Spent 4 months fixing our email signup flow for a 3% boost

Our welcome email sequence kept failing for a small group of users, and the error logs were a mess. It turned out to be a tiny formatting issue in our customer data import from an old system. We finally tracked it down last week after checking every step for months. Has anyone else had a simple data problem eat up that much time?

3 comments

3 Comments

phoenix_grant344d ago

Single apostrophe breaking the whole export" is such a mood. I once lost a week because a space at the end of a zip code field made our whole shipping API choke. You just stare at the data until your eyes cross.

rubysingh4d ago

Those small data issues are the worst because they hide in plain sight. We had a similar problem where a single apostrophe in a last name would break our whole billing export. It took forever to find because the error only showed up on the last day of the month. You start questioning your own code when it's just a comma in the wrong place.

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jana_hart184d ago

Saw a whole thread about this, @rubysingh. People were calling it "data gremlins" and it's too accurate.