B2B SaaS
Activation was the growth lever. Not pricing.
How a B2B horizontal SaaS trebled activation and doubled trial-to-paid in ten weeks by moving the activation event and cutting onboarding in half.
CASE / 06
Series B horizontal SaaS
Signups were fine. Trials were fine. Paying customers were the problem. Week-four activation rate sat at 11%. The founder had a theory about why. It was wrong, and he let us prove it wrong inside the first fortnight, which is the main reason this worked.
GEO
US · EU
Setup
PLG engagement team
Duration
12 weeks
Shipped
Q1 2023
The theory was pricing. It wasn't.
The theory was pricing. It wasn't.
The team had spent three months preparing a pricing test. Before running it, we pulled 22 structured interviews with trials who had cancelled or gone silent in the last 90 days. Pricing came up twice. Time to first value came up in 17 of 22. People were not saying "too expensive". They were saying "I could not tell if this was working for me". The pricing test was paused in week two.
The activation event was in the wrong place
The activation event was in the wrong place
Activation had been defined as "invite a teammate" because the product's collaboration story was strongest. We ran a cohort analysis against 18 months of paid-conversion data. "Invite a teammate" did not correlate with paid conversion. "Publish one workspace" did, at r=0.71. We moved the activation event. Every downstream metric, email, in-app nudge, success-team alert, was re-pointed at the new event over the following six weeks.
Onboarding, five jobs not seven
Onboarding, five jobs not seven
The onboarding checklist had grown to seven items because every team that shipped a feature had added their own. We cut to five, reordered to front-load the one that mapped to publish-one-workspace, and rewrote the copy to stop describing features and start describing outcomes. Drop-off between step two and step three, the worst point in the old flow, fell from 44% to 19%.
Email, only when someone stops moving
Email, only when someone stops moving
The old nurture drip was nine timed emails over two weeks, going out whether or not the user was making progress. We replaced it with four behaviour-triggered emails, each tied to a specific stuck state (signed up but not imported data, imported but not configured, configured but not published, published but no second workspace). Total email volume dropped by about half. Reply rate went up by 3.5x.
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