Fewer than half of the people who signed up to WishIT with email ever verified. Here's what we changed, and what any founder can steal from it.

Here's a pattern we noticed in our own product, and it might be hiding in yours too. WishIT lets you build a page where friends and family leave messages, photos and videos for someone. You can sign up two ways: with Google, or with an email and password. We expected both to work about the same. They didn't.

What the numbers showed

Since 1 July 2026, this is what we saw:

Signup method	Signed up	Verified email	Finished setup
Google	39	39	31
Email + password	40	19	15

Two caveats before anyone gets excited. This is a small sample, so treat it as a direction, not a law. And Google users show 39 of 39 verified because Google has already confirmed their email, so the comparison is about the extra step, not about Google being “better.” Still, 31 of 39 versus 15 of 40 is hard to ignore. Fewer than half of the people who signed up with email ever got verified: 19 of 40.

Why it was happening

Our old flow went like this: sign up, see a “check your email” screen, leave our site to find the email, click the link, come back. Every one of those is a place to lose someone. The email lands in spam. They get distracted. They're on their phone and the inbox is a different app. They close the tab, planning to do it later, and later never comes. We also found a second problem. When people who hadn't verified came back and tried to log in, they were shown a confusing error that made it look like they'd forgotten their password. So they assumed they'd done something wrong and left. None of this looks like a bug from the inside. The system was doing exactly what we told it to. That's what makes it expensive.

What we changed

We stopped treating verification as a locked door and started treating it as a nudge.

• People get in right after they sign up. No inbox detour. They land straight in setup.
• We still send the verification email. A small banner inside the app reminds them, with a resend button.
• We gate only the thing that matters. An unverified account can build a WishDrop and share it by link, but can't make it public, because public pages can appear on our site. That's where a fake or throwaway email could actually cost us.

The idea is simple. Ask people to prove who they are at the moment it protects something, not at the front door.

What you can take from this

If you run a product with signups, check one thing this week: how many people who create an account actually reach the first useful moment? Compare your signup methods side by side if you have more than one. A gap like ours is a sign that a step is costing you people. Then ask for each requirement in your flow: what does this protect, and is it worth the people it loses? Email verification is worth having. It's rarely worth having before someone has seen any value. We deployed this change on 9 October 2026, so we don't have results to share yet. We'll report back once there's enough data to say something honest. If you're building a product and want a second pair of eyes on your signup flow, get in touch.