Your signups aren't turning into paying customers. I'll show you exactly where they leak.
ActivateFirst audits where your onboarding and landing pages lose users, proves it with real people from your target market, and validates the fix before it goes live. Built by an operator who cut CAC 74% at Constant Contact.
Eric Dewhirst, founder. 20 years turning paid traffic into activated customers.
Activation Risk - Elevated
Top finding
The OTP verification step sends users to a separate tab. 40% never return to finish setup.
“The insights were surprisingly actionable. We made a handful of changes based on the data and it moved the needle for us.”
John Stewart
Founder & Chief Growth Officer, Opinari
The problem
You're paying for traffic that never activates.
You spend on ads, content, and outbound to earn the click. Then something between arrival and first value quietly loses them. Most teams assume it's a campaign or creative problem and pour more money into acquisition. Usually the real leak is downstream, in the funnel itself, and nobody owns it. You can't fix what you can't see.
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Mobile pages that take 15+ seconds to load, so visitors bounce before your headline.
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Onboarding that asks for too much before showing any value.
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Signups that never reach the moment that turns them into a customer.
The approach
Evidence, not opinions.
Most audits are one person's heuristics. Mine start there, then go further: I put real people who match your ideal customer through your actual flow, and you watch exactly where they leak. For a redesign, I test the new version with fresh users before you ship it and compare it to your baseline, so you know the fix works before it's live.
Baseline
AI and my methodology score your onboarding and landing pages, and real ICP users go through the flow. You see where they drop.
Diagnose
I show you the specific leaks, what they cost you, and what to fix first.
Prove
For a redesign, I test the new version with real users pre-launch and compare it to the baseline. Proof, not hope.
Work with me
Ways to work together.
Score your own page
Run any page through the audit and get a score in about a minute. See where you stand.
Expert Activation Audit
A deep manual audit of your onboarding and landing pages, scored on my methodology, with prioritized fixes and a live readout.
Evidence Audit
Everything in the audit, plus five real people from your target market run through your flow, moderated and recorded. You watch exactly where they leak. Opinion becomes evidence.
Activation Optimization Project
The full loop: baseline, redesign, test the new version with real users before launch, and a before/after comparison that proves the lift.
Ongoing optimization available for teams who want it.
See the work
See the methodology in action.
I publish teardowns of real SaaS onboarding and landing flows, scored the same way I'd score yours. No login, no pitch. Just the work.
ElevenLabs - Onboarding Flow
b2b_saas · desktop
The email-based signup route throws a generic 'Unable to create account. Please try again later.' error with no diagnosis or guidance, forcing the user to abandon email signup entirely and fall back to Google OAuth — a compounding failure that adds 2–3 minutes of dead time.
Read the teardown →
ElevenLabs - Landing Page
b2b_saas · desktop
The headline 'Bringing technology to life' fails the 5-second test — it is a brand tagline, not a value proposition, and gives no indication that ElevenLabs is a voice AI product.
Read the teardown →
Canva - Onboarding Flow
plg · desktop
Email OTP verification (screens 5–15) forces users out of the Canva tab into their email client, creating a multi-minute P-Gap interruption before the user has seen a single pixel of product value — the highest abandonment point in the flow.
Read the teardown →Eric Dewhirst
Founder, ActivateFirst
Why me
Why me.
I'm Eric Dewhirst. I've spent 20 years turning paid traffic into activated customers, including a 74% CAC reduction on Lead Magnet at Constant Contact, scaled to 43,000+ accounts across four markets. I've built and sold two companies. ActivateFirst is the tool I built to do systematically what I've done by hand my whole career: find where a product fails to prove its value fast enough, and fix it. I'm the first user of everything I build.
Connect on LinkedIn →74% CAC reduction
Lead Magnet at Constant Contact. Scaled to 43,000+ accounts across four markets.
Txtify - acquired by Constant Contact
Founded and sold. 2024.
Sr. Director, Product - Constant Contact
Led the lead-generation product on a platform of 500K+ small businesses.
PickupPal
250K users. U2 and Coachella partnerships.
Find your leak.
Start with a free score, or book a call and we'll look at your funnel together.