Ask HN: Signup for service via e-mail instead of html form | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Signup for service via e-mail instead of html form

3 pointsnodesocket4 comments

I'm thinking about having my developer focused startup accept signups by having users send an inbound e-mail (signup@mystartup.com) instead of having a traditional web based form.

Using Mailgun, I can parse incoming e-mails and automagically create accounts. My thinking is that this will cut down the back and forth of going from form to email to activate. It also reduces the likelihood of signup bounce.

What are the pros and cons of this approach? Anybody tried it?

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I would just go with a typical signup process. Don't listen to all the growth hacking stuff when you're first starting out. If your service is good, people will use it. Period.

Optimizing for bounce rate comes after. I see so many people fall into this trap because they read too many growth hack stuff online. These are all correct once you get to certain point, but when you're just starting out they're nothing more than distraction.

I've been there, and learned the hard way that optimizing early is not only unproductive but actually counter-productive because:

1. Let's say your optimization effort paid off and 100 more people signed up. This only means you had a good optimization strategy and doesn't tell if your service itself is attractive or not. Which means you may feel like you have made some progress but you actually haven't. Let the product speak for itself.

2. From my experience, if you have a compelling product and just put some effort to put it out there and promote, you WILL get users.

Optimization by definition is something you do when something's already "working". You have no idea if your product works or not early on. Your goal is to find THAT out.

Many people live in their web browsers, which includes reading e-mail. The debatable gain of not going through web browser disappears here.

Then, your prospective users need to learn about your service and how to sign up from somewhere, likely from a web page. You'll just make them go from web browser to e-mail client earlier, that's all.

And last, not many services have e-mail-only signups, so the process may be somewhat surprising and misleading.

So you don't think the context switching from html form to checking email (either web or native) to clicking activation link results in drop off and bounce?

If you're worried about that, provide both ways of confirming the activation: replying to the e-mail and clicking a link. But the switch from web browser to e-mail client will still be there, unless you think up something different.

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