Activation has been flat for three quarters despite a lot of experiments. How do I diagnose that as a leader?

Goes past the single aha metric to a three stage model (setup, aha, habit) with Apollo.io and Appcues case studies, plus the failure modes: no retention correlation, and changing the metric every quarter.

How to Measure Onboarding: Advanced Topics in Activation Metrics

From Product Growth by Aakash Gupta and Ramli John 25 min read

• Break activation into three stages, Setup, Aha and Habit, instead of one 'X in Y days' metric.
• Appcues lifted activation from under 2 percent to 25 percent by cutting onboarding into smaller steps.
• At Appcues, users who talk to a human are 2 to 3 times more likely to activate sooner.
• For one B2B company, Facebook and Instagram signups activated up to three times worse than organic.

Concrete plays with named examples: Zapier's 70,000 programmatic pages, Airtable's template library, Figma's free editor. This is what marketing looks like when the product is the channel.

Product-Led Marketing: How to get traffic and users for your product at a near-$0 CAC

From Lenny's Newsletter by Kyle Poyar 20 min read

• CAC needs to stay under about $1 per unique visitor for the PLG math to work.
• Organic search drives roughly 40 percent of new users, product virality another 16 percent.
• Zapier built more than 70,000 programmatic 'connect x + y' landing pages.
• Make activated signups your north star metric, not traffic or raw signups.

A three step method (brainstorm milestones, regress against retention, then experiment to prove causation) with worked examples from six companies. The third step is the one most teams skip.

How to determine your activation metric

From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky 15 min read

Poyar replaces the sales funnel with a five stage new user journey (discover, start, activate, convert, scale) and attaches benchmark ranges to each. It is how you find out which stage is actually broken.

Your guide to PLG benchmarks

From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 10 min read

• Gartner data cited: only 5 to 6 percent of buying activity is spent meeting a vendor's reps.
• Product-led companies were 55 percent of respondents, up from 48 percent in 2020.
• Benchmarks drawn from 450+ software companies, from under $1M to $100M+ ARR.

Written for exactly your situation: a busy team, plenty of tests, a flat number. Capland argues the failure is upstream of the test itself, in what you chose to test and who you tested it on, which is the diagnosis this question is asking for.

The Real Reason Most A/B Tests Don't Move Conversions

On Andrew Capland by Andrew Capland 22 min