Time to Value: The Key to Driving User Retention

Before you celebrate your latest wave of sign-ups, consider this: In just 14 days, as many as 91% of your new users may drop off. That’s not a retention problem that can be fixed later with engagement campaigns or feature updates. By the time you realize users are churning, they’ve already made their decision to leave.

Our 2025 Product Benchmark Report, analyzing over 2,600 companies, reveals a clear pattern: Products that deliver value quickly see dramatically better long-term results. The race to prove your product’s worth happens in days, not weeks. Win it, and you build the foundation for sustainable growth.

What is time to value in product growth?

Time to value (TTV) measures the elapsed time between when a user signs up and when they experience meaningful benefit from your product. This goes beyond completing an action or checking off an onboarding task. Value happens when users achieve the outcome they came for.

A user who creates an account and sets up their profile might look activated in your analytics. But if they haven’t solved the problem that brought them to your product, they haven’t reached value. Time to value tracks that critical moment when the lightbulb goes on and users think, “This is exactly what I needed.”

Time to activation vs. time to value

This distinction matters because teams often optimize for the wrong milestone. They celebrate when users complete setup steps without checking whether those users actually solved their problem. You can easily have high activation with low retention if activated users never experience the benefit they came for.

• Time to activation measures how quickly users complete a key action, such as creating an account, adding their first item, or inviting a teammate.
• Time to value measures how quickly they experience the benefit of that action and understand why it matters.

A user who creates a project has activated. But a user who sees how that project solves their workflow has reached value. The first metric just measures completion, but the second one predicts retention.

Why time to value matters for retention and revenue

Data from our 2025 Product Benchmark Report shows how quickly the opportunity window closes. For top performers at the 90th percentile, Day 1 activation starts around 21%. By Day 7, that drops to roughly 12%. By Day 14, it’s down to about 9%.

So you’re losing nearly half your activated users in the first week alone. Users don’t give products months to prove their worth; they make stay-or-go decisions in days, or even hours, based on whether your product delivered on its promise quickly enough.

Slow time to value wastes acquisition investment

Every user who churns before experiencing value represents wasted customer acquisition cost. If you’re spending $50 to acquire a user who leaves in three days without ever reaching their aha moment, you’re losing money on a leaky bucket.

The economic impact compounds over time. Slow time to value leads to poor retention, which drives up your blended customer acquisition cost (CAC), as you need to acquire more users to hit growth targets. Higher CAC compresses margins and makes it harder to invest in product improvements that could actually fix the underlying problem.

Fast time to value drives compounding benefits

When you optimize for time to value, the benefits extend far beyond retention metrics. Users who experience value quickly become advocates, generating word-of-mouth referrals that reduce acquisition costs. They provide better feedback because they understand what your product actually does. They also convert to paid plans faster and upgrade more readily because they’ve already seen the value.

Fast time to value also reduces support burden. Users who reach their aha moment quickly need less hand-holding and submit fewer support tickets. As a result, your team spends less time explaining basic functionality and more time helping power users get even more value.

Data insight: The link between early activation and three-month retention

Products that activate users quickly don’t just see short-term wins. They build foundations for lasting retention that show up in the data months later.

Day 1, 7, and 14 activation rates for the 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles. The day 14 activation rate for the 90th percentile is about 9%.

For half of all products, more than 98% of new users aren’t active two weeks after their first action. That drop-off velocity shows why time matters. Every day you delay value delivery, you lose more users who could have become loyal customers.

The 69% correlation between strong seven-day activation and strong three-month retention reveals how fast time to value creates the conditions for long-term retention. Users who experience the aha moment quickly develop habits around your product. They integrate it into their workflows and find additional use cases. That early win sets them on a path that leads to sustained engagement.

Products in the top quartile for early activation were overwhelmingly likely also to be top performers three months later. Conversely, products that struggled with achieving first-week time to value remained in the bottom quartiles for long-term retention, regardless of subsequent product improvements or marketing investments.

How to shorten time to value and boost retention

1. Map your current time to value by user segment. Start by measuring how long it actually takes different user types to reach their first value moment. Track this by acquisition channel, user role, company size, or whichever segments matter for your product. Enterprise users might need a different setup than individual users. International customers might face different friction points than domestic ones.
2. Identify and eliminate friction in your critical path. Every unnecessary step between sign-up and value is a potential exit point. Look for required fields that could be optional, configuration steps that could use smart defaults, or verification processes that could happen asynchronously. Each removed friction point accelerates time to value.
3. Design for value delivery, not feature completeness. Don’t try to showcase everything at once. Deliver one clear win quickly, then layer in additional capabilities as users demonstrate readiness. This “time to next value” approach keeps users climbing the engagement ladder rather than overwhelming them with options before they’ve had a chance to experience the basics.
4. Use behavioral data to personalize the value path. Different users need value in different ways. Use early signals like industry, role, or initial actions to customize which value proposition you lead with. Make the aha moment feel personally relevant rather than generic.
5. Measure outcomes, not just activity. Track whether users are achieving their goals, not just completing your onboarding steps. A user who finishes setup but doesn’t solve their problem hasn’t reached value and won’t stick around. Set up your product to measure actual outcomes.

Improving onboarding to guide users faster to their aha moment

Don’t make users set up their entire profile before they can do anything useful. Let them experience core functionality with minimal setup. Use sample data, pre-populated templates, or “try it now” flows that deliver value before asking for commitment.

The goal is to reverse the traditional onboarding sequence. Instead of “configure everything, then use the product,” aim for “experience value, then customize as needed.” Users who see what your product can do are far more willing to invest in setup time.

Enable discovery through hands-on experience

Lengthy tutorials that showcase features without context rarely work. Users forget the information by the time they need it, or they skip through just to get started. Let users discover through doing, as you guide them to complete a real task that solves their actual problem.

Provide contextual tips that appear when relevant, rather than lengthy feature tours. Show users how to accomplish their goal instead of every possible thing your product can do.

Reveal complexity gradually as users are ready

Show your users advanced capabilities only after they’ve mastered the basics. Don’t overwhelm newcomers with options when they’re still learning fundamentals. Build confidence through small wins before introducing complexity.

Each feature you reveal should come with clear context about why it matters and when to use it. Users should never wonder “Why am I seeing this now?” or “What is this for?”

Create activation checkpoints that build momentum

Break the journey to value into micro-milestones that users can achieve quickly. Celebrate each checkpoint to reinforce progress and build confidence. Each step should deliver incremental value while pointing toward the bigger payoff.

This approach helps users feel successful early and often. Instead of one distant goal that feels overwhelming, they achieve a series of small wins that create forward momentum.

Tracking the right activation metrics to measure time to value

Beyond basic activation rates, you should also track metrics that help understand and optimize your time to value, such as:

• Time to first value by cohort: Measure days or hours from sign-up to first meaningful outcome, segmented by user type and acquisition source to identify which groups reach value fastest.
• Value achievement rate: What percentage of users who start the activation journey actually reach the value moment, not just the completion rate of onboarding steps?
• Time to next value: For users who experience their first aha moment, how long does it take until they experience the second? Sustained value delivery drives retention beyond the first week.
• Early engagement depth: Track how deeply users engage in the first 48-72 hours, as depth often predicts staying power.
• Cohort retention by time to value speed: Compare 30, 60, and 90-day retention for users who reached value within 24 hours versus 1-3 days or 4-7 days to quantify the impact of faster time to value.

Examples of top industries that mastered time to value

Our 2025 Product Benchmark Report reveals how different industries approach the time to value challenge.

Financial services products in the 90th percentile have a three-month retention rate of 19.5%. Users sign up because they have immediate problems, such as debt they need to manage, budgeting crises to resolve, or investment decisions to make. The urgency is built in. Products that deliver value fast capitalize on this acute need. Slow time to value means users switch to competitors who can move faster when money is on the line.

Travel and hospitality products lead the pack with 25.6% three-month retention for top performers. Users arrive with time-bound intent, specific trips in mind, and deadlines approaching. They’re not casually exploring options, but solving concrete needs on tight timelines. Products that enable quick booking and surface relevant recommendations immediately win the race.

How to benchmark your time to value against industry leaders

Knowing where you stand relative to industry benchmarks helps you set realistic time to value goals and identify the improvements that will have the most significant impact on retention.

Use our free benchmarking tool to compare your activation rates and time to value against similar companies in your industry, region, and company size. You’ll see specific percentile rankings and understand how top performers in your space approach the speed-to-value challenge.

The benchmark data reveals patterns you might miss when looking at your metrics in isolation. You may discover your time to value is competitive, but your sustained engagement lags behind peers. Or certain user segments reach value much faster than others, pointing directly to where optimization efforts should focus.

For comprehensive data on how different products approach time to value, plus detailed activation strategies from top performers, explore the complete 2025 Product Benchmark Report.

Faster value delivery is the path to lasting growth

The data from 2,600+ companies reveals a consistent pattern across industries and company sizes: Products that deliver value quickly retain users long-term. Speed matters more than any other factor in those critical first days. Get it right, and you build loyal users who stick around and grow with your product.

So start tracking your time to value today. Identify where users are getting stuck between sign-up and their aha moment, and optimize relentlessly for speed. Your retention rates will reflect the investment.