👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.

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We need to talk about the personal emails plaguing our signup forms.

Personal emails have become a ubiquitous annoyance for free funnels, demo requests, events, and lead magnets. We’re usually left with two (bad) choices to deal with them: either block personal emails entirely or allow personal emails and then exclude these from reporting. Both approaches assume personal emails are essentially worthless.

This isn’t a new issue, to be clear. People have signed up with personal emails for as long as there have been form-fills. But the personal email problem seems to be getting (much) worse.

At vibecoding darling bolt.new, for instance, 98% (!) of signups come from personal emails. That isn’t a typo. My conversations with growth leaders have revealed that AI-native products see about 75-90% of signups are personal emails.

What’s changed:

But personal emails are far more valuable than you’d expect – if you’re able to de-anonymize them. And de-anonymizing personal emails has gotten way more accurate and way less expensive than it used to be. I’m going to walk you through exactly how to turn personal emails into your next biggest pipeline source.

I’ve previously featured the growth story of bolt.new, which spent seven years struggling to stay alive and then struck gold with an AI app builder. The startup is now at over $50M ARR and adds 20,000+ signups per day. They’ve been doubling down on enterprise and are adopted by three-in-four of the Fortune 500.

The tricky part: 98% of user signups are from personal email addresses. Many of these signups are from folks at large enterprises and simply trialing the product before going through procurement. The team wanted to identify these opportunities early so they could run more targeted GTM plays.

They ran the enrichment through Freckle, a next-gen data enrichment provider, and unlocked a goldmine: $1.7M of B2B pipeline in the first four weeks. 23% of bolt.new’s B2B pipeline now comes from personal email users.

There’s been an AI wave reaching more and more product categories. While these categories are seeing hyper-growth today, they’ll need to convert signups to become stickier and higher-value B2B customers if they want to avoid crippling AI churn. Many people are trying multiple products in a category before choosing their preferred vendor, and there’s a race to identify the best-fit prospects and win them over before a competitor does.

What’s less well known is that the enrichment rate on personal emails has seen a step-function improvement over the past year. Many PLG SaaS companies tried enriching their personal email signups in the past only to give up: the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. These companies usually didn’t see enough coverage or the unit economics on enriching personal email signups didn’t make sense.

Because the volume of enrichments is so high, companies need to make sure the amount they spend on someone who’s not a good user (let’s face it: most personal email signups) is justified by the amount they spend on those who are. This math is finally adding up.

De-anonymizing personal emails could be done in-house (DIY solutions) or outsourced to a purpose-built tool. The steps look something like this:

The steps above are purposefully vendor-agnostic. More sophisticated GTM teams could DIY this with a workflow automation tool (ex: n8n, Make) and tailor the workflow to their exact specifications. The downsides would be the opportunity cost along with the ongoing maintenance of the workflow (API rate limits, complex waterfalls, managing connections with external data providers). Others may opt to run this workflow via a more GTM-specific automation tool like Freckle or Clay.

Freckle founder and CEO Nathan Merzvinskis tells me that North America-focused companies see a personal email enrichment rate of about 55%. Companies with global user bases see a lower rate of about 45%. The accuracy is usually quite high (95%+) when an email is successfully enriched.

OK, now the fun part: acting on the data to generate pipeline without being (too) creepy. I asked Nathan which GTM plays are working for Freckle’s customers and added a couple of my favorites as well.

GTM play 1: Outbound comms to engage user as a B2B opportunity

A basic play is simply to start enrolling ICP-fit personal users into outbound comms across email and LinkedIn. There’s a risk that these messages come across as “creepy” – after all, the user chose to sign up with their personal email and may want to stay anonymous. Getting this right all comes down to the delivery.

I’d go with a sales-assist motion here, offering to help users get the most out of the product. If someone bites and schedules a meeting, the rep can then shift into light discovery and qualification around a potential enterprise opportunity.

I personally like to adjust the outbound comms depending on the product readiness. Product signals you might consider:

Those with a strong ICP fit and strong product signals should be prioritized by sales first: these product qualified leads are the low-hanging fruit. Those with strong ICP fit but weak or no product signals likely require a different approach including a persona-based nurture cadence or an onboarding assistance offer.

GTM play 2: ABM to user’s colleagues & educate user on collaboration

The next level is to run account-based marketing to the user’s colleagues, driving more product adoption within target accounts that already have at least one existing user. These automated campaigns would include targeted ads via LinkedIn or Meta along with automated lifecycle campaigns via email to the initial user. A typical hook: collaborating with colleagues who are already using the product.

GTM play 3: Identify and action on multi-threaded accounts

It’s not uncommon for an account to have multiple users, some of which have signed up with a personal email and others of which have signed up with work emails. The goal is expansion – rolling up the individual users into a team-wide or Enterprise plan.

These accounts are clearly product-qualified; however, there’s real work to multi-thread to ultimately link accounts. This data should be surfaced to the rep who owns the account and users should get enrolled in a collaboration-based lifecycle campaign.

GTM play 4: Identify and action on multi-threaded accounts

Multi-threading accounts may pose a challenge if existing users aren’t the actual buyer or decision-maker. The next step is to find the likely decision maker(s) and go top-down. This is effectively intent-based outbound where the intent signal is existing product usage within the account.

The message might look something like this:

I’d recommend enriching a test batch of your personal email signups to validate that these include high-value accounts within your ICP and that these can be enriched at a viable cost-per-lead. If that checks out, start with the first GTM play. Measure responses to the outbound campaigns (opens, replies, meetings booked) and conversion to qualified pipeline.

Assuming the first GTM play checks out, shift toward more complex plays and greater automation. Engaging peers, multi-threading accounts, and going top-down are more time- and resource-intensive. But they can also unlock net-new demand from your dream customers. And it could be what turns personal emails into your next biggest pipeline source.

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