Too many issues with onboarding... here is my journey story...

1. At first, activation process gave me 403 forbidden error... turns out they have geo-block on their website for several countries around the world. There are no issues with T1,T2 countries, but weirdly Philippines, India and Japan are blocked while Turkiye, Mexico are allowed. So the block list must be having some unconventional political motivation I guess - lol. [those who are wondering, yes I used a premium VPN from all countries possible!]

2. Anyway, used a VPN to create my account successfully - hmmm... I thought clicking the activation link of Appsumo would create my Biz account with one code. Unfortunately it did not - or did it secretly do it actually? I cant see the Billing page yet, so I donno. We will see later...

3. I wanted to add my second code, but the Billing page kept giving 500 server error in browser console. After a while of juggling, I realised the email verification (which was in my spam folder) had to be completed. Finally, got to the Billing page, but alas! there is no Plan added at all... so the first code never applied (and I already marked the Appsumo Code as redeemed ... grrr!)

4. The Appsumo activation steps say, enter the second code into the field, but there is no field in this page... I am guessing the field is not visible unless the first code activation had completed successfully, and included a Plan item into this billing page. So am I stuck again?
we will see later...

5. Anyway, I thought maybe just, start with a test website and see how the product actually is.... So started creating a new site, chose a template, added a dummy subdomain, and boom! I was kicked out... tried again and again... no matter which template I choose, after adding a subdomain, I get kicked out to homepage, and have to login and start over again. [almost losing my patience!!]

6. OK, let me try the other option (calls itself AI mode... really?), so I created a new site using AI option... The only inputs are fixed dropdown values for specific topics/genres, and the system spurts out random website based on the chosen fields... That does not look like an LLM, maybe just Math.random(). Anyway, the individual sections do have regenerate text and images - so thats definitely AI!

7. Did some more meddling, and finally went back to Billing page for one more try... And voila! The plan section now shows my newly created website, with applied code. I added my second code, and got both a green success toast message, and also a red toast saying the code has expired! (seriously, get a proper QA team guys!)

Finally mission accomplished - Onboarding Completed!

After all this rant, you may be surprised why am I giving 4 tacos? One simple reason - would you pass up getting a slightly worn-out Ducati for a junk price? You get the gist!

Item 5 is a still something I hope they can fix soon. In fact, there are plenty of things to fix and enhance. I don't think I can pitch this to my clients yet.. they are too picky about trivial things.

Webstarts.com has been around since 2006, so its a dinosaur like me.. so I am not worried about its life-time! I hope the founder evolves this product at a faster rate... the last ~20 years seem very slow paced - yes I have ways to go back in time and find out... :-)

The templates are too old fashioned. Modern designs use tailwind/vue css, and if Webstarts does not implement them sooner, it will end up getting less adopted in coming years, and fade away. Probably bring in a cofounder for v2 of Webstarts.

Good luck Adam!