The night we deleted our own fake numbers
A dashboard showing a $284k pipeline that did not exist, a leaderboard of seven invented people, and a testimonial about capital that had never been raised.
On 2026-05-04 at 21:39 we shipped a commit titled "URGENT fixes: grey stripe, logo redesign, remove fake data from app." Four and a half hours later, at 02:08, we shipped its sequel: "Massive truthfulness + UX pass: kill lies, rebuild trust, fix blockers."
You do not get to write a commit message with the word "lies" in it unless something has gone genuinely wrong. Here is what had.
The dashboard greeted every visitor with a hero panel reading "Pipeline up $284k. 4 deals close in 7 days. 12 DAY STREAK." None of those numbers came from anywhere. They were typed in as design copy, the way a mockup has a fake name in it, and then the mockup became the product and nobody took them out.
The community page had a leaderboard with seven names on it. I can list them because they are in the commit body: tyler.r, sasha.k, marco.l, kira.p, dev.h, jamie.v, rita.c. Six of those people do not exist. The pipeline pages were populated with a recurring cast of imaginary companies called Northwind, Acme, Bluepeak, Mercer and Crescent, who between them had been very close to signing for weeks.
And on the marketing site there was a section called "League Receipts," describing a competitive cycle that had closed and paid out. The commit that removed it says, plainly, that it "was a lie (no past cycles exist)." Alongside it, on six separate pages, was a claim that two top-ranked reps had been matched with a growth fund. That had not happened either.
Placeholder is a decision with an expiry date
Every one of these started as a reasonable thing. You cannot design an empty dashboard. A screenshot of a CRM with no records in it looks broken, so you fill it, and the fake numbers do a real job during the design phase.
The failure is not putting them in. The failure is that "temporary" is not a property a piece of code has. It is a promise a person makes, and nothing in the system remembers it. There is no linter for intent. The fake pipeline sat there for weeks looking exactly as legitimate as the real code around it, because it was the code around it.
The fix that night drew a line I still think is the right one. Fake data stays for anonymous visitors on the marketing site, where it is clearly a product preview and everyone understands the convention. Inside the authenticated app, where a signed-in user could reasonably believe a number describes their own business, it goes. A logged-in user with no leaderboard data now sees "no one on the board yet, earn XP to appear" instead of six strangers outranking them.
The distinction is whether the reader could mistake the fiction for a fact about themselves. That is a rule you can actually apply at three in the morning.
The receipts, corrected
The about page was the worst of it, and fixing most of it meant making the company look smaller.
It had claimed twenty-one months of operation, 3,840 BDMs, and $1.2M in the last cycle. Those were replaced with three months, zero outside capital, and one engineer.
I should be straight about the exception, because a truthfulness post that tidies its own story is worth nothing. Not every figure on that page shrank. The same commit that deleted the invented traction numbers also put a claim about the capital partner network in their place, and that claim is not something the repository can check either. Removing six false numbers and adding one unverifiable one is a real improvement and it is not the clean sweep the rest of this post describes. The founder bio said "quit the day job in October." That was corrected to "still holding a full-time day job, building nights and weekends," which was true, and which is a harder sentence to publish than the false one. A start date of May 2025 became three months ago, as a plain prospect tracker.
The launch date moved from March 2026 to Q1 2027, and the competitive cycle numbering went from "Cycle 04" and "Cycle 03" to "Cycle 00," because zero cycles had run. There is something almost poignant about a product inventing its own history of past seasons before it has had one.
The compliance claims went the same way eleven hours later. SOC 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA came off the site entirely, since none of them were true, and were replaced with an honest description of which sub-processors handle what. A minute after that, a feature described as "voice cloning" was renamed, because it does not clone anyone's voice.
My favourite deletion is the smallest. The FAQ contained a question whose title ended with the parenthetical "(Jedi-style answer please)," and an answer written in Yoda's word order. That was an instruction to a writer that shipped to production with the answer still attached to it, and it sat on a live page for days. The commit that removed it notes, in passing, that it also had to scrub "Jedi creep" out of the security page.
One correction turned out to be accidentally autobiographical. The contact page advertised support hours of nine to six Eastern. That was changed to seven in the evening until two in the morning, because that was the truth. Months later, when we ran a histogram over every commit in the project's first hundred days, there was not a single one stamped between five and eleven in the morning. The peak hour was six in the evening. The contact page had become, without anyone intending it, the most accurate piece of documentation on the site.
There was also a real bug in there, and it is a good one. A grey stripe was appearing down the side of the app. The cause was a stylesheet written on 2026-02-02, three months earlier, whose sidebar rule used fixed positioning. Fixed positioning escapes a parent's overflow clipping, so an old sidebar that had been hidden off-screen inside a container was leaking one edge of itself through the new application shell. Three-month-old CSS, reaching through two redesigns to draw a grey line on the screen.
I would rather have shipped a product that never needed this commit. But of the two available options, "we wrote down numbers we had not earned" and "we wrote down numbers we had not earned and left them there," only one of them has a fix.
The numbers on the site are smaller now. They are also ours.
— DealArena Team