Metric
Time to value
Time from sign-up (or first visit) to the first aha event, reported as a distribution: median and p75, plus p90 for the first major win. Shorter is better; one slow step often hides inside a fine median.
Plain label: time to first valueAlso known as: TTV, time to first major win, time to aha
Evidence is thin. One vendor reports a mean of about 1.5 days across 62 B2B SaaS customers, and another calls 1-3 days healthy and more than a week a warning for self-serve products (benchmark confidence C; vendor data). Stronger indirect evidence: day-7 activation is the best predictor of month-3 retention (benchmark confidence B), and 82% of subscription-app trial starts happen on install day (benchmark confidence B).
Never report a mean: a few slow users hide the shape. Pair it with step completion to find the step that adds the time.
Sources
Book content is paraphrased, never quoted at length. Last verified October 24, 2026.
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