renaming things. Each is a separate article, linked from the end.
Begin where the reader actually is.
Immediately after signing up, on an empty account, with nothing installed. Do not document the signup form itself; document the first screen after it.
Provide the input rather than asking for it.
Sample data, a copy-and-paste command, a suggested project name. A new user pausing to invent a value is a new user who has left the page to think about something else.
Show what success looks like at each milestone.
The expected output, the state of the screen, the email that arrives. A reader with no mental model of the product cannot tell a working state from a broken one without being told.
Handle "nothing happened" inline.
The most common failure in onboarding is silence: a job queued, a webhook not fired, a page that takes a minute. Say how long to wait and what to check, at the step where it happens.
State the time it takes, and be right.
Readers budget against the number. A guide claiming five minutes and taking twenty costs more trust than one that says twenty honestly.
End with exactly one next step.
The single most valuable thing to do second. A list of eight links at the end of onboarding is a decision the reader is not equipped to make yet.
Test it on someone who has never used the product, without helping.
Sit behind them and write down every hesitation. Any sentence you find yourself explaining out loud is a sentence that needs rewriting, and the temptation to help is the whole reason this test works.

A first-run path narrowing from many possible actions to the one that delivers the first result.

A getting-started guide has one job: the first real outcome, not a tour.

Common mistakes

Documenting the signup form. Nobody searches for help creating an account, and a guide that opens with three steps of registration spends its most valuable screen space on the one part that needed no help.

Turning it into a tour. A walk through every menu item delays the outcome past the point where a new user is still invested. Tours belong after the first success, not before it.

Assuming installed tooling. Command-line quickstarts that assume a runtime, a package manager and credentials already configured fail at step one for exactly the audience they were written for.

Offering multiple paths. Choosing between three setup options is work, and a new user has no basis for the choice. Pick the one that works for most people, and link the alternatives at the end.

Ending without a visible result. A guide that finishes with configuration complete and nothing to look at leaves the reader unsure whether any of it worked.

When this stops scaling

A getting started guide is a single page, so it never fails on volume. It fails on change, and it is the page most exposed to it.

Onboarding is the part of a product teams alter most often, and each alteration - a moved button, a new step, a changed default, a redesigned empty state - invalidates the page that has the most first-time readers and the least tolerance for being wrong. A stale advanced article annoys somebody who already trusts the product. A stale getting started guide is the first thing a new user sees, and they conclude that the documentation cannot be relied on before they have reached any value at all.

The multiplier is surfaces. One guide becomes four the moment you support a web app, a CLI, a mobile client and a self-hosted install, and each changes on its own schedule. Past two surfaces with monthly onboarding changes, keeping them all true by hand needs someone whose job it is. Tying the page to the code it describes, so a merged change to the onboarding flow flags the guide for review, is the approach SupportPages takes. For a single product surface, re-walking the guide yourself each quarter is enough.