How to Drive Activation in 2025
Product-led growth (PLG) puts the product itself at the center of acquiring and retaining users. In a PLG strategy, the goal is to help users quickly experience value from the product with minimal hand-holding. By guiding users to their “aha” moment early on, companies can dramatically boost activation rates and long-term retention. Recent data shows PLG is now mainstream – about 79% of SaaS companies have adopted PLG strategies, and 91% of those plan to invest even more in these approaches. The key to PLG success is onboarding: an effective product-led onboarding flow turns signups into active users without heavy sales or support.
Saltfish is a powerful ally in this journey, offering interactive AI video touchpoints that bring onboarding to life. With Saltfish, every step of the user’s first experience feels guided and engaging.
Principles of Product-Led Onboarding
Product-led onboarding is a user-first approach that delivers value-driven guidance inside the product. Instead of long manuals or relying on sales demos, onboarding is built into the user experience. It helps new users find the core value quickly – often by leading them to the “aha” moment or most important feature of the product. By delivering context-aware help at the right time, product-led onboarding boosts activation and retention without extra cost.
Effective onboarding flows share several best practices: they are personalized (tailored to the user’s role and goals), concise (short, interactive steps rather than long tours), and value-focused (guiding users to the key actions that demonstrate real value). For example, personalization based on user roles, short interactive tutorials, and clear paths to activation points early on are considered essential. Social proof (like success metrics or customer quotes) can be woven into the onboarding to motivate users. In short, great PLG onboarding feels like a friendly guide inside the product – personal, helpful, and designed to make the first experience valuable.
Saltfish amplifies this by delivering interactive AI video guides embedded directly inside the product interface. The Saltfish flow is built around key principles:
Personalized – Saltfish avatars speak in human tone, tailored to user roles or behavior.
Concise – Short, focused video guides lead users step-by-step to value.
Value-focused – Saltfish video flows guide users to core activation points fast.
With Saltfish, onboarding doesn’t interrupt, it feels like a friendly guide appearing at the right time.
Key Activation Metrics to Track
To optimize PLG onboarding, teams must define and track the right activation metrics. Activation rate is perhaps the most important metric: it’s the percentage of users who reach a predefined milestone signaling they’ve experienced the core value of the product. In other words, activation is when a user has their first “wow” moment. Industry benchmarks suggest the average activation rate across products is roughly 34% (about 36% in SaaS). Hitting that first milestone is critical because activation is the foundation of everything else – if users don’t activate, they won’t stick around or convert.
Other metrics include Time-to-Value (TTV), which measures how long it takes a user to find value after signing up. Shorter TTV means faster onboarding. Many onboarding teams rate TTV as one of their top metrics alongside usage and satisfaction. Early engagement metrics (such as Day-1 or Week-1 retention) also predict long-term success. For instance, Day-1 retention above 30–40% is generally considered good. Finally, conversion of free or trial users to paid (free-to-paid rate) validates that onboarding worked: companies often see 3–5% conversion in freemium models and 15–30% in trial models. In sum, measure how many users complete the key steps of onboarding, how quickly they do it, and how many become loyal users as a result.
Designing Retention and Growth Loops
Activation alone isn’t enough; PLG also relies on retention loops and network effects to sustain growth. Unlike a linear funnel, growth loops reinvest user value to fuel more growth. For example, retention loops are designed to maintain and deepen user engagement over time. A loyal user base not only drives higher customer lifetime value but also often becomes an acquisition engine through referrals.
Well-known PLG companies use loops creatively. Dropbox famously built an acquisition loop by rewarding users who referred friends with extra storage, pushing their viral growth exponentially. Slack focused on an engagement loop: by making chat invitations easy and hitting users with immediate collaboration value, they achieved a very high retention rate of about 90%. These examples show that designing loops (referral loops, engagement loops, expansion loops) is just as important as initial activation. Every time a user takes an action that brings another user back (or invites a new one), that loop compounds growth. Growth teams map out these loops and optimize them: tracking how users move from activation to continued use, and ensuring each stage “reinvests” value.
Saltfish strengthens these loops by placing dynamic video touchpoints at strategic moments, like when users stall or when they reach a paywall. Interactive Saltfish videos drive users to take action, while built-in analytics show which videos drive conversions, leading teams to refine them for better results.
Activation and Retention in Action: SaaS and Beyond
Many SaaS leaders offer instructive examples of PLG onboarding in action. Slack, for instance, made onboarding virtually frictionless. Users simply create a team and invite teammates by email; the product itself teaches usage through channels and searchable history. This approach helped Slack retain a massive share of its users – in fact, Slack’s paid users are about 90% retained over time. High retention like this is a hallmark of effective PLG onboarding.
Dropbox provides another classic case. In its early days, Dropbox’s simple, single-step “get free space” invitation loop helped drive adoption. By making it easy to invite friends to use the product, Dropbox turned every active user into a potential advocate. This referral mechanism was so effective that Dropbox’s viral growth became a model for PLG success.
Smaller or newer companies also see gains by reworking onboarding. For example, one startup reported a 164% increase in activation rates after optimizing its onboarding flow. Another achieved 5× higher free-to-paid conversion by adding templates and guided steps that anchored users to the next action. In each case, the team identified the key “aha” moment and redesigned onboarding to make it obvious and frictionless.
Beyond tech, product-led principles apply in all industries. Education software can use in-app tutorials to guide first-time students to their first achievement. In banking, apps can employ step-by-step walkthroughs to help users set up accounts or budgets (reducing drop-offs). While stats for non-SaaS industries vary, the core idea remains: an engaging, user-guided onboarding experience drives activation and continued use no matter the sector.
With Saltfish, any industry benefits. Whether it’s teaching a user to launch a campaign, fill out a document, or complete their profile, Saltfish humanizes the onboarding experience by delivering video guides where they’re most effective.
Saltfish’s Edge: Humanized AI Video Onboarding
This is where Saltfish brings something new. Saltfish is an interactive AI video platform built specifically for onboarding and engagement. Instead of cold text or button-click tours, Saltfish uses short AI-generated videos that feel like a real person talking. You can guide users with short, face-to-face videos embedded directly in your product to boost signups and adoption. Saltfish combines an AI video generator (turning text into a personable avatar video) with a flow builder that lets you branch videos and calls-to-action based on user actions. The final product is a video widget you embed in your app or website with one line of code.
Why do humanized AI videos help activation? First, they grab attention. A visitor who sees a friendly video greeting feels engaged and is more likely to stay on the page. Saltfish customers report that adding a welcome video on landing pages reduces bounce rate and increases leads. Second, during signup or in-product tours, a video avatar can explain features in plain language and even answer questions through branching flows. This makes the experience feel customized. Third, Saltfish videos can be personalized to each user, which drives higher engagement.
The results speak for themselves. Customers have seen dramatic jumps in activation and time-to-value. One company reported a 500% increase in activation for new sign-ups after switching to Saltfish-powered onboarding flows. Another said they now achieve 4× faster time-to-value for users. In one testimonial, a Saltfish customer noted: “After replacing our previous onboarding flow with Saltfish, we saw a 5× increase in engagement and activation rate for new signups.” These gains suggest that humanized video guides can turn a struggling onboarding flow into a growth lever.
Saltfish also excels at retention loops. Because Saltfish videos are interactive, they naturally encourage user actions like clicking a button in the video or following a link. This creates additional engagement loops (users click through the video to learn more). Moreover, Saltfish integrates analytics so product teams can see which videos and choices lead to success. This data-driven insight closes the loop: you learn what works, refine your content, and keep boosting activation.
How Saltfish Stacks Up vs. Other Tools
Saltfish is part of a growing field of AI video tools and onboarding platforms, but it differentiates itself on focus and features. Consider mainstream AI video generators like Synthesia. Synthesia lets you turn text to video in minutes using realistic AI avatars, supporting 140+ languages. It can create high-quality marketing or training videos quickly, cutting production costs significantly. However, Synthesia is primarily a standalone video studio. It lacks built-in interactive flows or direct embedding into a product interface. In contrast, Saltfish is specifically designed for in-app onboarding: it not only generates the video but also stitches those clips into decision-tree flows and injects them right into your app or website.
Other video platforms like Pictory or HeyGen are similarly geared toward content creation (social videos, marketing) and do not focus on product flows. Saltfish’s specialized flow-builder and UI widget set it apart.
On the traditional onboarding side, tools like Appcues or WalkMe offer guided tours and checklists but typically with static overlays, not video. Appcues, for instance, has powerful segmentation and analytics, but its plans are on the pricier side and do not include AI avatars. More importantly, Saltfish delivers a personalized video experience that static steps can’t match. Users are more likely to watch a 1-minute personalized video than to click through multiple tooltip boxes.
Ultimately, Saltfish positions itself as the best-of-both-worlds: the scalability of PLG onboarding with the effectiveness of a human touch. The numbers back it up: customers using Saltfish consistently report significantly better activation metrics. In a data-driven PLG world, humanized AI video simply generates more engagement per signup than older methods.
What’s next?
In 2025 and beyond, product-led companies know that onboarding is not a checkbox but a strategic opportunity. By measuring activation rates and iterating on flows, teams can turn first-use into habit. The best onboarding is short, contextual, and engaging – exactly what Saltfish delivers with AI-generated video guides. Saltfish’s interactive video touchpoints connect users with value quickly, and Saltfish customers are already enjoying big activation uplifts as a result.
For any SaaS team looking to level up activation in a crowded market, Saltfish’s humanized AI video onboarding is a compelling option. It complements your PLG metrics and retention loops with engaging content, driving more users to that all-important “aha” moment. By embedding face-to-face video guides where users need them, Saltfish turns every new signup into an enthusiast, accelerating growth the PLG way.
Ready to boost activation with humanized AI video onboarding?
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