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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

> I'm no longer collecting cards upfront, and I've finally got MRR growth back on track. I made the mistake of simply changing the signup form / billing code without making heavy modifications to the marketing site and onboarding flow, which caused a huge drop in growth after that change.

That'd be a great topic for a blog post. I don't know how to make that switch myself; I tried once and it wasn't a success.

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Great idea.

I ALMOST went back to the safety of CCs upfront (http://planscope.io/blog/why-im-going-back-to-capturing-cred...) but ended up sticking with it. And I'm glad I did, because growth is significantly higher and there are fewer cancelations.

The big takeaway: People do more research before plugging in their credit card. If it's relatively low friction to sign up for a trial of your product, you need to make sure your onboarding flow isn't just about how to use your product, but why (e.g. the typical responsibility of your features / tour pages.)

So wait--you said you almost went back to collecting CC's up front, and that article says it was a better fit than the no-CC trial, so what data did you collect to say otherwise?

You're arguing both sides Brennan. :) I'm confused as hell as to which worked and why.

Sorry, should have been more explicit: For most of Planscope's history, I captured credit card upfront. Growth was decent, but I wanted to see what would happen if I dropped that requirement. So I did, and growth plummeted (very few signups were converting.) My gut reaction was "REVERT!" (which is where that blog post stemmed from), but after talking with a few people I figured that maybe it's not as simple as just changing how signing up works... maybe I need to tweak a lot of other stuff. So I did, and now that it's been in production for a few months growth has eclipsed the card upfront rate.

So what all did you tweak to make it work? If you'd prefer not to be public about it, message me in the Academy (this is Dave Rodenbaugh)

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