Breaking into GTM

Everyone says find your aha moment. What is it actually, and how do I find ours?

The short answer

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.

Go deeper, your way

4 hand-picked resources, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.

The same ground, at another level

How activation and onboarding reads from a different seat.

How do I pick one activation metric when the product supports five very different use cases? Do not force one event. Model activation in three stages instead, setup, aha and habit, and let the aha event differ by use case while setup and ha... Doing the work 4 resources → Activation has been flat for three quarters despite a lot of experiments. How do I diagnose that as a leader? Flat activation with busy teams almost always means you are optimising the wrong half of the funnel, and the usual cause is upstream: the people ar... Leading a GTM team 4 resources → Slack's onboarding gets copied constantly. What is it actually doing, step by step? Signup is three steps and asks almost nothing, then the teaching happens inside the real product rather than in a tour on top of it. Slackbot sends... How the best do it 4 resources →

Terms in this answer

Aha Moment Retention

People also ask

Our activation rate is 18 percent. Is that terrible, or is that just what it is? It is below average but not alarming. Across 500 plus products the average activation rate sits around 34 percent and the median around 25, with Sa... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → What should a brand new user see in the first minute after they sign up? Something that already works. The best first screens hand the user a filled-in example rather than an empty box, because a blank canvas asks a stra... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → Almost nobody finishes our onboarding flow. Is that an onboarding problem or a product problem? Look at where they stop. If people drop at the same screen every time, it is an onboarding problem and usually a specific one: a required field the... Breaking into GTM 4 resources → How do I pick one activation metric when the product supports five very different use cases? Do not force one event. Model activation in three stages instead, setup, aha and habit, and let the aha event differ by use case while setup and ha... Doing the work 4 resources → How do I cut time to value when the product genuinely needs setup work before it does anything useful? Invert the order. Instead of configure everything then use the product, give people a working demo environment with realistic sample data so they s... Doing the work 4 resources → I have a backlog of 30 activation ideas and no way to rank them. How do I decide what to build? Rank by where the drop-off is largest, not by how clever the idea is. Break the path from signup to activation into every discrete step, count how ... Doing the work 4 resources →

Also in Starting Up

The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.

What growth metrics should I actually track as an early-stage startup? Track one North Star metric that captures real customer value (weekly active users, orders shipped, revenue retained) plus the inputs that move it.... 3 resources → Should I even be running paid ads at this stage? Only if you already have retention and a clear sense of what a customer is worth; otherwise you're paying to fill a leaky bucket. Most early startu... 2 resources →
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