I’d also challenge your line of reasoning about what constitutes a user for your service. I hear what you’re saying about ignoring bad (non-paying) users in the case of SaaS products etc. but this is literally a blogging aggregator without a network. Get the network going by reducing all the friction in the world and worry about the rest later. 6 man months is not a lot of time for a product. There’s a whole “free” internet just a click away.
The good news is it does seem like there is market for this and as OC pointed out there are ways to make iterations and improvements that could get people to sign up. Keep moving! Good luck!
Keep in mind that most products are not successful and thus, in theory, "not worth putting in all this effort".
The feedback from people saying that they bounced because of registration is a signal that you can choose to address or ignore. If _enough_ people bounce before they can see the value, then ignoring the signal means you're effectively giving up on this becoming viable. Another alternative, though, is to find more ways to demonstrate the value before registration is required to make sure you're not losing people too early in the sales funnel.
I feel like asking people to look at it from your perspective is not a great attitude in product management, which is more about figuring out the prospective customer's perspective and making sure you're offering something they want.
As another example, I was interested in Matter/Readwise reader apps. Matter has a very limited freemium version, Readwise doesn't. I tried Matter, I liked it, gave them my money. Maybe Readwise is better, who knows, but I didn't even give it a chance since I wasn't able to check if it's going to be useful for me.
Maybe I'm a cheapskate so I don't want to "screw" myself with paying for a month of Readwise and checking what it offers or maybe the freemium model really works better.
I also bounced after getting signup clicking #programming FYI.
Either make those 3-5 categories free or make them with like 24h refresh because so far I saw that your page has 5 not interesting articles and wants me to create an account.
This is too little to give you my precious email address or apple throwaway mailinator email.
From my perspective I still have a backlog of 200 items in my rss reader for today. It would be better for you to show slightly more value of what your product gives us. As from the comments it seems that it was interesting for a lot of people to at least try and open the page!
In money, not in time.
> So I feel like it's a fair ask
You do. But a lot of the people you'd like to sign up don't. You can argue all you like here, but it's not going to change many minds. And it certainly won't change the mind of anybody who just sees your home page and bounces.
So given that you're not going to win the argument, what's your next step?
Sure, but that's not the only thing that makes registration a high-friction event. For instance, any time I register for something, free or not, I am also aware that I'm probably getting my name on a marketing list (and probably sold to other lists) as well. So I'm not registering for anything unless there's already a very well-established value exchange for it.
> from my perspective, it's not worth putting in all this effort for someone who isn't willing to even register for free
How does free registration benefit you? It's just more cost for you (time to deal with problems, money to store the login information, and additional load on your server). The only way your statement makes sense - and the only reason you'd care that much - is if you're planning to monetize the information.
Good luck, but it's too shady for me.
Take a look at the B2C funnel here: https://www.alleywatch.com/2017/06/funnels-startups-primer/
That's not quite the right one for you, in that you have a freemium product where you could have a tier of unregistered users like Reddit does, but you get the idea.
The only users who are going to produce the sort of profits that you are hoping for with your months of work are going to go through a variety of stages. Unless you're running this like an influencer or an NPR pledge drive or something, none of those stages will involve them looking at it from your perspective. They're going to look at personal cost/benefit ratios for each step. Which, I'll remind you, is something you surely do for almost every purchase you make.
You can indulge your feelings of resentment here that "everyone else that commented about registering" aren't sufficiently respectful of your efforts. But given that you didn't show any respect for my effort in giving you free advice, you might be able to imagine how long you'll have to wait for people to come around on that. Or you could focus on meeting your users where they are and maximizing flow through your funnel.
It's up to you.
the mainstream web is unfortunately a cesspit mostly made up of predatory sites that provide a barely useful service which is easy to live without, which only exist as a way to hoard peoples data or lock them into subscriptions in the hope that they'll forget they're paying it. if your site is different and you want people to actually care, you'll need to show them.
For mine: the registration wall is the same as thousands of others which I dismiss just the same - because if I'm asked to register this early it's because my registration is the product - and not the alleged value that is used to scam me in. And that's from someone who has worked on plenty of marketing efforts. The request for registration is not a signal of quality. The content offered before that registration would be - and there isn't much of that. Your site may be high value and totally deserving of registration but the bar for my registration is much higher than that.