Nothing. Blank. Emptiness. It takes much more energy to start filling this empty state with your data than it would do if there were already data there for you to read. (This is the same reason that staring at a blank piece of paper before you had to fill it for your art exam in school sucked, by the way.) Replacing empty states I’ve seen several businesses deal with the problem of empty states by showing their excited new users messages like “You haven’t set up any projects yet.” Or, worse yet, “You don’t have any friends.” Although well-intentioned, these messages don’t help the user get started with your product. All they achieve is to highlight the user’s solitude in a rather demeaning way. Sounds like a recipe for churn. But in every problem lies an opportunity. And in this case, an empty state is a chance to show customers what life on your product could be like — if they were using it to its full potential. Showing users templates that they can fill in is one way to solve this problem. This is how the marketing automation tool Autopilot doubled their product activation rate: by replacing empty states with customer journey templates. You can read more about Autopilot’s story here.