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Agent skill

User Onboarding Activation

by RefoundAI in RefoundAI/lenny-skills

Help users reach their first moment of core value by optimizing the first-run experience, removing friction, and aligning product design with psychological triggers.

MITAuto-check passed

Install User Onboarding Activation

skills CLI
$ npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill user-onboarding-activation -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install RefoundAI/lenny-skills user-onboarding-activation --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/RefoundAI/lenny-skills.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/skills/user-onboarding-activation .claude/skills/user-onboarding-activation && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
user-onboarding-activation
GitHub stars
1.4k
Token cost
~2.1k tokens
SKILL.md length
1,254 words
Files
3 (incl. references)
Skills in repo
76
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

Help users reach their first moment of core value by optimizing the first-run experience, removing friction, and aligning product design with psychological triggers.

  • Works in 4 steps: Define milestones - Help the user… → Audit the funnel - Identify… → Apply behavioral design - Suggest… → …
  • SKILL.md covers How to Help, Core Principles, Templates & Frameworks and Questions to Help Users, plus 3 more sections
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

User Onboarding Activation is an agent skill from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. Help users reach their first moment of core value by optimizing the first-run experience, removing friction, and aligning product design with psychological triggers.

Its SKILL.md is about 2.1k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. The skill folder holds 3 other files, including reference files (for example `references/artifacts.md` and `references/guest-insights.md`).

The repository describes itself as: 86 product management skills from Lenny's Podcast for Claude Code and AI agents. Hiring, user research, strategy, shipping, and more. The licence is MIT.

Example prompts

  • “/user-onboarding-activation”

Workflow steps

4 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Define milestones - Help the user identify a data-backed activation metric that correlates with long-term retention.
  2. Audit the funnel - Identify high-friction steps or human-mediated gates that prevent users from seeing the product immediately.
  3. Apply behavioral design - Suggest psychological nudges like forced choice or the goal gradient effect to increase completion rates.
  4. Design for personas - Tailor the onboarding flow based on whether the user is an individual builder, a collaborator, or a financial buyer.

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit 13598cc. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

User Onboarding Activation loads about 2.1k tokens when it runs, and up to ~42k if it reads all its reference files. Until then it costs about 48 tokens; SKILL.md has 1,254 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~48
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~2.1k
With references · SKILL.md plus every file in references/, read only if the agent opens them
~42k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from RefoundAI/lenny-skills at commit 13598cc, republished under its MIT licence (© RefoundAI). 1,254 words, ~2,088 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/user-onboarding-activation/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder). This skill also uses 2 other files; get the full folder from GitHub.
name
user-onboarding-activation
description
Help users reach their first moment of core value by optimizing the first-run experience, removing friction, and aligning product design with psychological triggers.

User Onboarding and Activation

Bridge the gap between initial signup and realized value to maximize long-term retention.

Help the user with user onboarding and activation using insights from 15 guests and posts across Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter.

How to Help

  1. Define milestones - Help the user identify a data-backed activation metric that correlates with long-term retention.
  2. Audit the funnel - Identify high-friction steps or human-mediated gates that prevent users from seeing the product immediately.
  3. Apply behavioral design - Suggest psychological nudges like forced choice or the goal gradient effect to increase completion rates.
  4. Design for personas - Tailor the onboarding flow based on whether the user is an individual builder, a collaborator, or a financial buyer.

Core Principles

Onboarding is the highest leverage growth area

Adam Fishman: "Onboarding is the only part of your product experience that a hundred percent of people are ever going to touch. Good luck getting a hundred percent feature adoption of anything else in your product, right? But onboarding is the thing that you have to go through in order to use the product. It's also the first opportunity that you have as a company to deliver on the promise that you made out in the marketplace."

Since 100 percent of users experience the onboarding flow, any improvement here has a compounding effect on every subsequent stage of the funnel.

Design for the lazy, vain, and selfish user

Anuj Rathi: "So there's very interesting insight that I heard from Scott Belsky from Adobe, and then now, he's doing very interesting stuff, and that stayed with me which was you have to think about users on modern internet consumers having three attributes. So they are lazy, they are vain, and they're selfish."

Assume users have limited attention and want immediate personal benefit; the product must deliver a wow moment quickly to overcome entrenched habits.

Drive toward a single high-value action

Kristen Berman: "We worked with one medical on how to increase setting doctor's appointments right away during the onboarding, and that worked and drove it up by 20%."

Structure the flow to prompt the one core action most closely linked to long-term retention as soon as the user signs up.

Optimize for the first mile of impatience

Scott Belsky: "In the first 30 seconds of using a new product, you are lazy, vain, and selfish. You want to get it done super quickly. You want to look good to your colleagues or to your friends. You don't want to have to watch a tour or read anything, really endure any learning curve whatsoever."

New users are in a state of high impatience; you must help them feel successful within the first 30 seconds of engagement.

Reduce cognitive load through immersive guidance

Lauryn Isford: "So, what you've probably experienced if you signed up for Airtable recently or what you might experience if you create a new account soon is we've built an immersive wizard that we called Guided Onboarding that helped guide you through setting up your first workflow on Airtable, and in doing that reduced the cognitive load of getting started, helped you make more progress faster, and created scaffolding that more than 90% of customers would benefit from to be able to get up and running on a product that's pretty complicated."

Use wizards and personalized scaffolding to guide users through their first meaningful work instead of leaving them with a blank screen.

Ground activation in retention data

Hila Qu: "Two, you want to understand you usage behavior of those free users, which features do they use and which features kind of correlates with a higher conversion rate, retention rate, all of that. If you don't have a foundation of data and understanding of how to analyze those data, you are giving a way of free product for nothing."

An activation milestone is only valid if data proves that users who reach it have significantly higher retention or conversion than those who do not.

Treat every tap as a high-cost resource

Nikita Bier: "Mobile apps have such a low margin for error when it comes to designing them. Because I have this dogmatic view that every tap on a mobile app is a miracle for you as a product developer because users will turn and bounce to their next app very quickly."

In mobile and scarce-attention environments, every unnecessary interaction increases the risk of bounce, so every step must be essential.

Show full SKILL.md (518 more words)Show less

Templates & Frameworks

  • 8 Tactics to Increase Activation Rate (What is a good activation rate) - The eight most commonly cited tactics for improving activation rate, with dozens of real-world examples from survey respondents.
  • 5-Step Behavioral Design Process (How behavioral science can boost your conversion rates) - An end-to-end process for applying behavioral science to product development, from research through experimentation
  • Three-Step Activation Metric Discovery Process (How to determine your activation metric) - A structured three-step process for identifying and validating your product's activation metric, moving from qualitative brainstorming to quantitative validatio
  • Onboarding Friction-Value Framework (Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business) - A mental model for thinking about onboarding friction as a feature, not a bug — the goal of onboarding is activation, not completion
  • Day 1 Commitment / Mental Model Principle (How behavioral science can boost your conversion rates) - Embedding behavioral nudges and commitments into the core product onboarding on day one rather than adding them as afterthoughts later
  • Four B2B Aha Moments Framework (Five steps to starting your product-led growth motion) - A multi-persona aha moment framework for B2B PLG products that goes beyond individual user activation to cover team, buyer, and paid-customer moments
  • Ben Williams' Aha vs. Habit Distinction (How to determine your activation metric) - Framework distinguishing between the 'aha moment' and the 'habit moment' in B2B PLG SaaS activation, with guidance on identifying user-level actions that feed t
  • 5 Common Mistakes When Setting Activation Milestones (What is a good activation rate) - The most frequent errors companies make when defining their activation metric.
  • Onboarding Improvement Checklist (How to increase your product's retention) - Key questions to ask when improving your onboarding to increase retention

See references/artifacts.md for the full list with details.

Questions to Help Users

  • "What is the specific action that separates users who stay for six months from those who churn in week one?"
  • "Does a user see the core product value within the first 30 seconds of their experience?"
  • "Are there any human-mediated gates or sales calls preventing users from trying the product immediately?"
  • "What is the current success rate for users reaching their first activation milestone?"
  • "Are you asking users questions during signup that make the product feel more tailored to their needs?"
  • "How does the onboarding experience change for a solo user versus a team collaborator?"

Common Mistakes to Flag

  • Measuring activation by signup instead of value - Getting a user to create an account is not the same as getting them to realize why the product is useful.
  • Providing a blank slate experience - Empty states increase cognitive load and force users to do the hard work of figuring out where to start.
  • Setting the activation bar too low - If 80 percent of users reach your activation milestone but retention is still low, the milestone is not a meaningful indicator of value.
  • Allowing users to skip critical setup steps - Initial curiosity is the peak moment of user motivation, and letting them skip setup often leads to failure later when they lack context.

Deep Dive

For all 50 sourced insights from 15 guests, see references/guest-insights.md

  • Growth Model
  • Acquisition Channels
  • Retention Engagement
  • Referrals Word Of Mouth

© RefoundAI, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 2 other files (references) in skills/user-onboarding-activation of RefoundAI/lenny-skills.

  • SKILL.md
  • references/artifacts.md
  • references/guest-insights.md

Open the folder on GitHubat commit 13598cc

Compare with similar skills

User Onboarding Activation next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

User Onboarding Activation compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
User Onboarding Activation this skillRefoundAI/lenny-skills1.4k—~2.1kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Onboarding ActivatorLeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills2.2k—~5.3kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Onboardingsickn33/agentic-awesome-skills47k1 repos~1.8kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Onboardalirezarezvani/claude-skills28k—~1.3kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Codebase Onboardingaffaan-m/ECC276k3 repos~2kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Contributor Onboarding DocDonchitos/Claude-Code-Game-Studios26k—~1.4kAutomated safety check: PassMIT

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Questions about User Onboarding Activation

What does User Onboarding Activation do?

Help users reach their first moment of core value by optimizing the first-run experience, removing friction, and aligning product design with psychological triggers. User Onboarding Activation is an agent skill from RefoundAI/lenny-skills. Help users reach their first moment of core value by optimizing the first-run experience, removing friction, and aligning product design with psychological triggers.

How do I install User Onboarding Activation in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill user-onboarding-activation -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/user-onboarding-activation in RefoundAI/lenny-skills) into .claude/skills/user-onboarding-activation in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install User Onboarding Activation in Codex?

Run `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill user-onboarding-activation -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (skills/user-onboarding-activation in RefoundAI/lenny-skills) into .agents/skills/user-onboarding-activation in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use User Onboarding Activation in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add RefoundAI/lenny-skills --skill user-onboarding-activation -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/user-onboarding-activation, .gemini/skills/user-onboarding-activation, .github/skills/user-onboarding-activation and .opencode/skills/user-onboarding-activation in your project.

What does User Onboarding Activation need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: User Onboarding Activation is instructions for the agent only.

Does User Onboarding Activation access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is User Onboarding Activation safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does User Onboarding Activation use?

User Onboarding Activation is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does User Onboarding Activation use?

About 2.1k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 8.4k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full. Its references folder adds about 39k tokens, read only when the agent opens those files.

What are the alternatives to User Onboarding Activation?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with User Onboarding Activation: Onboarding Activator (LeoYeAI/openclaw-master-skills, 2.2k stars), Onboarding (sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills, 47k stars), Onboard (alirezarezvani/claude-skills, 28k stars) and Codebase Onboarding (affaan-m/ECC, 276k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains User Onboarding Activation?

RefoundAI (a GitHub organization) maintains it in RefoundAI/lenny-skills, which has 1,382 GitHub stars. The repository holds 76 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on July 16, 2026.

Source: RefoundAI/lenny-skills on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.