Before UserOnboard was UserOnboard, it was supposed to be a book. The original plan was to sell an ebook as "business practice" before founding my own startup.

At the time, I was a UX designer highly inspired by JTBD and Kathy Sierra's work, so I wanted to approach the project as a way to share my own perspective on software strategy.

The ebook was initially going to be called "Customer Growth" (in a double-entendre sense of "grow your customers" and "help your customers grow").

It was a philosophical take that approximately ZERO companies were problem-aware of at the time, but I persisted anyway based on a confounding mixture of sheer conviction and shameless naivete.

Even worse, I planned to sell it at the poorly-chosen and disgusting-sounding domain name of custgrow.com.

In order to grow my presale launch list, I started putting out onboarding teardowns. The response was WAY more enthusiastic than I expected. After the first couple teardowns went viral, it became pretty apparent that when I called my perspective "user onboarding", people listened, and when I called it "custgrow", people wanted to hurl.

So, another brisk domain search later, and useronboard.com was born. The site became surprisingly popular right out of the gate. It also started attracting a lot of attention from big companies -- I almost hyperventilated on a call with Netflix's VP of Design -- and I will always be thankful for all of the career opportunities it unlocked for me.

As nice as it was to be so valued for "UX takes", though, that was never where my main interest really resided.

I've always been most passionate about finding the relationship between generating business value by helping users generate user value, and that requires following the numbers -- which user events, specifically, are driving retention and conversions?

Counting Wins (and Losses)

After UserOnboard was up and running, I originally tried to scratch my "empirical rigor" itch by self-funding my own startup: a tool that let apps present their signups with an onboarding to-do list.

I knew I didn't want to raise funds, so I hand-coded an MVP as far as my dev skills would carry me, then hired engineers out of pocket to get it to a point where it was secure enough to embed in real live apps.

The beta tests didn't show nearly the impact that I thought they would have, though. The companies who were first willing to take a chance on my tool were relatively early-stage and therefore lower-volume, and running split tests cut that already-low number immediately in half.

People in our industry throw around claims like "we made this simple change and it literally doubled conversions", but I quickly found out how unrealistic those kinds of "wins" actually are.

I realized that I needed to work with companies with a bigger N. Instead of doubling down on the to-do list app, I went in-house with high-volume self-serve companies to see what truly worked at scale.

I wanted to see how the "grownups" approached their data and experimentation practices. After years of being relegated to the "UX kids table", I was operating on a lot of faith that larger companies generally had business teams who attended to activation's unit economics -- especially when we're talking about hundreds of thousands (or millions) of signups per month.

It's been a humbling process in that regard, both because I've truly learned a lot about data management and split test subtleties, and also because I've genuinely been pretty shocked at how many companies treat activation economics like a toy steering wheel.

The Term That Worked Too Well

In a sense, "user onboarding" as a term was both a blessing and a limitation: it immediately landed with recognition, which was a major benefit, but also came with a talking-past-each-other problem.

I've always thought of onboarding as meaning something like "connect your users with value so you make more money", but most people instead seemed to hear the same word to mean something like "product tour".

That gap has been surprisingly tough to close. I've invested over a decade toward trying to steer the "which tooltip tour should I use?" conversation toward "what kind of user value actually drives our business?" instead, and not always very effectively.

The main difference I see between onboarding and activation is in their definitions of success. If we're being brutally honest, onboarding's success is defined by how much the team likes the new experience they've made. Activation's success, by contrast, is defined much more by how much it helps the company grow.

Over the years, I tried articulating these ideas in a grab bag of haphazard attempts, but anything published under the UserOnboard branding would basically immediately get "boo... stick to UX teardowns pls" instead.

So at this point, I'd rather start a new project, closer to what I'm truly trying to provide in terms of project success.

Not My First Own-Goal Rodeo

This also isn't the first time that I've left behind a professional reputation. I started out my career in tech as a developer. Several years in, I came across a book called "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, and was immediately like "holy shit this is what I want to do with my life."

I studied up on all the UX concepts and practices that I could, and gained UX experience working for super cheap while my dev work paid the actual bills.

Eventually, I felt confident enough to introduce myself as a developer AND a UX designer, which literally always resulted in people saying "oh great you can code" and completely ignoring the UX part.

I realized that if I truly wanted to be taken seriously in a UX role, I had to introduce myself as only that, and not even mention my engineering skills at all. It felt super risky at the time, but it eventually worked out.

The downside actually isn't as severe as it might sound. Knowing how to code is a good foundation for UX work, even though the work itself is different. And deep UX experience is a good foundation for activation work, even though those focus on different things as well.

Even if I'm living in Amplitude cohorts and split test results instead of Figma and focus groups these days, having that adjacent expertise "for free" can only serve to help.

The More Things Change...

So, au revoir onboarding, and hello activation.

It reminds me a little of a beautiful anecdote from the film editor Walter Murch.

He was stitching together footage and was so passionate about a single clip that he built a whole big scene in the movie around it.

When the scene was done, though, he noticed that one particular clip didn't fit with the rest. It was the original one, which had inspired the whole scene.

He had to ask himself whether the original clip was the scene's "heart", or its "umbilical cord"; whether it was critical, or inspirational.

UserOnboard has been an "umbilical cord" that I've been amazingly fortunate to have come across, but Value Paths has always been my heart.

So I decided to forego a career in UX entirely, and have instead been working the last several years inside high-volume self-serve companies to create a playbook for actually connecting your signups with value, and actually driving business results from it.

There's a Patrick McKenzie quote that goes something like "find a gap in business operations, and then drive a truck through it" and that's what I hope to do for activation.

It deserves to be taken a lot more seriously than "pick an aha moment in a meeting and throw a couple split tests at it".

Value Paths is that truck, and I aim to drive it wholeheartedly.