How naked should I make my product? | Hacker News Reader

How naked should I make my product?

10 pointsphilhill11 comments

I'm embroiled in this debate with my cofounder about the conversion funnel for our new email marketing app.

Should we open our product to users without requiring login (going naked)

Our big USP is "make a newsletters from your blog or curated in minutes". We've had some great feedback and pretty good adoption of our MVP in the first 2 months but here's the issues:

* the sooner someone tries our product the sooner they "get it". Just reading about loses people. * we're getting lost in the noise of all those email services out there even though we do something different * our conversion funnel from landing page to sign-on and try-it (acquisition) is 15%. Too low.

Do we open up the product and let people create a newsletter (takes just 5 minutes) and require them to login only when they want to publish?

My cofounder suggested replacing the entire landing page for flashissue with the product demo. no text, no marketing; just product (100% naked). i.e. as a visitor you either get what the product does or you dont (then we dont want you anyway).

My inclination is to the open the product but still use a landing page to give some kind on intro.

I've never seen a web app done 100% naked but why not????

This idea of a not forcing users to create accounts to use your product is pretty much the default these days, but five years ago I'd never seen it done.

During the first day of having Twiddla exposed to the world, I added a no-signup option as an afterthought and watched traffic our demo usage simply explode. Here's the writeup:

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

So the short answer is yes. This same lesson has been learned over and over again by hundreds of companies since then. At this point, it's not worth even giving thought to. Do it if you can.

Your reasoning makes complete sense to me from a UX perspective. However, how does a company get any sort of demographic information if they can't track the user reliably? Apart from all the evil reasons to do that, there must be some critical places where user data helps in making a product better.

Think about the alternatives you're comparing:

[Frictionless]: cookie + record in the database + random userid

[ForcedAccountCreation]: cookie + record in the database + arbitrary username + meaningless passwordhash

I can't think off hand of any advantage the things in that second list give you that you can't get from the things in the first one.

I will be the first one to admit that I don't know participate in the date aggregation point of the pipeline so my knowledge is rusty. Say one was designing a system where age, sex information was important. How do you keep track of this information:

1. Across multiple computers that the person might be using?

2. Expiring cookies?

Thanks

If the app is intuitive enough that when I land on the page I immediately know what it is, what it does, and how to use it, I'd say go for it. But if I land on your page and see and app that I don't immediately "get" I'd bounce pretty quick.

What might be kind of cool is have the landing page be the product demo like you had said, except with a modal window similar to twitter bootstrap's modal plugin that gives a quick paragraph or two of what the product is and how to use it.

Maybe you could do something like StackOverflow does. You are given the option to login using your Google account credentials there. This way it's just the simple press of a button, both sides get what they want. You can login with Facebook as well, it seems: http://stackoverflow.com/users/login

I just came here to say great headline. Made me want to click and see what you had to say.

Do you buy a car without a test drive? Of course not. Same applies to web apps. Let people take around the block and test it.

Defer interruptions to user pursuit of user goals until you've earned their commitment to continue.

"Do we open up the product and let people create a newsletter (takes just 5 minutes) and require them to login only when they want to publish?"

Bingo. Do exactly that. As a user, I will love it that you are letting me try the product before I give you any information about myself.

We did that naked thing with our product at www.jackpotbuddy.com. When people click the button to Play then we prompt them to register or login.

I think it is a good idea and can help with conversion rate.

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