Let the product sell
Activation and onboarding
Getting a stranger from signup to their first real win, fast enough that they come back tomorrow.
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Everyone says find your aha moment. What is it actually, and how do I find ours?
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Who should own activation: product, growth, or customer success?
One team owns the number and everyone else owns an input. In practice the growth team should own activation because they can ship changes to the si...
How do I set an activation target the whole company will actually rally behind?
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 goo...
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...
We are in India selling to global users. How do the best Indian companies onboard buyers who are asleep when we are awake?
They stop treating the timezone gap as a staffing problem and treat it as a product requirement. The winners front-load everything a new user could...