GitLab's Contributor Success team addressed challenges faced by first-time open source contributors. Initial studies revealed confusion, overwhelming experiences, and difficulty finding help. Using GitLab's tools, they created a semi-automated onboarding solution connecting newcomers with maintainers. An issue template with a checklist streamlined the process, including access to community forks. Comment templates ensured consistent messaging, synced using the GraphQL API. Webhooks expedited the onboarding issue creation, reducing wait times from minutes to seconds. Automation and GLQL views improved issue tracking and triage efficiency. Project mirroring made the README more accessible, clarifying the onboarding process. These improvements doubled the number of contributors, reduced response times, and resulted in a 100% success rate in a follow-up study. They also created a contributor recognition hub, and shared their approach with other open source projects.