Forty free trial signups and zero converted, where do I look first First Customers

Half never coming back after day one is your entire problem and it happens before pricing is even relevant. You have an activation problem, not a conversion problem.

Define one action that means someone has actually used the thing, the moment where they see it work on their own data. Then measure what percentage reach it on day one. If that number is under about a quarter, nothing downstream matters.

Concretely I would do three things this week. Watch five session recordings end to end, painful but the fastest diagnostic there is. Email every one of the 20 who bounced with a single question, what were you hoping to do when you signed up. And put a real human onboarding call on the confirmation page for the next 20, even if it does not scale, because you need to hear where they get stuck in their own words.

Fourteen days with no card is also long enough for the trial to disappear from someone's memory. Most people evaluate on the first day or never. Shorter trial, or trial that starts when they hit the activation action rather than when they sign up, converts noticeably better in my experience.

Do not skip the boring version of this. Ring five of them. Not email, ring. Ten minutes each, ask what they were doing before they found you and what they went back to. I got more from four of those calls than from six weeks of analytics.

One counterweight to all this: 40 signups is a very small sample. Nothing you learn from it will be statistically anything. Treat it as 40 conversations you have not had yet rather than as a dataset.

Second thing worth checking: where did the 40 come from. If they arrived from a directory listing or a general launch post, they are curious rather than in pain, and curious people never convert regardless of what you build. Twelve signups from people who described a specific problem to you first will out convert 200 tourists.