The best activation metrics correlate with long-term retention, not vanity metrics

In growth metrics, "activation rate" measures the percentage of new users who complete key onboarding actions that indicate they've experienced the product's core value.

An activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies five to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today.

For us, activation is indicative of the team forming a habit around the usage of Snyk. And when I say the usage, I actually mean deriving core value, which is ultimately fixing vulnerabilities. It's not just logging in. It's not even just finding vulnerabilities, it's fixing vulnerabilities.

"The latter" refers to having extreme clarity around the goal, as opposed to the specific metric chosen (like 7 friends in 10 days).

I think the majority of the value is in the latter, is just having extreme clarity around the goal and that allowed everybody to work towards optimizing the same goal.

"Build with a capital B" was Airtable's internal name for a metric measuring how sophisticated or advanced a user's created content was.

We introduced a few more metrics, and one of them with purely a retention metric for an individual. Are you week two retained? Are you week four retained? The other was what we called Build with a capital B, and this was roughly a sophistication score.

One of the things that onboarding really drives is habit formation with the product, which leads to retention. I have seen companies shift their curve outward by 10, 15, 20 percentage points from making those changes.

If you're doing it right, sometimes conversion should actually decrease a little bit. You might actually have fewer people getting all the way through successfully, but I think that's okay because a lot of those people were probably not the right people for your product.