A plan to make the new customer template experience deliver the promise our own signup wizard makes. Grounded in 251,618 real notes, live product walkthrough evidence, and PostHog baselines.
ProposalCarlos McCoyAttaches to the template workstream14 Jul 2026
Templates are the signup pitch. The product doesn't keep it.
"We'll customize templates and features for your profession."Subtitle of the signup wizard's practice step, shown to every new customer. Screenshot below is from a fresh production signup on 14 July.
Here is what that customization amounts to for a new Psychology practice. The first visit to Templates opens with a count of 8,990 resources, a wall of roughly 60 pre-seeded templates, and below the fold, a community marketplace. There is no start here, no hierarchy, and no path.
First visit to Templates, minutes after signup. Every seeded card reads "Alex Rivera · Edited 14 Jul 2026". The brand new user appears to have authored 60 templates they have never seen. Note the third row: a template titled "SOAP Note - don't publish yet" ships in the default set.
~3.6%of registered mental health workspaces are active on templates (2,371 of 66,134)
40%of new signups preview a template in their first 60 days. The traffic is already there
15%create a template
4.8%use template import, against 17.6% who say they're switching platforms
Sources: production usage analysis by Tim, 13 Jul 2026 (251,618 template-linked notes over ~10 weeks); PostHog, new signups over the last 60 days (n=4,681). Adoption rates are share of signups doing the action at least once.
What practitioners actually use
The usage data is unusually decisive.
SOAP is the universal note
Ranked #1 or #2 in every one of the seven profession groups. DAP is the clear second. Yet the Psychology default set contains no plain SOAP note, and five professions lack it entirely.
The same five admin documents travel together everywhere
Notice of Privacy Practices, credit card authorization, telehealth consent, release of information, financial responsibility. They appear in every group's top 20, always as a cluster. That is a packet, not five separate templates.
Nobody uses library templates directly
All 140 top-20 rows across all groups are workspace-saved custom copies. Zero direct from-library uses. Practitioners adopt templates by making them their own.
Mental health is half the volume
49.3% of all template-linked notes, and the only group where scored assessments (GAD-7, PHQ-9) are mainstream, at 340+ workspaces each.
Signatures are near universal
51 to 74% of form-notes carry a signature field in every group. Directly relevant to the sign-and-complete work in flight.
Against that, the current seeding is inverted: 64% of default slots are intakes, notes are an afterthought, and the packs are noisy. Dietetics, Functional Medicine and Health Coach receive identical copy-pasted sets. Personal Training ships 18 templates and not one is a note. The full gap analysis and the config fix live in the default templates proposal.
What a new customer hits today
Live production walkthrough, fresh Psychology workspace, 14 July. Five defects, each screenshotted.
False provenance
Seeded defaults are labeled "Created by you and your team", attributed to the user, edited today. It reads as a bug, not a gift. And the one structural element, a "Default" Intake folder that the first-run coach mark points at, ships with 0 files while the seeded intakes sit loose outside it.
The universal template is missing, then duplicated six times
No plain SOAP note in the Psychology defaults. Searching community returns six or more near-identical SOAP notes with no canonical pick.
Point of use dead-ends
The note editor's own placeholder says "choose a template", but the suggested actions are Basic blocks and Previous notes, which a new user has none of. Typing /soap returns nothing. The real path is five steps through an unlabeled icon into a full screen browse of 9,010 resources.
Import can't carry the switcher journey
PDF only, 10MB, one file at a time. A switcher moving a practice has dozens of forms.
Import silently drops signature fields
The AI conversion is genuinely impressive: nine of nine fields extracted with correct types. But the signature line vanished with no warning. A switcher who doesn't notice ships a consent form clients can't sign.
Searching "soap" from the note flow. The workspace offers "SOAP Note - don't publish yet"; the community offers six competing SOAP notes. Nothing indicates which one to trust.The first note. The placeholder says "choose a template". The buttons don't.Import conversion of a test intake PDF. Field types inferred correctly, helper text auto-written. The signature and date line from the source PDF is simply gone.
Full annotated walkthrough with 39 screenshots: vault → 06-Agent-Work/template-experience-walkthrough-2026-07-14/.
The plan
Four moves, one story: your practice's paperwork, ready on arrival. Each moment is clickable in the prototype.
1 · A curated starter set of ~10, honestly framed
Replace the 60-template pile with what the data says gets used: SOAP, DAP and a progress note, the five-document new client packet, and GAD-7 + PHQ-9 for mental health. Framed as "your starter set for Psychology, yours to edit", not fake-authored by the user. Since all real usage is customized copies, defaults should invite editing.
An early fork for the 17.6% who are switching: multi-file upload, DOCX and PDF, and a conversion review step that names what was found and what wasn't. Signature detection turns the current silent failure into a one-click fix, and ties directly into sign-and-complete.
The note editor's suggested actions become the starter notes: SOAP, DAP, progress, one click. Slash search covers workspace templates, so /soap works. Smallest engineering ask on the list, placed at the exact moment of need.
Longer term: the Templates page stops being a marketplace with your files on top. It becomes Your documentation (the starter set plus what you've made), the New client packet as a first-class bundle you can send as one action, and Explore for the community. The packet concept comes straight from the data: those five documents already travel together in every vertical.
Phase 2, AI personalization. The starter set is deterministic and ships without model risk. Once live, AI tailors it: practice name and branding pre-filled, fields adjusted to services and modality, and import conversion quality keeps improving. The baseline works without it; the AI layer makes it feel personal.
Deliberately not in scope
No new signup wizard steps (conversion-sensitive, recently slimmed), no setup-dashboard checklist changes (V3 just shipped), no community marketplace redesign. The community stays where it is, one level down.
Baselines and goals
Measured on new-signup cohorts, first 60 days. Baselines are verified PostHog adoption rates; goals are proposals to pressure-test.
Metric (share of new signups)
Baseline
Goal
Driven by
Preview a template
40%
55%
Moments 1, 3
Customize a template (edit or duplicate)
19%
30%
Moments 1, 4
Create a template
15%
18%
Moment 3
Import a template
4.8%
9%
Moment 2 (≈ half of switchers, up from ~1 in 4)
Note created from a template, within 7 days
n/a*
instrument, then +50%
All four
*The instrumentation ask. PostHog cannot see the core activation moment today. The create note event carries no template property, and the events that should capture selection (use template, choose template) are dead, 25 events total in 60 days. Template-linked notes are only measurable in the production database. One event or property on note creation makes the North Star trackable.
Downstream, the hypothesis is that early template activation lifts week-4 retention and trial conversion. That link is correlational until we can segment on the instrumented event, and it is labeled as such in any readout.
Sequencing
Ordered by cost. The first two need no design cycle.
