One thing that's surprised me while talking to founders:
The problem often isn't a lack of leads.
It's not knowing which leads actually matter.
Two people can sign up for the same product on the same day.
One is actively evaluating solutions and will buy within weeks.
The other is just curious and never comes back.
On the surface, they look identical.
Most teams spend a lot of time trying to get more traffic, but much less time understanding who is showing real intent.
I'm curious:
What has been the most reliable signal for you that a user is genuinely interested and not just browsing?
This hits for tool builders especially. When I look at who signed up for my last project, the signals that actually predicted "will use it more than once" had almost nothing to do with how they found the tool — they were all about what they did in the first 10 minutes.
The curious-browser does one thing and leaves. The active-evaluator tries to make the output their own — they paste their own repo, change a template, download the result. That self-customization behavior in the first session was the clearest predictor I found.
The hard part: most analytics tools count both equally as "signups." Behavioral segmentation inside the product, not acquisition channel, is where the signal was.
This resonates. We've noticed a similar pattern in conversations with founders.
A signup tells you someone was interested enough to click. It doesn't tell you whether they're actually evaluating the product.
The actions that seem to matter are the ones that require a bit of commitment—uploading their own data, customizing something, inviting a teammate, connecting a workflow, or coming back with a specific use case in mind.
That's also why I've become skeptical of looking at acquisition channels in isolation. Two users from the same source can have completely different intent levels based on what they do in their first session.
The challenge is that most dashboards still treat both as "one signup," even though their likelihood of becoming a customer is completely different.