👋 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.