Why vanity signup metrics almost killed our early growth

Watching a massive wave of new signups roll in every morning feels amazing until you check your active user retention and realize 90% of them never even finished onboarding.

We spent months tweaking our top-of-funnel acquisition completely ignoring the massive holes where people were dropping off.

Shifting our entire team's focus from raw registration numbers to weekly active milestones was painful but it saved our product.

What metric finally made your team stop chasing signups and fix activation?