activation

activation is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from cbrock84/headcount. It costs 74 tokens per session (651 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to helping new users reach their first useful result after signing up, through signup design, onboarding, and a shorter path to value.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to improve signup forms and onboarding, diagnose why users do not become active, and reduce time to first value.
Why use it?
It addresses the point where interested users abandon a product before they experience its benefit.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the revenue plugin — 10 skills shipped together

About the project

headcount is an organization of independently installable Claude Code plugins, each grouping skills for a department such as finance, security, or demand generation. Claude Code users install the departments they need and invoke their skills for specialized work; the catalogue entries are skills and related agent tooling from that organization.

cbrock84/headcount · 1,247 stars · on GitHub

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cbrock84/headcount/activation
Any agent
npx skills add cbrock84/headcount --skill activation
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cbrock84/headcount

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install revenue, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 10 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for activation

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/activation.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/activation)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cbrock84/headcount/activation"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cbrock84/headcount/activation.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 74 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 651 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00074 $0.00651
Opus 5 $0.00037 $0.00326
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00130
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00065

Measured yesterday against content hash bdfd93459184, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

activation scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/revenue/skills/activation/SKILL.md · 66 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 66 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Activation

Acquisition spend is wasted downstream of a weak activation. This is usually the cheapest place to improve revenue and the least worked on.

Define the activation moment

Name the specific thing a new user does that predicts they will stay — not "logged in twice," but the action that delivers the value they came for. Find it in the data: compare what retained users did in week one against what churned users did.

Everything in onboarding exists to get people to that moment faster. Without it defined, onboarding becomes a feature tour.

Signup

Every field costs conversion, and each one must earn its place. Ask for what is needed to deliver value now; collect the rest later, in context, when the reason is obvious.

  • Defer email verification past first value where the product allows it.
  • Never ask for payment details before value is delivered unless the model requires it.
  • Show progress on multi-step flows, and let people finish later without losing work.
  • Errors inline and specific. A form that rejects on submit without saying which field is where people leave.

Onboarding

The goal is the first real outcome, not a completed tour.

  • Use their data, not sample data. The moment someone sees their own information in the product is the moment it becomes real.
  • One action at a time, each visibly advancing toward the outcome.
  • Skippable, resumable, and repeatable. Forced linear onboarding fails everyone whose situation differs from the assumed one.
  • Empty states do the teaching. They are the most-seen screens in a new account and usually the least designed.

Checklists work when the items lead to real value and the list can be dismissed. They fail when they are busywork.

Diagnosing

Instrument each step and find the largest drop. Then watch session recordings of people who dropped there — the quantitative data says where, and only observation says why.

Common causes, in rough order: asked for too much too early, value not visible before effort required, an empty product with no path out of it, and a required integration nobody has permissions for.

Read the full file on GitHub · 66 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 66 lines · 74 tokens per session scan A bdfd93459184

Subscribe to this mod's changes

activation is a skill published in the GitHub repository cbrock84/headcount (1,247 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 74 tokens to every session and 651 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-09-03.

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