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Comment by limmeau | Hacker News Reader

Have you thought about adding a mode in which anonymous users can just start using the service (but their edits are lost when they forget the URL), like Etherpad used to have?

When I read that I had to subscribe just to try it out (just to see if it does anything I can't also have with a personal wiki or rememberthemilk) and that it would be $5/mo anyway, I lost interest.

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We had been throwing around the idea of creating a quick demo that doesn't require signing up and doesn't persist your data. Recently we decided that we wouldn't implement that for now because we consider it a feature that your data persists in one place and want the trial to be full-featured. We also didn't want anyone to be confused about whether the data gets saved ("so I put some stuff in Atombox and now it's gone?").

I like your idea of persisting the data and using a URL as an access key, though. I hadn't thought of that.

Do you think a screencast would be sufficient to get people over the initial stand-off of not wanting to sign up?

Thanks!

A screencast is better than nothing, but for me, nothing beats being able to toy around with your user interface to get a first-hand impression of how fun it is to use, especially if the webapp is some wiki-todo-crossover. Perhaps you could offer a read-only view of an example collection?

I understand. I like being able to try things out too. I think you're right: we'll have to make some sort of interactive demo.

You said above that your biggest hesitation to signing up for a trial is that it's $5/month afterwards. Do you think you would have had less hesitation if we were doing something like this?

free: full-featured up to 128 atoms, with sign-up

$5/month: full-featured up to some reasonable limit on atoms (on the order of hundreds of thousands, a practical limit to guard against abuse)

Probably less hesitation, yes.

That's fair enough. Thanks for your help.

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