She has a point!

Funny how big tech took from founders and builders, basically everyone, the ability to distribute via owned channels. Everything is now zero-click: websites, socials. Come to us, we're validation, here's $50 for your efforts! Except for Emails, the last bastion of owned. And even with emails, I saw companies who used to send 1B's of emails per month, losing ground to ISPs cracking down on them. Still, atm, it's the most owned channel. Agree?

Wow, just re-landed on @X, and already 20 new followers. The platform really changed! But where is the girl power? Girls who are in startups, girl founders, girl builders, let's connect!

Let's all join on this one!

Day 6/7 of finishing the MVP until EOW. Tomorrow is the last day, I dunno how much I'll be here, the @X algo will forgive me? We are all hostages :) Every decision I took up until this point is a risk, validated only by my experience, research and people telling me that it sounds great and solves real problems, even when I go into details. This of course is a bucket that can't hold water. That's why the MVP needs to go out. Not going to sleep yet, I want to spend some time with my family. Gn

Day 5/7 of finishing the MVP until EOW. Going to sleep now, what a day it has been. Lots of progress on the product and even on distribution (passed today 3K followers). I am compounding. Gn

Canva optimized for "time to first design." Their growth team found that if a user doesn't create a design on day 1, the impact of any subsequent actions drops significantly.​ So they built personalized onboarding that pushes toward the type of design they want to create. The result? 10–12% lift in activation, scaled across millions of users.​ The pattern is identical: – Find the one action most correlated with long-term retention (not "completed onboarding"). – Strip the first session down to only what's needed to reach that action. – Make it achievable ASAP. Companies that nail this see 2–3x activation improvements within 90-days.​ How can you start right away with this? (bookmark this post)...

2,000 messages sent as a team. Not channels created. Not integrations added. Messages. Teams that hit 2,000 messages retained at 93%. Teams that didn't? Under 30%. So Slack rebuilt its onboarding around one goal: get teams talking immediately. New users land in a pre-populated channel with messages already waiting. Signup to first message takes under 90 seconds.​ Their product research showed teams experiencing value within 5-minutes had 85% 30-day retention vs 35% for teams needing 30 minutes.​ Same product. Same price. One group gets to value fast, the other becomes a churn stat. ...

The moment that determines whether someone stays or leaves is called your Core Value (CV), and is different from product to product. For Slack, that one number changed everything. They didn't optimize for: - Completed setup. Or - Watched the tour. They dug into cohort data and asked: What behavior predicts a team still being active at day-90? Their answer? ...

6. Capture an email during the follow, and If someone doesn't activate in 24 hours, trigger an email with a direct link to to pick that flow up. Recovery campaigns recapture 15–25% of users who initially dropped off.​ Then measure: activation %, week-1 active %, month-1 churn for the new cohort. Slack and Canva didn't win onboarding because they had more features. They won because they figured out for their users "why you're here." What's the one action in your product that predicts retention? If you don't know, that's the first thing to fix. And that's just one of the things that @MelissaPekel and I are going to help you crack, track and act on @keeponboard

1. Pull two cohorts: users retained at day 30 vs churned before day 30. 2. Compare their first-session behavior. What did retained users do that churned users didn't? 3. That action I talked about, your "aha" moment (Core Value)? Define it as your activation metric. 4. Redesign onboarding as a tunnel to that one action. Remove everything else from the first session. 5. Create a micro checklist focused on reaching that outcome, not configuring settings. If you're onboarding on a chat interface style Claude/ChatGPT, each question/answer need to lead to that CV. ...

Tell me the truth, how fast is your Aha moment? Did you measure it? If a new user doesn't experience an Aha moment within their first 60-seconds, your churn rate skyrockets. Compressing time-to-value (TTV) is the best way to convert curiosity into long-term customer trust. But you have to optimize for the right metric if you want to nail that, and it's not your first suspect. So what should you track? A thread...

👍10. Your ability to distribute, btw, disappears if you don't continue to work on it, keep working on it way after your launch, it's an asset for life. Good luck with your launch. I would love to have you following our launch, we probably have a few months, though. @MelissaPekel @keeponboard

🖖8. As MRR starts to show up, show it, share it, and also share the struggles, people love to join in on journeys. 🙏 9. Say thank you all the time and be supportive in the long run. The launch is a short event, it's just the beginning, and people who love what you do and how you do it will build with you partnerships. ...

🫵 4. Promote other people's stuff to ride the reciprocity effect. When you give with heart, you get back in full. 👏 5. Create anticipation, raise the stakes, generate some buzz, and talk about the launch months in advance! ...

🫱2. Help people out, and talk to them 1:1 about their stuff, not yours. Yours will come up via proxy during that conversation if they don't think you're an idiot. ✍️ 3. Create something for them, think of something they will appreciate, something small, that they will love to share, or that they'll remember you for, a personal video, send them a hat, a patch, even create a post about their product or business. ...

We worked on that for years. To build the kind of distribution that is required for the launch to be successful, you have to: //bookmark this, because there's a lot here// 🤌1. Be consistent and patient about it - showing up is what builds the skills you'll need for distribution. It's gonna take a-time, a whole lot of precious time 🎵 .︎..

You might disagree completely with what I’m about to say… As a founder, the reality is that you need to prepare months before your launch. A few years ago, @MelissaPekel and I won The Golden Kitty award on Product Hunt, and we won it not just because the product was great, it was because we had the reach. A thread...

Founders, Builders, Startup people, and everyone who: 🦅 Are bootstrapping for months! 🧙‍♂️ That builds in public and is buried in the trenches. ⬇️ That looking to growth hack a stuck product. 📈 That run after that big golf stick moment in MRR. 😓 Who are grinding for that elusive product market fit. This one is for you. Never ever fear that failure, it only happens when you stop. Let's connect and build together! Loved the image, via @__Discipline

Day/3 of finishing my MVP until EOW. Looking to connect with people building in: 🦅 SaaS 🧙‍♂️ Tech 🤖 AI tools 👨‍🎤 Product Development ⌨️ Devs Drop what you're working on ⬇️ In 3 days I'm done with my MVP!