In case anyone is trying to create a similar "onboarding" effect with limited apps until the user completes certain tasks, the way I did this was by creating a role called 'Onboarding'. I hid all tables and only showed one button on the dashboard. The user is then taken to a new form with steps. The user is greeted with an embedded welcome video, and then required to fill in information on the next couple steps. I then created a button that sends the user to a new page (via code page), with a spinning circle and percentage that gradually increases. In the background, since the record was updated, an API is running that changes their permissions. Once the percentage reaches 100%, pipelines has changed their permissions to 'Participant' and the user can now see all tables and a new dashboard. I utilized magic buttons app to construct the button/ code page and just tweaked it slightly to my liking.
Hope this helps someone down the road!