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Comment by yosho | Hacker News Reader

Hi, I'm one of the creators of the landing page. We thought traditional beta signup pages were boring (ie. Launchrock style) so we added a "Ravn Hunt" game to our landing page. Our landing page was pretty traditional beforehand, but after the game, user conversion went up as people became more engaged, and kept playing for the invite code.

It also helps that we invite the top 10 users who achieve the highest score everyday so that people have a goal to reach to get the invite. And of course, the Facebook share button helps with spreading the word.

---edit---

Here's a pic of our old landing page http://i.imgur.com/ZhURi.png

It was pretty straight forward, full size image in the background with a simple Request Invitation button in the middle. Hope that helps.

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just to provide even more context. In our previous system, you entered your email to be in our beta queue. You could enter 3 of your friends' emails to move up the queue. Pretty standard stuff. We didn't think much of it.

In our last HN post, a reader named zem had commented that they didn't like the 3-invite system. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3194012 (click parent to see the original post). As i mentioned earlier, we saw it as pretty standard practice and hadn't given it an extra thought when we implemented it, but the comment sparked the question, how could we make beta invites more engaging when just about every other company out there is doing the same thing.

You could just have the game ask to enter your email address if you want to save your scores.

+1 or even have the game prompt you to enter your email address to play level 2.

really good point, lots of room for optimization

you're totally right... feel really stupid that we didn't do it that way in the first place!

Nah, don't feel stupid. I've just been thinking about stuff like this, where basically you can let people get going anonymously, because in some instances people are going to want to save something. it just may turn out that scores on your game is one of them, so just like entering in one's initials in the arcade, you can ask for email.

For what it's worth, I've been involved in A/B testing this exact thing to hundreds of thousands of new casual game users. You might be surprised. I would highly recommend the OP test this theory. :)

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