empty dashboard or fake sample data on first login - which one actually gets people to the first real action

Third option that beats both in my experience: make the import itself the demo.

Instead of choosing between empty and fake, put the import control in the middle of the empty screen with a sample file they can download and re-upload in one click, clearly labelled as an example. They see the real flow, the data is real data moving through your real pipeline, and there is no ambiguity about ownership because they chose to load it.

The reason pure sample data goes wrong is exactly what you described - the trust problem. Once a user is unsure which rows are theirs, every subsequent screen has a small question mark on it. That is a very expensive thing to introduce in the first two minutes.

Just went through this on a much smaller product and the thing that moved my number was not the dashboard at all, it was the step before it. I was asking for company name, team size and role during signup because I thought I would want the data later. Cut all three, went straight to the import screen after email and password, and the import completion rate went up noticeably.

So before you redesign the empty state, count how many screens sit between the button they clicked and the thing they came to do. Mine was four. It should have been one.

Empty states should give an instruction, not an explanation. One sentence saying what to do, one button doing it, and nothing else on the screen. Most bad empty states are bad because they describe the feature to a person who has already decided to use the feature.

I shipped sample data and then removed it, so here is the failure mode in detail.

Sample data made the first screen look great and the activation number went up, briefly, because I was measuring the wrong thing. People clicked around, felt satisfied, and left. My real activation event is a completed import within seven days, and that number went down about six points while the shallow one went up.

What I did not anticipate: support tickets from people asking how to delete the sample project, and two people who thought the sample numbers were their own data pulled from somewhere, which was a bad thirty minutes of email.

If you do it anyway, put a persistent dismissible banner on every sample object saying what it is and offering one-click removal.

Measure time to first real action, in minutes, from account creation. Not conversion rate, not a funnel percentage - the raw distribution of that duration for everyone who ever gets there.

Mine had a spike at under four minutes and a second bump at around thirty hours, meaning people who did not do it in the session mostly came back the next evening. That told me the answer was not a friendlier dashboard, it was an email at the right time on day one. Reduced the never-imported group by roughly a third.