PLG SaaS Founder Strategy

We spent 6 months optimizing the wrong activation metric. Our "aha moment" wasn't what we thought. What we initially tracked: - Users who completed onboarding (83% did this) - Users who created their first project (71% completion) - Users who invited a teammate (only 22%) We obsessed over that 22% invite rate. Built features to encourage invites. Added prompts, incentives, emails. Nothing moved the needle. Then we dug into cohort retention: Users who completed onboarding but nothing else: 8% became paying customers Users who created a project: 31% converted Users who invited teammates: 47% converted BUT... Users who published their first output (only 34% did this): 73% converted to paid. The real activation moment was creating something valuable enough to share externally. Not inviting teammates. Not completing setup. What we changed: - Onboarding now focuses entirely on getting to first published output - We removed 4 setup steps that delayed this moment - Time to first publish dropped from 47 minutes to 11 minutes - 30-day conversion jumped from 23% to 41% The lesson: Your activation metric should predict long-term retention, not just feel like an achievement. What activation metric drives your product? Is it the right one?