Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I tried to click past the signup form so that I could try it out, but it gave me this:

  10 errors prohibited this user from being saved
  
  There were problems with the following fields:
  
  Password can't be blank
  Password is too short (minimum is 6 characters)
  Password is too short (minimum is 6 characters)
  Password confirmation can't be blank
  Login can't be blank
  Login is too short (minimum is 3 characters)
  Login use only letters, numbers, and .-_@ please.
  Email can't be blank
  Email is too short (minimum is 6 characters)
  Email should look like an email address.

Or, translated:

  These 10 arbitrary barriers just cost us a potential customer.

You guys offer a Free plan, fer cryin' out loud. Let us try your thing without filling in a form. It looks like a cool product, but it's 2011 and people stumbling in off the Internet have zero attention span and zero tolerance for hassle. If I can't get to a working demo with a single click from your homepage, I'm gone.

And so is a hefty fraction of your potential userbase.

> If I can't get to a working demo with a single click from your homepage, I'm gone.

Not only a demo but the actual product. Let me jump right in and start on my free 3 designs. Only ask for my info when I want to export to HTML/CSS.

Perhaps this is what you meant but I think this is really important.

Thanks -- a demo of the export tool is definitely something I'd like to implement, but doing so would have postponed the launch by a week or two. I made the decision to launch without it and that's that.

Appreciate the feedback as it helps me prioritize what to work on next.

Why would it take any more time?

If you absolutely need to have user accounts behind the scenes, you can just point your "Try It Now" button to a page that creates a dummy user record "guest6772343/dummypassword" and logs in as that user. Forward to the application, and you're done.

You can have this up and working 5 minutes from now.

EDIT: For an idea of why this is important to do, and how important it is to do it (in terms of how many more users you'll unbounce), here's a writeup of the day we accidentally launched Twiddla, and the consequences of going through the quick 5-minute login-bypass exercise I describe above:

http://www.twiddla.com/blog/2007/04/1000-signups-on-day-one....

You have to think about whether this person would ever actually become a customer of yours.

From my experience, you could spend the next couple weeks building a perfect sandbox for people who will NEVER buy your service, or you can leave the login restrictions in place, and the people who may actually become customers will certainly take a few minutes to get in there.

If they don't have the time to create a simple login, they may become real support nightmares anyway.

- They won't take the time to read instructions.

- They will think they can do things they can't and the service doesn't even provide.

- They are the people who expect EVERYTHING for free including your help.

Don't just jump on this. Remember, you are in charge. You know the service you are providing. This person already complained about something FREE, how much more of that do you really want to deal with?

You're making very unfair judgement about the types of people that might land on his site and not have the barrier of a form overcome by their perceived utility of his service.

> You know the service you are providing.

But someone landing on his site might not. Letting them in without any barrier but a click will let them see for themselves. At that point, a sign up form is no barrier because they have seen the utility.

This should not take weeks or days. If built this way from the start, it should add almost no extra time. You gain nothing by asking for this info upfront but gain plenty by not.

For the record, this person makes his living selling a few services in the same space as the original poster, and has been in the exact same position of having launched a product and watched tons of potential users bounce away because the "try it now" button asked for a single username and password.

I also run a service that gets 100% of its business as a result of people converting from free trials to paid users, and the biggest lesson I've learned from that site is that the more people you can put into the top of the funnel, the more come out the bottom. It's not a matter of getting more trial signups at the expense of a worse conversion rate. It's a matter of the conversion rate staying constant and income going up in direct proportion to how much friction you can remove from the signup process.

:) I didn't mean to offend you, so sorry. Your services appear to be SaaS, but I don't see much in terms of a design tool in your list.

My company needs a tool like what he's providing, and I had absolutely no trouble with his sign-up process.

Hey, can you shoot me an email? I'd like to ask you a few more questions off-thread.

matt@leandesigns.com

"If I can't get to a working demo with a single click from your homepage, I'm gone."

Agreed. I think I'll make this a rule for my future projects.

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