# Marcus Delgado, VP of Product at Fieldcast — read of Activation AI, May 21 2026 > 11 years in product, currently running PLG motion at a 190-person B2B field-ops SaaS. We use Segment, Pendo, Customer.io, and Mixpanel. I have seen every onboarding tool pitch since 2017. ## How I got here Someone dropped this in the PLG Slack community with the message "anyone tried this?" No context, no endorsement, just the link. I had 12 minutes on Caltrain standing in the quiet car so I opened it. The slug said "activation-ai" and I thought, fine, another Appcues competitor, let me see what the angle is. My daughter has a soccer tournament this weekend and I'm trying to clear my to-read queue before Friday. ## What I clicked first The hero got me. "Half your signups churn before they ever see the value" is not a novel claim but the follow-up line is better than most: "Activation AI routes new users through personalized journeys, triggered by role, signup source, and product fit signals." Okay. That is a sentence that describes a real thing that real teams actually need. The demo widget in the hero that shows the routing logic live -- VP Engineering, 42 seats, first action invited two teammates, assigns path with a first-session checklist -- that is a legitimate UI and it made me lean in. ## Where I paused The four-step implementation: "Connect, day one. Drop the snippet into your product and pipe Segment or Rudderstack events. About thirty minutes if your stack is normal." I stopped there because that is either genuinely true or it is the biggest lie on the page. Every tool in this category says 30 minutes. Pendo said 30 minutes. Intercom onboarding said 45. We spent three weeks. So I kept reading to find out whether this company has earned the right to say that, and that is when the page started to fall apart. ## What I distrusted Halfway down, the tone shifts completely. There is a section called "How honest is this idea, really?" and that word -- *idea* -- is doing a lot of work I did not expect. Then I hit this: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." So. I scrolled back up. The page opens with "For VP Product and Head of Growth at 100 to 500 employee SaaS companies" which I read as: this product is for me. Then the pricing section reveals the tiers as "Browse Free / Unlock the dossier $5 / Adopt the build $99-$199." I am not buying a dossier. I am not adopting a build blueprint. I am a VP Product looking for a tool to fix my week-one drop-off. The page is selling the concept of building Activation AI to a founder or agency owner. The first half of the page speaks directly to me as if I am the end user. The second half reveals I am apparently supposed to be the person who goes and builds this thing. That is not a subtle pivot -- that is a different product entirely. And "Year-1 take-home: -$11,900" in the honest scoring section is not a confidence builder if I am evaluating whether to spend $99 to adopt this. Also, "Wishdeal adoptability score 72/100" -- I have no idea what Wishdeal is or why I should care what score they give their own idea. ## What would convince me If this were a real live product I could actually buy: one screenshot of a real Slack message from a real CS manager saying "I got the at-risk list this morning and closed two renewals I would have missed." Not a testimonial card with a stock headshot. A Slack screenshot with a company name I can search on LinkedIn. If this is genuinely a business-idea-to-buy product (which seems to be the real thing being sold): say that in sentence one. Put "We designed the go-to-market playbook for Activation AI. Buy the blueprint and build it yourself" at the top. Then everything else makes sense. Right now the page has an identity crisis that a VP Product will feel in the first 90 seconds. ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. Is there a working product I can connect to Segment today, or am I buying a plan to build one myself? Because those are very different conversations. 2. The hero widget shows a routing decision in real time. Is that a real system or a demo mockup? If real, what does the admin UI look like for defining the cohort logic? 3. The recovery trigger that fires at hour 72 -- how does that actually deliver? In-product tooltip, email through Customer.io, or does your system own the email send? Because we are not handing deliverability to a third party we have not vetted. ## Verdict: dismissive Not because the problem framing is wrong -- it is actually one of the cleaner activation pitches I have read -- but because I cannot figure out what I am supposed to do here. If you are selling me a SaaS tool, you have no customers and no product I can trial. If you are selling me a blueprint to build a business, you opened with the wrong person's pain. I am not building an activation startup. I am trying to fix my week-one drop-off by Friday. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-05-21. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*