Work with me on your activation
Build a measured engine that turns more of your signups into durable revenue.You're spending real money on signups, and most leave before they pay. Activation looks like the fix, so teams pick an "aha moment", push everyone toward it, and wait for conversion to climb. Often it doesn't move at all.
The reason is almost always the same: the behavior correlated with revenue, but didn't survive being optimized for. Herd people toward it and the correlation decouples: you've moved the metric, but not the business.
The job isn't to find a magic action; it's to find the data proxies that live closest to user value, so they keep their correlation with revenue even after we guide more users toward them.
User behaviors don't cause conversion. User value does.
The classic trap: a team drives "invite a teammate" up and conversion doesn't move — because the users who'd invite were already the ones who'd pay. Sorting the durable proxies from the fragile ones is most of the work, and it's the part your dashboard can't do for you.
I created UserOnboard over a decade ago, and have done activation and early-conversion work across 100+ companies, including:
How It Works
Diagnostic
I dig into your data to find the early behaviors that actually predict paid conversion, size the revenue opportunity in each (honest ranges, not headline numbers), and lay out the highest-leverage bets worth pursuing. You come out with a clear activation model and a prioritized opportunity list -- useful on its own, even if we stop there.
Experiment program
We dig into why those behaviors matter to users, design experiments to move more of the right signups toward them, and measure each against a control group rather than trusting a trend. Each test's win condition -- primary metric, MDE, and guardrails -- is set in writing before it runs, so the bar isn't moved after the fact. What proves out gets scaled; what doesn't gets dropped, and we move to the next lever.
Working together
I run no more than two engagements at a time. Expect 10-15 hours of committed work per week, focused on analysis, research, experiment scoping, and reporting. Primarily async, though I recommend at least one standing weekly meeting, and am available as needed otherwise. Same-day responses to emails, chats, and knock-knock jokes.
"Samuel had a tremendous amount of impact on our growth at Amplitude. He was a guiding light for activation. We couldn't have gotten to where we were without him."
-- Jenny Chang, Head of Design,
Who It's For
Self-serve SaaS where activation matters but is under-defined, or conversion has plateaued without a clear rationale.
Enough that a controlled test reaches significance in weeks, not quarters -- roughly 1,000+ signups a week is a useful floor, but it's the signal that matters, not your size.
Self-serve is a meaningful revenue driver with room to grow conversion.
For teams who have firmly established traction and are looking for more than onboarding UX polish.
What It Requires
Less than teams usually expect. Early experiments are usually small T-shirt size -- things like "use an empty state to guide more people to their first template", rather than feature-level rebuilds.
Outside of that...
I don't need spotless data (nobody has that), but my analysis is only as reliable as what it's built upon, so it helps to know where you'd trust the numbers and where you wouldn't. If mobile signups were double-counted for a stretch last year, I'd rather hear it from you than hand you a wrong finding.
Activation cuts across product, growth, and marketing, and the touchpoints usually belong to no one in particular. That makes it hard to ship anything without someone in leadership backing the work. At smaller companies that's often the founder; at larger ones it needs to be someone who can clear a path across teams.
Our impact together depends on how much gets shipped. I recommend committing real room to act on what we find -- planned in, not squeezed between other work. I'd rather run as many tests as possible, and the cap is your ship rate. I promise I will have no shortage of suggestions.
"Very few people have Samuel's depth of understanding when it comes to growth and customer behavior. It was a pleasure to have him on our team."
-- Gaurav Agarwal, President,
How to Start
I find which of your early user behaviors actually correlate with revenue, size what each opportunity is worth, and lay out where I'd look next if I were you.
$10,000 fixed Download one-sheet ↓Together, we run experiments based on your strongest opportunities, and find out which ones actually move revenue. If you purchased the Diagnostic, its $10k is credited forward, not added on top.
$15,000 / month Download one-sheet ↓Not sure which fits? Email me at samuel@valuepaths.com and I'll give you a straight read on which makes sense for where you are.
You Might Be Wondering...
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Where are the case-study numbers?
This page doesn't have a "+40% conversion" banner, which is deliberate. The results I'm proudest of belong to the teams I earned them with, whether as an operator at places like Amplitude and ClickUp or under NDA with clients like yourself. -
Can't we find this in our own analytics?
You can see the correlations; what you can't see is which ones hold up once you optimize against them. That only shows up when you push on one and watch whether it holds. -
Why pay for a diagnosis instead of just making changes?
Because the expensive mistake is a quarter of engineering time invested into a lever that was never causal. Three weeks of looking first tells you where the good bets are before you spend a quarter finding out. -
Why not just hire a growth PM?
Eventually you might. But a hire takes two quarters to ramp, and activation is a specific muscle that not every growth PM has built. This installs the model and the method in weeks, and leaves your team able to run it without me.
Tell me what's going on with your activation and I'll write back the same day with a straight read on whether this is the right kind of help -- and if it isn't, I'll say so.