Field notes. John Arndt, Soxoa. Published .
A dashboard that says "7 signups this week" tells you almost nothing when you're small. Seven is small enough to know by name, and the useful question is about each of them: did Dana connect her data? Did Marcus ever come back after creating an account?
signup-pulse replaces the total with the people. It has three parts, and they're worth building in this order.
1. An email the moment someone signs up
Not when they finish onboarding. When the account is created. The people who quit halfway through setup are the ones you most need to hear about, and an alert tied to onboarding completion never mentions them.
A few details matter more than they seem to:
- It must never block signup
- The alert sends in the background after the account is saved. If the mail provider is down, the customer never notices.
- It sends exactly once
- Retries and duplicate hooks are normal. A small "already alerted" record before sending stops the double emails.
- An hourly backstop
- Anything created without an alert gets one late, instead of never.
- Bots get their own line
- Filtering them silently hides a real problem. Counting them separately keeps the people list clean and shows you the bot traffic too.
2. A morning list, people first
The digest opens with who's new since yesterday, then lists everyone from the last 30 days with the furthest step they reached and when they were last active. Anyone who hasn't moved in a few days is marked stuck.
Operational numbers go on one line at the bottom, and only the ones that aren't zero. The subject line never says "0 new signups". If nothing happened, it says so in one sentence or doesn't send at all.
Before any of this works you have to define the journey with the owner: created account → verified email → first project → first result → paid, or whatever the real steps are for your product. That conversation is often the most useful part of the exercise.
3. Walk the funnel yourself
Then the review. Create a new account through the real public path, on a laptop and on a phone, and write down every step, how long it took and what was confusing. Put the real stage counts next to it. For each step where people stop, write what you saw, the likely cause and one specific fix: a field to remove, a default to set, an email that never arrives, a button nobody can find on mobile.
Rank the fixes by people affected and effort. Anything you couldn't reproduce is labeled a hypothesis. Then the owner picks which fixes to make.
What it won't do
It never emails, messages or retargets your signups. Alerts go to you. It stores only what it needs: email, timestamps and stage. And it doesn't dress up small numbers. "One of seven reached a first result" is the sentence that gets the product fixed.
Get the skill
signup-pulse is part of the free Soxoa Ops plugin for Claude. In Claude Code, add the marketplace with /plugin marketplace add johnarndt/soxoa-claude-plugins, then run /plugin install soxoa-ops@soxoa-plugins. You can read the skill on GitHub before installing it, or copy its folder into ~/.claude/skills/.
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