Client: Desklight (fictional) · Format: 4-Email Onboarding Sequence · Type: Spec Sample
Desklight is a project management tool for small creative teams — agencies, studios, and startups with 5–30 people. This sequence is designed to convert free trial users to the paid Team plan ($12/person/month). Voice: warm, direct, human — the opposite of automated marketing.
Email 1 of 4
Subject: You’re in. Here’s the only thing you need to do today.
Trigger: Immediate (account creation) · Day 0
Hey [First Name],
Welcome to Desklight. You just signed up, which means one of two things: either your last project management tool finally broke your spirit, or someone on your team sent you a link with a message like “please, for the love of god, can we try this.”
Either way, you’re here. And we’re going to keep this simple.
Here’s the only thing I’d ask you to do today: create one project. Just one. Give it a name, drag in a few tasks, and invite somebody from your team.
That’s it. No 47-step onboarding wizard. No mandatory webinar. No “quick start guide” that’s 26 pages long.
Desklight was built for teams that would rather do the work than organize the work. So we made the organizing part feel like less of a job.
If you get stuck, reply to this email. It comes to me — Sarah, not a bot — and I’ll help you sort it out.
Sarah
Co-founder, Desklight
Email 2 of 4
Subject: The feature nobody asks about (but everybody uses)
Trigger: 3 days after signup · Day 3
Hey [First Name],
Three days in. By now you’ve probably noticed that Desklight doesn’t look like most project management tools. No Gantt charts. No resource allocation dashboards. No “workflow automation engine.”
But there’s one feature I want to point you toward, because it’s the one that quietly changes how your team communicates.
It’s called Notes.
(I know. Groundbreaking name.)
Here’s what it actually is: a shared space attached to every project where your team can think out loud. Not in a comment thread buried under a task. Not in a Slack channel that moves too fast to find anything. Just a clean, persistent page where you can write down what matters.
One of our early users — a 12-person design studio in Portland — told us that Notes replaced their Monday status meetings. Their creative director started posting a weekly update there instead. People read it on their own time, added their own context, and by Tuesday morning, everyone was aligned without sitting in a room pretending to pay attention for an hour.
That’s not what we designed Notes for. But that’s what happens when you give smart people a simple tool and stay out of their way.
Try it: open any project, click Notes in the sidebar, and write something. It doesn’t have to be polished. The best ones aren’t.
Sarah
Co-founder, Desklight
Email 3 of 4
Subject: How a 6-person team stopped losing projects in their inbox
Trigger: 7 days after signup · Day 7
Hey [First Name],
I want to tell you about Arlo & Co.
They’re a small branding agency in Austin — six people, a dog named Brisket, and more client work than they could keep straight. When they came to Desklight last year, they were managing projects across a combination of email threads, a shared Google Drive folder called “CURRENT WORK (USE THIS ONE),” and a whiteboard that nobody updated.
Sound familiar?
Within two weeks, they’d moved everything over. Not because we told them to — because the friction was low enough that it just happened. A project here, a task list there. Brisket still can’t use it, but the rest of the team is onboard.
Here’s the part I like: their founder, Marco, told us that the real shift wasn’t organizational. It was emotional. His exact words: “I stopped waking up at 3 a.m. wondering if we’d dropped something.”
That’s what this tool is for. Not productivity metrics. Not velocity tracking. Just the quiet confidence that nothing’s falling through the cracks.
If you haven’t moved a real project into Desklight yet, this is your nudge. Pick the messiest one. The one that lives in six different places. Give it a home.
You might sleep better.
Sarah
Co-founder, Desklight
Email 4 of 4
Subject: Your trial ends in two days. Let’s talk about that.
Trigger: 2 days before trial expiration · Day 12
Hey [First Name],
Your free trial wraps up on [date]. I’m not going to pretend this email isn’t about asking you to pay for Desklight. It is. But I want to be straightforward about what you’re deciding.
If Desklight has made your work easier over the past two weeks — if your team knows where things live now, if you’ve had fewer “wait, who’s handling that?” conversations, if you’ve spent less time managing the work and more time doing it — then it’s worth the money.
If it hasn’t, that’s okay too. Seriously. Not every tool is right for every team, and we’d rather you use something that works than pay for something that doesn’t.
Here’s what happens next:
If you want to keep going: Pick a plan at desklight.com/pricing. The Team plan is $12/person/month and covers everything most small teams need. No annual contract required. You can leave whenever you want.
If you’re not sure: Reply to this email and tell me what’s holding you back. Sometimes it’s a missing feature. Sometimes it’s a budget conversation you haven’t had yet. Sometimes it’s just inertia. Whatever it is, I’d rather help you figure it out than watch you disappear.
If it’s not for you: No hard feelings. Your data stays available for 30 days after your trial ends, so you can export anything you need.
That’s it. No countdown timer. No “limited time offer.” Just a decision whenever you’re ready to make it.
Sarah
Co-founder, Desklight
This is a spec sample — not commissioned work. Desklight is a fictional company. Written by Paul Scott.
Paul Scott 