> the signup gate becomes a decision point where I ask myself "Do I really care/want to see this?". The answer is no a non-zero amount of times and I do bounce off it at that point.
Cool. You’re not in the target, you bounce. You save time, they save time and bandwidth and get a higher quality user funnel. Everyone is happy.
That doesn't seem like the optimal way of filtering when you're just trying to get eyes on your product. That criteria doesn't have anything to do with the product itself. This is something that's actually relevant to my interests, looks cool, and I'd like to try it at some point.
I do get the desire for them to want an audience to give updates to and try to have a consistent user base. The thing that sucks is that not only do they want to email me, so does everyone else. I've never been very protective of my inbox but the volume has gotten crazy recently so that's had to change. If they let me in and then asked for my email to continue after a couple minutes I'd be more inclined to provide it.