Time to first value (get them to the first win)

For a dev tool, the product is the pitch. A developer tries it alone and decides in minutes. Acquisition without activation is just a faster way to lose people.

Use this when: people sign up or star the repo and then nothing, they get it working once and never come back, your docs assume the reader already understands it, or you are about to spend on a launch or a channel while the first ten minutes still leak.

The core idea

You can nail your positioning, your homepage, and your launch, and still lose everyone in the first ten minutes. For a dev tool the first run is the sale: the developer tries it, alone, without talking to you, and decides. Two gates, straight from Frankl's DREAM funnel:

• Evaluation: can they get it working over a weekend, with zero human help? (the weekend test)
• Activation: how fast do they reach their first real win, the "I'm awesome" moment (time to first value)?

Fix this before you scale acquisition. Pouring users into a leaky first run just loses them faster, and know-if-its-working will show you that retention, not signups, is the number that matters.

The two thresholds

The weekend test (Frankl). A motivated developer should get your product doing something real over a weekend, without a call, a demo, or an email to you. If they cannot, that is your single highest-leverage work, above any channel, launch, or homepage tweak.