A working library of activation research, teardowns & field notes from 180+ SaaS launches.

The Playbook · Chapter 1, Excerpt

Stop buying the funnel. Start fixing the floor.

“The single most expensive mistake in B2B SaaS right now is pouring acquisition spend onto an activation floor that buckles under any meaningful conversion lift. We wrote this playbook because we kept watching smart teams do it — then hire us to unpick it.” Nicola Asquith & Blair Henrikson, Activation Over Acquisition, 2023

When we audited the first 40 of our 180+ engagements, the pattern was uncomfortably consistent: trial-to-paid conversion sat between 4% and 11%, paid acquisition was treated as the only growth lever, and the activation surface — the first three screens a buyer sees after signup — had not been meaningfully redesigned since the company’s seed round. Every playbook we have shipped since has been written against that pattern.

The book is a working manual, not a manifesto. Chapter 1 walks through the five diagnostic questions we ask in every first-week kickoff — the same five questions we will ask on a diagnostic call. Chapter 2 maps the seven activation archetypes we have catalogued across our 600+ in-house teardowns, from the “5-screen PLG trial that quietly kills activation” to the “enterprise demo gate that pretends to be self-serve.” Chapter 3 is the rebuild framework: a 14-day sprint shape that has produced at least two shipped artifacts for 97% of our clients inside the first 60 days.

Since its release in 2023, the playbook has been downloaded 38,000+ times, taught inside Lenny’s Newsletter’s annual Product Review cohort, and cited in Product Talk sessions on continuous discovery. The full text is free for any founding PM or Head of Product who books a diagnostic — we mail it the same day.