The Day We Fixed Our Signup Pipeline (opens in new tab)

It started with a graph. Our signup numbers were climbing every week. The team was excited—growth was happening. But something felt off. A lot of those "users" never came back. Their email addresses looked strange. And our activation rate was quietly dropping. One Friday afternoon, I decided to dig into the data. What I found was not growth. It was noise. The Diagnosis I ran a simple query: group signups by IP address, count them, and sort descending. The top result: one IP address had regist...