Wouldn’t it be great to be welcomed everywhere like a regular, recognized instantly? Imagine answering only essential questions during onboarding, just as you would be chatting with a friendly concierge at a hotel you love.
The Challenge
No one likes filling out forms over and over again. Yet as product builders we need some context about new users: where they come from, what their interests are, to provide them a truly personal first experience. This is the core challenge for any onboarding.
But above all, we want to respect the users privacy, never using data they didn’t willingly share.
The Solution
Gravatar can not only speed up onboarding and make it effortless, it also allows you to truly personalize it. Gravatar gives you exactly the profile details you need the moment a user shared their email address. With the help of AI tools, it was never easier to instantly personalize your onboarding flow, making each user feel recognized, understood, and welcome from day one.
And what if your user doesn’t have a Gravatar? No worries! Their experience won’t suffer at all —it’s like meeting someone for the first time. All you risked was an API call.
The Prototype Idea
Say you’re building registration for a conference. Typically, attendees slog through long forms, uploading avatars and repeating personal details, to create a conference badge or networking online profile.
But what if a friendly concierge bot simply asked for their email, fetched their Gravatar info automatically, and then asked only about missing details? Registration would become conversational and engaging. The bot could even sprinkle in personal touches using profile details, transforming a dull form into a delightful chat.
The Demo
For the implementation, we used Lovable, along with Supabase and the OpenAi API.
We imagined building a registration flow for a WordCamp event.
First, the user enters their email and confirms it using a verification code. Behind the scenes, we query Gravatar via a Foreign Data Wrapper on Supabase and check what profile details are available. We compare that data with what’s needed to generate a conference badge. From there the friendly concierge bot knows what user information is still missing and understands the user’s context. The goal? A quick, pleasant interaction that ends with a ready-to-print event badge.
(Just to be clear: this is only a demo.
It has glitches and won’t actually register you for any event—fictional or otherwise 😉)
Gravatar For Developers 