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I thought so too, so I actually tried this. With a whiteboard app. And it didn’t exactly work, new users and engagement went down compared to having a “landing page” in front.

Only a relatively few people like you and me really want to dive in without having a story first. Turns out, to my surprise (!) that most people don’t want to dive into your app without reading about it or watching a video first.

Teachers, kids, business users, they all have different questions they want answered before they spend time trying to learn a new app, they want to know if there are reasons this can or can’t be the thing they use from now on. Learning a UI is a time investment, and people want to make sure it will be a good investment before using their time. They don’t want to be tricked into learning your UI for a week or two or more and then find out later it can’t group and copy-paste shapes, or that the price goes up, or that they can’t share they way they need, or that your app doesn’t have a on-premise installation.

Getting in quickly can have a low barrier to entry, I’m with you there, but my experience on the other side of this is that it’s not good to go directly to the app without an intro first, generally speaking.

Aside from this there’s also the fact that users who don’t intend to pay are on average way more demanding, way less patient, and way less understanding about communicating and learning the UI and dealing with bugs or misunderstandings. It was surprising for me to see from the other side how rude the free users are on average compared to the paying users.

Then build a second website which acts as a landing page for the thing you've built.

Or create a youtube channel for it.

No need to spoil the tool for everybody with marketing cruft.

> It was surprising for me to see from the other side how rude the free users are on average compared to the paying users.

In my experience, this also applies to cheap vs expensive projects (consultancy). Customers start to get really pleasant and polite when they are charged at least 100K or something like that for doing some custom software development. They get very demanding when it's below 10K.

Might be because you're talking to different sets of customers. People who are cheap vs people who know what they want is complex and are willing to pay for it.

Two issues with that

- Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is going to care about our wish for more companies to do this.

- It doesn’t work for many products. How do you just drop someone into a cloud storage product? You could give them some temporary space where they can drop some files if they want, but what do you do if they abandon them? Delete them after some time? Might confuse some customers who didn’t realize they had to actually register an account. Maybe a huge banner with a countdown would work… you start to have to solve a whole lot of problems to make it work

But so many products that are well suited to immediate usage are hidden behind layers of explanation and marketing and signup and other irrelevant barriers.

They might be irrelevant to you as a user, but are they irrelevant to the bottom line of the organizations behind the products?

And that, comrades, is yet another way to realize our economy's incentive system is misaligned with people's material needs.

Says the person with free time to write, freedom to express an opinion, food in their belly, shelter, hot water, a computer in their pocket, access to a free vaccine, yada yada yada.

What the parent comment describes is what people who aren't capable of material or intellectual contribution do to products to create the illusion of value where none exists, or to manipulate users into paying as much as possible regardless of the effective value of the product.

This stifles development of things that are actually useful. It puts money and influence in the hands of people who shouldn't have either, creating bad incentives in the market and within the company. It gives marketing a gloss of false legitimacy, allowing for all the things that have us in a feverish race to the bottom.

Everything you just touted has been achieved despite the Idiocracy fan-fic that seems to be the current mission statement of corporate America.

There's no economic incentive system without transaction costs.

In the webapp ecosystem, those transaction costs take the form of annoying signup pages and mail spam. Could be worse.

There are many categories to consider here. Three examples:

- Products that don't require any of this stuff.

- Products that require some form of registration since it stores user data remotely. The person registers so they may secure, modify, or remove that data. The handling of personal data should serve this role exclusively.

- Products that require some form of initial setup and onboarding will facilitate that setup for the vast majority of people. The user should still be able to bypass the onboarding in case their use case doesn't reflect the common use case.

When marketing becomes involved, things become problematic. That friendly offer of assistance to get started usually reflects marketable features rather than any form of genuine training. That collection of personal information is used to harass the person using the product rather than to facilitate the use of the product. (Heck, I have companies contacting me over a decade after I last used their product to try to make a sale.)

> Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is going to care about our wish for more companies to do this.

I think this is a really, really interesting phenomena: the human brain (perhaps when sufficiently institutionalized) exhibits some sort of fundamental bias toward disruptive UX that breaks flow and productivity, and this approach must be proven wrong, every time, on a case by case basis, and doesn't fundamentally internalize.

It's crazy: because it doesn't lead to higher sales, it's seen as a bad approach. WHY? "Just because."

> It's crazy: because it doesn't lead to higher sales, it's seen as a bad approach. WHY? "Just because."

If the goal of a company is to create higher sales, then it is a bad approach.

If the goal is to create a great tool used by people and not worry about adoption or supporting a large business through profit, it's probably a great idea!

I agree as a user. As a developer and businessperson though this sounds incredibly entitled - "make great software and give it to me instantly for free. I should get to keep using it and you should get nothing."

Shouldn't it be win/win? Both sides giving something to help each other? Software gets tricky I guess since it's fun to develop, and mere attention or praise is enough for many devs. And ads blur the line of "free". But the level of childish entitlement gets a little depressing sometimes.

You need customers before you can make money. It makes sense to me that you first create a user base before you try to upsell them. If the goal is to create a user base, the fewer hurdles the better.

I don’t see it as having to do with entitlement, more as a case of it being easier to standout in a crowd of options when your thing is easier to start with.

You are contributing to the good health of your society. Benefit is enjoyed by all members.

You are also advancing the art. Which is an objective good.

You could say that about doing free plumbing, free dentistry, etc.

Yes you could. In the first case anyway.

This is great advice if your goal is to get the maximal number of people using your product.

But it's not exactly clear how you plan to turn that into, say, revenue. Build it and they will come, sure. And the more leads you stuff into the top of the conversion funnel, the more conversions, right? What do you mean 'qualified' leads?

If your product's viability will rest on turning some percentage of those free users into subscribers or purchasers, then you have to do some upsell, at some point. And if they can get into the full product without any obstacles within milliseconds, you're going to have a very, very hard job getting those conversions. Meanwhile you're winning over free users who cost you money and time to serve in handling their support and feature requests, and you're bringing in ever more people who are never going to give you any money.

It is viable to build your product this way if the primary product your business sells is 'convincing investors that by building up loyal active users, and developing rich understanding of those users' behavior, you will somehow create a reservoir of value that can be sold for 10x the amount of money you're asking them to put in to keep your servers turned on for another few months'

And it's probably viable if you aren't trying to be a business at all.

But as generic 'this is how all products should work' advice, it's pretty terrible, unless your main advice is 'don't try to make a business around offering a software product unless you're primarily interested in selling engagement monetization fairytales to investors'.

You monetize when the user has value that they do not want to let go.

Ready to save your new work of art?

Or higher resolution?

Or premium features?

You do it when the user is hooked.

I was not advocating for “no revenue”.

Also it seems self evident that such advice does not apply to all software…. Do you think I’m saying this is how SAP should be sold? No…, obviously the advice applies to software suited to this approach.

‘Here’s the whole product with no tutorial or marketing crap, off you go, have fun’

‘Thanks! Oh wow, this is great!’

‘Glad you like it.’

‘I love how you don’t try to upsell me on things or push any kind of premium paid features, just give me the whole product without limitations’

‘Yeah, that’s our philosophy, let you fall in love with the product’

‘Cool, thanks. Okay, I’m gonna save my work now.’

‘$20, please’

‘I’m sorry what?’

‘$20 to save.’

‘Er… could you have mentioned this earlier? I just spent ages using your awesome product and you just let me in and I didn’t have to sign up or anything, and you never mentioned a premium upsell, so I just assumed…’

‘Yeah, I thought I might be able to trick you like that. We call it “bait and switch”. Isn’t it so much better than all that marketing BS?’

I agree, not allowing to save would be pretty asinine. But having collaboration or limiting the number of documents or the complexity of documents is totally acceptable.

It's not advice for _all_ new products. Excalidraw has a plus plan, and I'd be curious to learn if they're seeing success. I think if you make something highly highly accessible and lovable, there will be opportunities to make money. Not sure! It's just a core belief of mine. I'm also sure there are products like that that can never figure out the pivot to $.

The plus plan has been very successful from my point of view, we’ve been able to bootstrap the business and make our first hire.

The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open source model works really well for individuals, it’s hard for companies to adopt.

They want authentication, security policies, private spaces to collaborate, access control, search… all of this requires having a company behind it in practice and the open source model doesn’t work as well.

The two versions so far work really well alongside each other right now.

Impressive.

How did you get people to try the free version? What worked?

That's how the newspaper business approached the internet and it nearly killed them all. You can't do this in a competitive field where operating your platform is expensive. Excalidraw is probably run by a few people not trying to get rich and able to iterate on code at their own pace. That is an ideal situation to keep it simple. It just doesn't work for most businesses.

I was thinking this is a universal approach for all businesses but I see now it’s not.

> Just. Fucking. Let. People. Instantly. Use. Your. Full. Product.

I love that - and that's how I aim to build things now.

Excalidraw has few calls to external domains as well - just Google Analytics and Sentry.io. That's still two that can be reduced, but it's much better than most modern clustertrucks.

Yeah, we’ve been trying to keep it without calling to any external service. Both of them are optional, excalidraw will work offline and/or with an adblocker that blocks those domains.

That said, those two have been really important for the success of the project. Google Analytics is helpful to get a sense of how important it is to people and motivation for the team. The second one helped us fix a lot of edge cases that couldn’t immediately be found via normal testing.

This was an important design goal for Webhook.site, which I'm the founder of. You're instantly in the app, you get the unique URL and you're ready to do. No need to click anywhere. By now I've lost count of how many people have written to me saying they appreciate this aspect of the product.

I feel like this is the benefit of a web app, you can just simply open it without having to go through download process etc. Just being able to open a link and get started or try it out is the best part.

There is an upsell to Excalidraw+, and it's the first thing I clicked on. $7/month.