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Ever tried to assemble a flat-pack bed?
It's not too difficult, as long as you have all the right parts and can follow the instructions. But what if you didn't have the instructions? And what if the manufacturer threw in a few extra parts you don't actually need? And what if that was standard practice and the company always sold beds with random pieces and no instructions?
You'd probably give up and spend the night on the couch, maybe staying up late to research alternative companies, and leave a scathing review of your experience online.
In this scenario, you bought a bed - but you certainly aren't getting a comfy night's sleep.
SaaS products are a bit like flat-pack furniture that needs to be assembled before the buyer can experience value. SaaS customers must also wait to experience the value of their new purchase. It's this delay - known as time to value or TTV - that makes churn such a common problem among SaaS companies.
If you're a product manager, growth marketer, or customer success leader, TTV is one of the most important metrics in your toolkit. It directly shapes activation rates and long-term retention, and it determines whether trial users convert. And yet, most teams either don't measure it or don't design their onboarding around it. This guide breaks down what TTV is, how to measure it, and five proven strategies for reducing it - so your users reach their aha moment faster and stick around longer.
Whether you're selling software as a service or flat-pack furniture, every customer buys your product to receive a specific benefit. Bed shoppers aren't really buying laminate finish or a memory-foam mattress - they're buying a good night's sleep. And people who subscribe to an analytics tool like Amplitude aren't buying pretty graphs or reports - they're buying a way to understand how customers use their product.
Time to value (TTV) is the time it takes a new user to experience the core benefit of your product after signing up. It's the distance between "I just created an account" and "Now I see why this is worth paying for."
You can express it as a formula:
TTV = Date of First Value Event - Date of Signup
The "first value event" is different for every product. For a project management tool, it might be completing the first task with a teammate. For an analytics platform, it might be generating the first meaningful report. Defining that event clearly is the first step toward measuring and improving TTV.
The longer your time to value, the more customer turnover you'll see. People have limited patience and if they don't reach that aha moment quickly, they're likely to feel that their time is being wasted. If they've already paid for your product, that's time and money spent on little visible return.
But a switch flips once customers realize the value of your service. Reaching that aha moment or activation event is often what separates users who stick with your product from those who end up churning. The faster users realize how your product can help them improve their lives, the less likely they are to churn.
And those benefits end up compounding over time. Dan Wolchonok, Head of Product and Analytics at Reforge, explained in his talk at Price Intelligently's 2015 SaaSFest conference that a 15% improvement in user retention in the first week compounded into nearly twice the number of retained users after 10 weeks.
That's not just a retention win - it's a customer lifetime value multiplier. In a product-led onboarding model, where self-serve users need to experience value before they convert to paid plans, TTV is effectively the clock ticking on your conversion window. Shorten the clock, and you shorten the path to revenue.
TTV isn't one-size-fits-all. It generally falls into one of five categories, depending on your product's complexity and onboarding design:
Some products deliver value the moment someone uses them. Think of the umbrella you buy when it's raining - the time to value is instant. In SaaS, HubSpot's Website Grader is a great example. Plug in your URL, get a score across SEO, performance, and security within seconds. The tool provides immediate value for users and serves as a powerful lead generation tool for HubSpot.
Short TTV means users reach their aha moment within their first session or first day. Canva is a good example here. A new user can sign up, pick a template, customize a design, and export it in under ten minutes. The value is clear almost immediately, but it does require a few intentional steps to get there.
Most SaaS products fall into this category. Access to the product alone doesn't provide the desired benefit - some further action is required. Your customers might need to invite colleagues to collaborate, import their customer data, or finish your onboarding sequence before they start to realize how the product can benefit them. Take a product like Expensify, for example. Signing up for expense management software doesn't provide value. The aha moment comes when a user files their first hassle-free expense report, a task which requires several steps to complete.
This is the point where users reach minimum viable value - enough to justify continued use, even if they haven't unlocked the product's full potential. For a CRM, basic value might be importing contacts and sending a first email campaign. The user hasn't explored automation or reporting yet, but they've gotten enough return to keep going.
This is where users discover benefits they didn't originally sign up for. A team using Notion for project tracking might discover it also handles their internal wiki and documentation needs. Exceeding value is what turns satisfied customers into advocates - and it's a major driver of expansion revenue.
You can't improve what you don't measure. Yet many SaaS teams build onboarding flows without a clear definition of what "value" looks like for their users - or any way to track how long it takes to get there.
Start with the formula:
TTV = Date of First Value Event - Date of Signup
The harder part is defining your "first value event." This is the action most strongly correlated with long-term retention - your product's aha moment. For Slack, it might be a team sending 2,000 messages. For a design tool, it might be exporting the first project. The event should be specific, measurable, and validated against your retention data.
Once you've defined the event, track these supporting onboarding metrics:
For benchmarking, most SaaS products with a healthy onboarding flow see users reach their first value event within one to three days of signing up. If your TTV stretches beyond a week for a self-serve product, that's a signal worth investigating.
Here's a practical example: say your analytics platform defines "first value event" as generating a report with real data. You'd measure the time between account creation and that first report, then segment by signup source, plan type, or onboarding path to find where users get stuck - and where they don't. The patterns in that data tell you exactly where to focus your activated users improvement efforts.
It's crucial that you help customers reach their aha moment as quickly and efficiently as possible. Behavioral emails, in-app user onboarding, customer success managers, usability testing, and personalization can all help generate excitement and momentum while gently guiding users toward value.
Here are five strategies for reducing your product's TTV through different channels.
Onboarding guides can be delivered in a number of ways - within your app using tools like Appcues, via support documentation, or through a series of behavioral emails.
Project management tool Asana does a fantastic job of using onboarding emails to engage new users. During the free trial period, users are sent a series of emails triggered by certain behaviors. Each email includes a lesson specific to a task within the app, and the CTA takes users straight to that feature, allowing them to execute on that task immediately. Asana also sends weekly status report emails, summarizing your completed tasks, how many are left, and the status of your projects.
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Asana's onboarding emails are a great example of how omnichannel experiences can add value and encourage user engagement.
Read more: 3 must-have user onboarding emails | The ultimate guide to aligning your lifecycle emails and in-app messaging
Use in-app onboarding patterns like checklists and walkthroughs to help users realize the benefits of your product more efficiently. Gently guide users in the right direction until they reach their aha moment.
Calendly is a good example of focused in-app onboarding. When a new user signs up, the product immediately walks them through three steps: setting availability, creating an event type, and sharing a booking link. There's no feature tour, no overwhelming dashboard - just a clear path to the first value event (getting a meeting booked). The entire flow takes under two minutes.
It's important to focus on the benefits your customer expects to receive, not the benefits you want to highlight. Your users don't care about all the bells and whistles in your product as much as you do - they care about how your product is going to make their life better. Don't use your onboarding sequence to drag users through every step and feature in your product at the expense of achieving value.
Teams building these kinds of flows often use Appcues to create native-looking tooltips, modals, checklists, hotspots, and slideouts without engineering resources - so product and growth teams can ship and iterate on onboarding experiences directly.
Read more: The 5 best walkthrough examples for web apps
For products that are more time-intensive or require extensive integrations with other tools, a more hands-on, high-touch approach can help customers reach value more quickly. A customer success team can bring a "concierge" approach to reducing time to value by quickly answering questions and offering personalized training.
Calendly discovered the benefits of concierge onboarding when scaling their enterprise tier. By offering new enterprise accounts a dedicated onboarding specialist within two days of signup - walking them through workspace setup, integrations, and team routing - they saw significantly higher activation rates compared to self-serve enterprise signups. The personal touch helped complex organizations get to their first value event (a fully functional team scheduling workflow) far faster than documentation alone could.
The key is knowing when to use high-touch versus low-touch approaches. Concierge onboarding works best for higher-cost products with longer implementation cycles, complex integrations, or multi-stakeholder setups. SaaS companies with a high volume of lower monthly subscriptions can benefit more from using in-app onboarding tools for low-touch user onboarding. If you offer multiple versions of your product, you can take a hybrid approach and reserve your CSMs for higher-tier plans while automating onboarding for self-serve users.
Read more: 10 user and customer engagement strategies
When you spend hours in your own product every day, it's easy to forget what a first-time user experience feels like to people unfamiliar with your product. What seems like a minor blip to you could be a major point of friction for new users.
Removing friction from the onboarding process is essential for reducing time to value. If users can't find the feature they're looking for, or hit any number of small friction points along the way, they're likely to give up before they have a chance to receive the value your product provides.
To understand how users experience your product, take advantage of in-depth tools like Mixpanel, Heap, Fullstory, UserTesting, etc. for on-demand and ongoing identification of possible friction in the user journey. And don't underestimate the power of in-person user testing.
All the way back in 2016, for instance, we saw a significant lift in our activation rate after watching a few user onboarding sessions in FullStory. We realized that many new users weren't reaching the page where they needed to be to realize their aha moment. So we redesigned our welcome message to redirect users to that page after closing the welcome message instead of simply dropping them on the Appcues dashboard. That simple redirection took our completion rate from 13% all the way up to 32% - this meant 150% more users were reaching their aha moment to become activated users.
It just goes to show that even small improvements to your user experience can go a long way towards removing friction and reducing time to value.
Read more: 13 product and behavioral analytics tools to help you understand your users
As we noted earlier, helping users reach their aha moment within the first week can dramatically increase ongoing revenue. Personalizing your onboarding experience can help keep users even more interested and engaged, reducing time to value and improving the overall user experience.
For some products - particularly those that provide value through content curation - the value a user gets depends heavily on their personal preferences rather than on the features offered by a product. Personalizing the onboarding process is especially important in this case. Pinterest leveraged personalization to reduce time to value using location data to suggest trending topics and highlighting popular content in a user's language. The result? Their new user activation and retention rates increased by 5-10%.
More recently, Spotify has taken a similar approach with its onboarding. New users are asked to select favorite artists and genres during signup, which immediately personalizes their home screen and Discover Weekly playlist. By putting relevant content in front of users from the first session, Spotify shortens the gap between "I just signed up" and "I can't stop listening."
By personalizing their onboarding experience, Pinterest was able to help users quickly discover relevant, valuable content, keeping them more engaged and active with the service.
Read more: 5 ways to personalize your user onboarding experience
Even teams that care deeply about onboarding can fall into patterns that quietly extend TTV. Here are four of the most common pitfalls - and what to do instead.
1. Overwhelming users on day one. It's tempting to show new users everything your product can do. But a feature tour that covers 15 capabilities before the user has completed a single task creates confusion, not confidence. Instead, focus onboarding on the shortest path to the first value event. Save advanced features for later.
2. Skipping the aha moment definition. Many teams build onboarding flows without a clear, data-backed definition of what their product's aha moment actually is. Without that anchor, you're guiding users toward a destination you haven't defined. Start by analyzing which early actions correlate most strongly with long-term retention, then design onboarding around that specific event.
3. Using one-size-fits-all onboarding. A marketing manager and a developer signing up for the same product need different paths to value. When every user gets the same flow regardless of role, use case, or intent, you're forcing some of them through steps that don't matter to them - and delaying the ones that do. Segment users early and tailor the experience.
4. Ignoring measurement. If you aren't tracking TTV, activation rate, or onboarding completion, you're optimizing blind. Teams that don't measure these metrics can't identify where users drop off or whether changes to the onboarding flow are actually working. Build measurement into your onboarding from day one, not as an afterthought.
The strategies above aren't theoretical. Here are three companies that shortened their time to value with focused onboarding improvements.
Back in 2016, our team noticed that many new users weren't reaching the page where they needed to be to experience their aha moment. By watching onboarding sessions in FullStory, we identified the friction point: the default post-signup landing page dropped users on the dashboard instead of guiding them to the builder. We redesigned the welcome message to redirect users to the right page after closing it. That single change took our onboarding completion rate from 13% to 32% - a 150% increase in users reaching activation. The lesson: sometimes the biggest TTV wins come from the smallest fixes.
Asana's onboarding email sequence is built around behavioral triggers, not a fixed calendar. During the free trial, each email corresponds to a specific task inside the app, and the CTA links directly to that feature. Users don't just read about what Asana can do - they're prompted to do it. By tying email engagement to in-app actions, Asana shortens the gap between signup and first project completion, keeping users moving toward value during the critical trial window.
Pinterest used location data during onboarding to suggest trending topics and surface popular content in each user's language. By personalizing the first-run experience based on where users were, they removed the "blank feed" problem that slows down content discovery platforms. The result: new user activation and retention rates increased by 5-10%. For products where value depends on content relevance, personalization is the most direct way to shorten TTV.
Whether you're selling flat-pack furniture or software subscriptions, reducing your users' time to value is always a good idea. Here's a recap of what matters most:
Start by defining your product's aha moment - the specific action most correlated with retention. Then take another look at your user journey to identify points of confusion that can be clarified and moments of friction that can be smoothed out. Anywhere the path to value requires unnecessary complexity, simplify it. You'd be amazed what even a few seconds saved on the journey to value can mean for your activation and retention rates.
Every strategy in this guide - behavioral emails, in-app onboarding, friction removal, personalization - is something Appcues is built to help you execute. From targeted in-app flows to cross-channel engagement across email and push, Appcues gives product, growth, and customer success teams the tools to guide users to value faster, without waiting on engineering.
Book a demo to see how Appcues can help your team reduce time to value and turn new signups into engaged, retained customers.
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