TTV — Time to value
The time between a customer signing up and getting something out of the product that genuinely matters to them. It is not setup time and it is not the first session: it is when the product has solved, for the first time, the problem they paid for.
What is time to value?
The time between a customer signing up and getting something out of the product that genuinely matters to them. It is not setup time and it is not the first session: it is when the product has solved, for the first time, the problem they paid for.
Also: TTV · time to first value
Configuring is not getting value
The most expensive confusion around this metric. Somebody creating their account, inviting their team and connecting an integration is progress, not value. Value arrives when that work gives something back: the first report used in a meeting, the first ticket that closes itself. Measuring the first gives good numbers and customers who do not renew.
Why it matters
What changes in a SaaS
It is the metric that best predicts first-year retention. A customer who takes weeks to reach their first result has plenty of time to regret it, and every day that passes without getting anything is a day somebody on their team asks whether this was worth it.
Time to value in detail
Defining what the moment is
Before measuring, decide what counts as first value in your product, and write it down. Without that definition everybody measures something different: sales looks at the signature, product looks at the first login, and support looks at when people stop writing in.
Where the time goes
Almost never in the product. It goes on waiting for customer data, waiting for somebody on their team to have a gap, and on the back-and-forth resolving questions that are documented but cannot be found. All three belong to support and documentation, not engineering.
How to shorten it
By reducing what has to be decided before starting. A sensible default that can be changed later is worth more than a six-step wizard that forces people to choose correctly from the outset.
How Intake handles it
Questions about time to value
What is a good time to value?
It depends so heavily on the product that comparing across companies says nothing. What is useful is measuring your own, splitting it into stages and seeing which one people get stuck at: that is where the work is.
Can it be measured without instrumenting the product?
Yes, by hand and on a sample. Take the last twenty customers, look at the date they signed and the date they first performed the action you defined as value. Twenty cases is enough to see the pattern.
Related terms
A term on its own is only half understood. These come up in the same conversation.
Onboarding
Onboarding is the process that takes a customer from signing up to getting their first real result with the product. It covers the initial setup, the data import, training the team and everything else needed for usage to become routine.
Health score
A health score is a rating that summarises, in one number, how likely an account is to stay a customer. It combines usage, adoption and relationship signals — how many people log in, which features they use, how many tickets they open, how they respond — into something that can be sorted highest to lowest.
Churn
Churn is the percentage of customers — or of revenue — lost in a period. It is the metric that decides whether a subscription business genuinely grows: with high churn, every new customer only fills the hole left by another.
CSM — Customer Success Manager
A Customer Success Manager (CSM) is the person responsible for making sure a customer gets the outcome they signed up for. They work proactively across a book of accounts, own adoption, retention and expansion, and their success is measured in renewals, not in closed tickets.
NRR — Net revenue retention
Net revenue retention measures what a group of customers bills today against what they billed a year ago, counting what was lost to cancellations and contractions and what was gained from expansion by those same customers. It excludes new customers: it measures what the existing base does.
QBR — Quarterly business review
A QBR is a periodic meeting between vendor and customer to review what has been achieved with the product, what has not, and what will happen over the coming months. It leans on usage data and outcomes, not on a deck of new features.
