Lily Foster

For the longest time, I measured success by how many new people clicked signup every week. It felt like winning, even though my overall user count stayed completely flat because of churn. I finally paused all outbound efforts for a week and just emailed the people who had been sticking around for a while. Their feedback wasn't about needing flashy new features; they just pointed out basic friction points that made them want to pull their hair out. Fixing those three small things did more for my retention than months of acquisition campaigns ever did. When you hit a plateau, do you double down on marketing, or do you go talk to your existing users?

Parsing messy public web data is honestly harder than building the actual core feature.

You think a website's meta tags will have standard company info and then you find sites that put random blog text in the title tag. If your tool makes a wild guess and gets it wrong the user instantly loses trust in the whole product. I've started marking scraped fields as "needs review" whenever the confidence score drops below a certain point.

Have you found a reliable way to clean up dirty data before it hits the user interface?