{"id":22561,"date":"2026-07-19T13:29:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T13:29:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/youre-doing-plg-activation-wrong\/"},"modified":"2026-07-19T13:29:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-19T13:29:10","slug":"youre-doing-plg-activation-wrong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scannn.com\/lv\/youre-doing-plg-activation-wrong\/","title":{"rendered":"You're doing PLG \"Activation\" wrong"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I was afraid that my knowledge about product-led growth would become commoditized and useless because AI would just fix the most egregious mistakes in a typical SaaS business automatically.<\/p>\n

Luckily (for me at least), I was wrong; if anything, it got even more complex to get a PLG business under control.<\/p>\n

At Fyxer as a CPGO, I\u2019m spending dozens, if not hundreds, of hours curating specific high-level documentation from Strategy to ICP, use cases, etc., so my trusty AI sidekick always has the most accurate thing to go off on, and it still is not that easy to actually correctly identify where the problems are.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also said many times that distribution (finding enough good users and activating them) is the hard part of the product-market fit equation, not just having a good product.<\/p>\n

But as it turns out, activating the right users is not (just) a growth problem. It\u2019s a company problem, and AI is really good at generalizing for some users and bringing more of them, not the right ones.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not sure if this is all caused only by AI, but our understanding of what good looks like in Product-led Growth has changed dramatically.<\/p>\n

Share<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The most prominent concept about product-led growth is probably around your activation metric, and we used it for quite some time now to get all of it under control: <\/p>\n

In short, we\u2019re introducing Aha\/activation milestones to a company to focus more on customer success and to have a conversion rate to focus on:<\/p>\n

The most common definition that you will still find out there is:<\/p>\n

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\u201c<\/span>activation rate<\/strong> = [users who hit your activation milestone] \/ [users who completed your signup flow].\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The activation rate is at least in principle so powerful because it informs you about the most important thing in a SaaS business. Your efficiency. If the activation rate is high, your business will do fine. If you\u2019re efficient, you can grow.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s technically correct, but the reality is that most of my clients, and we at Fyxer, struggle to push it up and are not able to move it, and it masks short-term efficiency for long-term efficiency.<\/p>\n

If you think about the simplified journey of a customer, then it\u2019s this:<\/p>\n