I shipped a daily email. The unsubscribes told me to kill it.
Two weeks ago I shipped a daily habit summary email. Last Friday I killed it. The unsubscribes told the truth my open rate wouldn't.
By David Arnowitz
Two weeks ago I shipped a daily habit summary email. Last Friday I killed it.
I'd seen the requests in feedback forms. I'd validated the idea in user interviews. I built it in a week. I shipped it with the confidence you get when five people ask for the same thing.
Open rate was fine — 42%, well above average for our list. Then I looked at unsubscribes. Three times our normal rate. People were opening the email, seeing their data laid out, and quietly walking away from us.
The diagnosis took me a few days to write down. I'd built the email on a passive consumption model — here, look at this. But the people on our list aren't passive. They're active experimenters. They want to pull insights when they're ready, not have them pushed at the same time every morning. The data wasn't telling them anything new. It was telling me I'd misread them.
“The discomfort of getting it wrong is the signal that your understanding just got sharper.”
What metric were you watching this week that just told you a truth your gut didn't want to hear?