Creator Onboarding Checklist: The First Two Weeks in Order

Onboarding a creator rarely fails because somebody was lazy. It fails because several people did useful work in the wrong order, and the useful work had to be redone: chatters writing before the limits existed, a price list built before anyone looked at the library, a payout set up in week three because nobody owned it in week one.

This page is the sequence itself.

What is an onboarding checklist for, and who uses it?

It exists to make the dependencies visible before they bite. The value is not the list of tasks (everyone knows the tasks). It is the column that says what each one blocks.

• One named owner runs the whole thing for the full two weeks and chases the rows they do not own themselves.
• The creator owns the rows only she can answer: limits, prices, access, payout details.
• The manager and chatters work from the artefacts the sequence produces, and start when those artefacts exist, not before.

What does the complete onboarding sequence look like?

Eighteen steps over fourteen days, and the order is the whole point.

#	Step	Owner	Timing	What it blocks	Done
1	Contract signed and countersigned, copy filed	Agency lead	Before day 1	Everything below	[ ]
2	Identity and age verification on file	Agency lead	Before day 1	Account access	[ ]
3	Payout details confirmed and test-verified	Creator	Before day 1	The first payout only	[ ]
4	Account access granted at the level the contract names	Creator	Day 1	Steps 5 to 8	[ ]
5	Second factor moved to a method both sides can reach	Agency lead	Day 1	Any shift cover	[ ]
6	Hard limits written down and signed off	Creator	Day 1	Anyone writing to fans	[ ]
7	Content library inventoried and tagged	Manager	Day 1-2	Price list, first PPV	[ ]
8	Voice guide drafted from the creator’s own messages	Manager	Day 2	Chatters writing unsupervised	[ ]
9	Price list built, floors included	Creator + manager	Day 3	Any pitch at all	[ ]
10	Fan list segmented: whales, active, expired	Manager	Day 3	Win-back, first mass message	[ ]
11	Shift rotation set with evening cover named	Agency lead	Day 4	Going live	[ ]
12	Chatters briefed on limits, voice guide, price list	Manager	Day 4	Going live	[ ]
13	Go live: chatters take the inbox	Chatters	Day 5	Nothing	[ ]
14	Manager reads every thread, same day	Manager	Day 5-7	Unsupervised shifts	[ ]
15	First full evening block covered end to end	Chatters	Day 5-7	A readable baseline	[ ]
16	Reporting connected: every sale attributed to a person and a shift	Agency lead	Day 6	The day 14 review	[ ]
17	Voice guide corrected against real threads	Manager	Day 8-10	Unsupervised shifts	[ ]
18	Price list revised once against what actually sold	Creator + manager	Day 12	Nothing	[ ]

Close the two weeks with a review on day 14: which rows are still open, what the first live week sold, and what changes in the roster because of it.

How do you fill in each column?

• Step stays as written. Rewording it into something vaguer is how a row gets marked done when it is not.
• Owner is a person’s name. Never a team, never a role with two people in it. A row owned by “the agency” is a row owned by nobody.
• Timing is a target, not a promise. Slipping a day is normal; slipping a day on a blocker moves everything under it, which is exactly what the last column is for.
• What it blocks is the only column you must not edit. It is the dependency, and it is what makes this a sequence rather than a to-do list.
• Done means the artefact exists and the owner has seen it. “In progress” is not done, and a half-written voice guide unblocks nothing.

Rows 1, 4, 6, 9 and 11 are the ones to chase on the morning they are due rather than the evening they are late: nothing goes live until all five are closed. The rest block one thing each: row 5 blocks any shift cover, row 8 blocks chatters writing unsupervised. The last column tells you which. A blocker that slips moves everything under it; a row that blocks one thing costs you that one thing.

Three rows produce documents you keep and reuse, and each has a template of its own: the voice guide, the price list and the shift rotation.

Which three mistakes ruin an onboarding?

Going live before rows 6 and 9. Somebody is keen, the account is sitting there, and the first messages go out before the limits and the prices exist. Nothing about that saves time: it converts week two from calibration into cleanup, and the fans who got improvised prices remember them.

Setting overnight cover instead of evening cover. New agencies staff the hours nobody wants and call it coverage. Our data is unambiguous about the shape of the day: the 2am-6am window collapses conversion, evenings maximise it. Row 11 means naming who is in the inbox in the evening, by name, before day 5.

Leaving access half-done. Row 4 granted but row 5 skipped is the most common version. The agency can log in until the second factor sits on a phone nobody on shift can reach. It surfaces at the worst possible moment: a Saturday evening. Both rows or neither, and the levels should match what the contract actually says.

When do you revise the checklist?

After every onboarding, briefly, while the friction is still fresh:

• A row that was never blocking in practice, twice running: move it or drop it.
• A row people kept doing out of order: the dependency is either wrong or unstated.
• A step that only existed in one person’s head and surfaced as a surprise: add it.
• A new platform, a new tool, a new contract clause: onboarding is the first place a change in the agreement becomes real work.