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Comment by nate | Hacker News Reader

Thanks Scott. To be honest, I really debated that. I have a blog post or two on this topic specifically. I've gotten a lot of advice from smart people that goes both ways on this. I personally like a guest user experience and no sign up. But from a lot of a/b testing with previous products, I've seen requiring registers to have a great effect on being able to increase signups, but more importantly create valuable conversations. Namely to discuss problems and feedback, which helps me make something much more valuable for people.

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I assume that by "increase signups," you mean that when people view the landing page, a higher percentage of them signup. But what would worry me is the stat that such testing does not capture: the number of people who did not share the site with others because it's not easy to play with. And that kind of sharing is advertising.

In other words, it's possible to have a lower signup percentage, but more total signups.

Keep in mind that requiring users to sign up before trying the product contaminates user count as a meaningful metric, and devalues it as a marketing channel because it's filled with unqualified non-users.

I totally hear you that it sucks when you know people try your product but leave without signing up, and worse still you have no channel to ask them why. Users exploring a public demo have shown real interest in your solution to problems they have, and while they're exploring (especially if the demo is somewhat guided) there's a very natural opportunity to begin a conversation without requiring a signup. Ask for feedback (via survey, olark chat, quick submit comment form, your contact info...), offer to email product updates or tease future enhancements, show you twitter feed, etc. Moving registration downstream doesn't have to mean you can't learn about potential customers.

The wisdom I've heard is that you can either lose people on the "what is this -> signup" phase or the "signup -> pay" phase. Your leads are better qualified if you lose them on the former. You get better gauge of the potential market on the latter (guessing on this one).

I've worked in two completely different companies where we tried some notion of using the product without signing up. Both times we just got more people with less overall engagement at the cost of complicating the backend infrastructure.

Not to say this will never work, but it's definitely not a panacea.

I can see your reasoning behing making people sign up, even if that will significantly retard your growth rate multiplier.

But there's NO reason to make people create a new account. Everyone hates making new accounts, and there are a zillion identity providers out there, from google to facebook to twitter to linkedin to github to yahoo (ad nauseum).

And even if it's too much work right now to configure your application to accept third party identities, you can still "sign-up" users by requesting an email address, letting them straight into the application, and then email them a URL with an embedded identity token that allows them to pick up where they left off.

My advice would be to give people something for signing up. For example, let them start playing without email, let the save, and then ask for their email address to send them a unique url to their new account. This has the added advantages that (1) more people will play with the app and hopefully talk about it! and (2) those that sign up are more qualified leads as they know what they're signing up for.

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