I work on FightNome, so this post is about our own app.
FightNome is a pad-work trainer for boxing, Muay Thai, kickboxing and MMA. A recorded voice calls strikes on the beat of the music and you throw them on a bag, on pads or in the air. The app has a fair amount of depth: a combo editor, sections and rounds, tempo, conditioning between rounds. None of that helps someone who just installed it and wants to hit something tonight.
So onboarding doesn't explain the features. It asks a few questions and hands back workouts that are ready to play.
Five questions
The questions are goal, level, discipline, stance and music style. Each one exists because it changes what the coach says or how the session is put together.
Discipline is the obvious one. A boxing session and a Muay Thai session shouldn't call the same strikes, and a Muay Thai session that never says "teep" or "knee" would feel wrong in the first minute.
Stance matters more than I expected. Kicks, elbows and knees are called by name with lead or rear, so the app needs to know which side is which before the first call. Getting that wrong is the kind of thing a user notices right away and doesn't forgive.
Level and goal decide how much is asked of you. They're also where vocabulary comes in. Pad numbers (1 jab, 2 cross, 3 lead hook and so on) are normal in a lot of gyms, but to a beginner "one, two, three" means nothing. In FightNome only the amateur-fighter persona hears numbers. Everyone else hears the names of the strikes.
Music style is the soft one. It doesn't change the technique, but it's part of whether the session feels like yours.
What comes out
From those answers the app builds four starter workouts, with names like First Fight, Sharp Fundamentals and React & Fire. They're normal workouts, the same kind you'd build yourself in the editor: sections, rounds, rests, and conditioning parts like rope, shadow work and bodyweight between striking rounds. Nothing about them is a special tutorial mode.
That was a deliberate choice. If the starters were a separate thing, people would have to learn the real app later anyway. Because they're regular workouts, opening one and changing a combo is also the moment you learn how the editor works.
Why not a tour
A tour would have to show screens, and the main point of the app is that you don't look at the screen during a round. The phone goes in a pocket or a waistband and the voice runs the session. Explaining that with screenshots felt backwards. What actually explains it is pressing play and hearing the first round.
Every workout shows its full plan before you start (every section, every round, every rest), so that preview does the job a tour would do, just for the session you're about to do.
The part I keep going back and forth on
The paywall comes after onboarding, and the app doesn't have a free tier. That means the questions have to be worth answering before anyone has heard a single call. Five questions is about where I think patience runs out, but I don't have a clean way to test that without guessing.
If you've built an onboarding flow that generates content instead of explaining it, I'd like to hear how many questions you ended up with and which one you cut.
If you want to try it
FightNome is on the App Store (iOS 26 and up) and Google Play. It's a paid subscription, and only the yearly plan has a 3-day trial. More at https://fightnome.app.
I used AI assistance to draft this post and edited it myself.
