A founder shows me a dashboard. Signups look healthy, activation looks fine, and then the line falls off a cliff between the second and the fourth day.
I ask what the user gets to be by using the product, and the room goes quiet.
What Running Shoes Teach Us About Identity
Consider what Nike sells. Is it running shoes? In a way, but not in the way you think.
They sell the desire to be an athlete, and the shoes are the equipment that makes the claim credible to the person wearing them. Remember when you got your running shoes and you got all excited because from tomorrow you’re starting to run?
Your identity as a runner begins with your next run (with your brand new shoes).
Notice the order of events. You get the equipment before you have run anything, then wake up the next morning already holding evidence about who you are, and the running follows from that.
This is not a marketing trick. It is how people have always changed.
Arnold van Gennep, looking at initiation across dozens of societies a century ago, found the same sequence in all of them. A person crosses a threshold, receives an object or a mark or a new name, and from that moment everyone around them treats them as the thing they have just become.
Competence arrives later. It arrives precisely because the identity was granted first and the person then spends years making it true. In martial arts, a white belt is still a belt. The novice gets the robe on the first day and nobody imagines this means they can do anything yet.
Why Consumer Software Loses New Users
Almost no consumer software works this way.
A new user arrives into an empty screen, a tutorial, a progress bar sitting at zero, and a label describing them as a beginner. That is a probation period. It tells someone they are not yet what they came here to be and will have to earn it, and then we wonder why they are gone by Thursday. Nothing was conferred, so there was nothing to live up to.
The Artifact That Turns a First Session Into a Habit
I spent years building an augmented reality studio and the most expensive lesson of that period sat exactly here. We kept extending what the technology could do, assuming capability would carry people forward.
It did not.
What moved someone from a first session into a habit was the moment they held something they had made with it and recognised themselves in the result.
The spatial computing software we built puts digital twins of retail stores into the hands of the people who work in them. For a long time we assumed the value sat in what the system could compute. Watching the first day changed my mind.
An employee walks their own aisles with a phone, and by the end of it they are holding a three dimensional model of the store they work in. Nobody has to sell them on that model. They made it, they recognise every shelf in it, and from that afternoon onward they relate to the building as something legible rather than something they merely move through.
Every piece of analysis we shipped afterwards landed on a person who had already changed. That is the sequence, arriving in a warehouse aisle instead of a temple.
How This Works Without a Physical Artifact
Recently I have been building a longevity product, and the same sequence runs there, except nothing in it can be held in the hands. The first thing that happens when someone opens the app is a breath. Two inhales and one long exhale, the physiological sigh the body already uses to settle itself, before any content or plan appears on the screen. Twenty seconds later the person is calmer than when they picked up the phone, and they did not read a claim about calm, they felt one.
Insight has never changed anyone’s state. The body does that, which is where the evidence has to be delivered. It is the same conferral as the store map, worn rather than carried. Everything the product says afterwards is being said to someone who has already become the person it is speaking to. What opens up over the following weeks is staged deliberately, so there is always something being grown into.
What Founders Can Do on Monday
So what do you do with this on Monday?
Start by naming the thing you hand over. Call it the artifact. It is whatever the user walks away with that is theirs, recognisably made by them or delivered into them. The store map an employee built by walking their own aisles. The settled nervous system after that first breath. A badge is not one of these.
Two moves follow.
The First Move: Change What You Measure
The first is a measurement change. Most activation metrics are structural, because an analytics tool proposed them, so teams polish profile completion while nothing about a person feeling anything gets tracked anywhere. Replace it with one number. How long it takes a new user to receive their artifact, and how many of them arrive there at all.
Once that number is on the wall, arguments about the onboarding flow settle themselves, because every screen becomes answerable to the same question. Does this bring the artifact closer, or push it further out.
The Second Move: Draft the Artifact
The second move is for founders whose product cannot produce anything real in ten minutes, who usually conclude none of this applies to them. It still does. Where the user cannot make the artifact yet, the product drafts it and hands it over.
A plan assembled from four answers given in the first minute.
A first version of the thing they came here to build, generated on their behalf and immediately theirs to change.
Ownership transfers on the edit. They only have to change one line of it before they start calling it theirs.
Running shoes have one more property worth taking. They sit by the door and keep making their claim while nobody is wearing them. Software disappears the moment you put your phone away, so between sessions the artifact is the only thing still speaking on your behalf. Leave it where the person’s day already passes.
Gamification, streaks and points are fine. They keep score, and keeping score means something when there is something to count. Laid over an empty room they read as an obligation, and obligations in software get ignored first and deleted soon after.
Move the Moment of Becoming to the Front
All of this comes down to moving the moment of becoming to the front. Your user decides who they are with you inside the first ten minutes, and everything you ship afterwards is either confirmation or contradiction.
So, before the next retention sprint, ask yourself this: Who does someone get to be after ten minutes with your product, and what did they walk away holding?
Damir Firšt, tech founder and startup mentor at BIRD Incubator, co-founder of Matterless (an XR studio acquired by Auki Labs), with deep experience across AI, spatial computing, and immersive design, specialising in product strategy, fundraising narrative, and go-to-market positioning for founders turning complex technology into products the market wants to buy.
