Would you rather have lower signups with high retention, or massive vanity metrics?

We used to celebrate hitting high weekly signup numbers, but looking at month-two retention always brought us right back down to earth. A huge chunk of those users were bouncing immediately because our messaging attracted people who wanted a completely different tool.

We were wasting time building features based on feedback from the wrong crowd. Once we explicitly rewrote our landing page to say what the product doesn't do our signups dropped by half, but retention doubled.

Have you ever deliberately slowed down your top of funnel growth to filter out bad-fit users?