Trial and activation

Before measuring, find each product's trial source: start and length in the product database (for example, 14 days from signup), the account's test dates, or billing's trial_start and trial_end. In a real case, billing had a single trialing subscription in the whole base, because the trial lived in the product. A product with no trial source stays out of the metric, and that is declared.

Activation is the first event that delivers value, and it changes by product: first reply received in a prospecting tool, first message sent through a connected channel, a creator's first sale on a content platform. Write the list in a single place, with the exact event name. A product with no defined milestone is null, never activated by default.

For post-sale activation and time to first value, the anchor is the first paid charge, not the billing cycle date. Billing rewrites the cycle date forward when a subscription recovers from a failed charge. In a real case, this undid activations already earned and pushed old accounts into the wrong cohort. After the fix, the earlier series was no longer comparable and was flagged.

An account enters the denominator only if the activation event already existed when it started (the event's birth date in the instrumentation) and the observation window has closed. An account that started before the event existed is null. With no eligible account, the rate is null, not 0%.

A converted trial is a customer with a paid charge after the trial start, on any subscription. A trial subscription canceled at the end of the period is not churn: it is an unconverted trial, and it stays out of the MRR movements table. The customer may convert on a new subscription, so measuring per subscription understates conversion.

Conversion and activation are read by trial start cohort (week or month), with a fixed window (for example, conversion up to 30 days after the trial ends, activation within 30 days). The cohort month is not the MRR month. A cohort with an open window shows as partial.

The same person or company opens another account to get another trial. Link accounts by normalized phone or tax ID and treat the second as a reopening of the first, inheriting its history. Deduplicate repeated emails and usernames in the trial base before counting.

In B2B with an onboarding project, activation is the product milestone met within a deadline counted from the sale, for example by the Saturday of the fifth week after the closing week, or connection within 25 days and completion within 90 days of opening the onboarding case. The final stage of the onboarding pipeline and a logged meeting do not prove activation.

An early signal of a valuable account triggers a single alert per account. Real example: among signups in the last 45 days, a first sale within 72 hours of signup, or 10 or more buyers within 2 days of the first sale. Accounts that already have an SDR, closer, CS or CRM record stay in the table but are left out of the message.