Spent a chunk of this month checking metrics I assumed mattered and found out they didn't.

Checked AI Overview traffic on three real sites in Search Console. Zero clicks, zero impressions, across all three. The AI search panic did not show up in the data at all, backlinks and normal indexing did all the actual work.

I have been the developer founders hire, for five years. The thing that costs them most is not my rate.

It is arriving with a solution instead of a problem. Someone asks for a screen that does a specific thing. I build exactly that. It works. It gets approved. And it does not fix anything, because the real problem was somewhere else in the flow.

In February we noticed trial-to-paid conversion had dropped from 14% to 9% with no product changes. We spent two weeks looking at the product before someone suggested checking email deliverability.

We ran a seed test across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo. Results:

• Gmail (personal): 94% inbox

• Gmail (custom domain): 61% inbox

• Outlook: 78% inbox

• Yahoo: 88% inbox

The custom domain Gmail number was the killer. A large chunk of our B2B users were on Google Workspace with a custom domain. Our onboarding emails, trial expiry warnings, and password resets were landing in spam for nearly 40% of them.

I've noticed that the actual modeling often gets more attention than the boring part beforehand: figuring out what the columns mean, missing values, duplicates, weird categorical values, outliers, leakage, domain aware data cleaning etc.

Curious what other people here actually spend the most time fixing before they can start modeling.

Noticed that whenever i jump into my own thread and answer early comments the post stays active much longer.

But then i also see posts where the author never responds at all and it still trends just because users are talking to each other.

Do you guys actively reply to every comment to boost engagement, or do you just let the discussion happen naturally?