Pick a target you can defend from data rather than one that sounds ambitious. Start from your current rate and the benchmark spread, which puts good around the 60th percentile and great around the 80th, then commit to a specific number for a full year without changing the definition. Say out loud what you are giving up to get there, because an activation goal that costs nothing was never a goal. Publish the number weekly in the same place, including the weeks it goes down, since the credibility of the metric matters more than any individual week. And translate it into something people outside growth care about, usually the retained customers or revenue that the improvement produces, or engineering will treat it as somebody else's dashboard.
4 hand-picked resources, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it 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
Open lennysnewsletter.com →Why we picked it 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.
From Product Growth by Aakash Gupta and Ramli John 25 min read
Open news.aakashg.com →Why we picked it 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.
From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 10 min read
Open growthunhinged.com →Why we picked it 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
Open amplitude.com →How activation and onboarding reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.
