It's an interesting idea but why would I sign up and give you personal data without any idea of the site's features or UI?
Would be nice to make these optional. Just throw me into the canvas and if I want to add people then make email required.
Worst case (often the case) those email addresses get collected and eventually sold off to some marketing spam list that just adds more junk to my inbox and adds a little bit more information to some marketing profile about me somewhere.
A video demo would definitely help demonstrate that at least there's a "there" there.
Rather than rëengineer your site, consider just putting up a static walkthrough of key features, or a short video demo.
Cheers!
What benefit do you get from that?
Are you going to send me an email reminding me to try it again? That’s going straight to spam.
If I like the product-at some point I’ll have to sign up, and then you have my email.
Why the intermediate step? The only thing that comes to mind is limiting resource usage? If it’s just free people might use it just to use it-but isn’t that kind of the point of a demo?