It is the first moment a new user gets something real out of your product, and you find it by looking at what people who stuck around did in their first session that people who left did not. Pull your users into two groups, retained at day 30 and gone, then look for the action where the two groups diverge most sharply. It is usually smaller and earlier than you expect: not built a full workflow, but sent one message, imported one file, invited one colleague. Correlation is not enough on its own, so once you have a candidate, run an experiment that pushes more new users to do that thing and check whether retention actually moves. If it does not, you found a symptom of engaged users rather than a cause.
5 resources, 5 link-checked.
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.
From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky 15 min read
Open lennysnewsletter.com →It defines time to value precisely enough to instrument: a start event, a value event, and the gap between them. The insistence that logging in is not value is the point most teams need to hear.
From Amplitude 12 min read
Benchmarks from 500 plus products: 34 percent average, 36 percent for SaaS. If you have ever wondered whether your number is bad or normal, this is the answer, and it is free.
From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky and Yuriy Timen 12 min read
Hila Qu built PLG at GitLab and scaled Acorns, and this is the rare free piece that maps the sales-led funnel against the product-led one side by side so you can see exactly which stage you are actually changing.
From Lenny's Newsletter by Hila Qu 20 min read
Isford's team found Airtable's aha moment and lifted activation about 20 percent by rebuilding onboarding around it, so this is the search this question describes, done on a real product with the numbers named.
On Lenny's Podcast by Lauryn Isford with Lenny Rachitsky 64 min
Listen on Apple Podcasts podcasts.apple.com →How activation and onboarding reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.
