We removed the login wall. CPA dropped 50% overnight.

Every growth advisor we talked to said the same thing:
"Capture emails early. Gate your product behind signup."

So we did. We built a beautiful onboarding flow that asked for email before showing any value.

It was a disaster.
A user left one comment that I couldn't shake:

"I hit a login wall before seeing any value. Trust broke before it even started. I left."

We deleted the login wall. Within 24 hours, our CPA dropped exactly 50%.
Here's what we learned from the experiment and why I think the "capture emails early" advice is wrong for a specific type of product:

The anxiety problem nobody talks about.
Founders who come to validate ideas aren't casual browsers. They're already anxious. They have a specific question ("is this idea stupid?") and they need a fast answer. Putting a signup wall in front of that answer doesn't feel professional it feels like a trap. The emotional state of your user changes everything about what friction is acceptable.
Value-first converts better than gate-first but only when your core value is fast to deliver.

If your product takes 20 minutes to show value, gating early makes sense. If it can show value in under 60 seconds, gating early actively destroys conversion. We were in the second category and treating ourselves like the first.
The email you get after value is worth more than the email you get before.
A user who's already seen your product work and then gives you their email is significantly more likely to convert. We were optimizing for the number of emails, not the quality.

We're still early (no revenue yet). But this single change is the clearest signal we've gotten that we were solving the right problem in the wrong order.
Has anyone else run this experiment? Curious whether the 50% CPA drop holds across different product types or if we just got lucky with our specific audience.