i know exactly where users drop. no idea why

been doing growth on saas products for a few years and now building my own. this keeps happening and i need to know if it's just me being bad at this.

funnel says a big chunk of signups die at step three of onboarding. great. cool. why though.

posthog tells me that. never why. session replay gets closer, i sat through about thirty of them last month taking notes like a lunatic. you see the hover, the pause, the tab close. you still have no idea what was going on in their head.

emailed users. including paying ones. almost nobody replies. the ones who do reply are the ones who already like you, so wrong sample anyway.

the only time i've ever got a real answer was on a call where someone just told me the thing outright. took thirty seconds and was worth more than a month of dashboards. but i only got it because he happened to be on a call with me. most users you never get to ask.

and low traffic makes it worse. few hundred signups a week means even the "that" is noisy. by the time a change gets anywhere near a readable result it's been two months and i've shipped four other things on top of it.

so here's my actual process right now. see the drop. guess the reason. pick whichever fix sounds most likely. ship it. tell myself i'll check in a few weeks. sometimes i do.

that's it. that's the whole method. guessing with extra steps.

so what do you actually do. do you just cold call users until someone picks up. is there a framework i'm missing. or is everyone quietly doing the same thing and just not saying it out loud