5 ms·

Google Reader import ftw. I would have just looked and kept moving if I hadn't spotted that on the right. Well played sir, well played.

trickjarrett 16y ago
That being said, you should fill in the email address when I need to create an account. Maybe make it greyed out since it is optional, but if I'm giving you access to do the import, I'm likely going to tie it to my email address.
- conesus 16y ago
  Great idea. Noted for later when the server isn't being hammered. Oh my god is it being hammered.
samstokes 16y ago
Very nice app, and as with the parent, Google Reader import got me to try it. However, I was put off by having to choose 64 feeds to "turn on" immediately after the import procedure. It meant my first experience of NewsBlur was the difficult and uninteresting bookkeeping task of figuring out which of my few hundred feeds I really, really cared about, and I pretty much disengaged from the app at that point. If I didn't have to make that choice right then, my first experience would instead have been simply my familiar feeds in a (rather nice) new UI - and at your current price point that would probably have been enough for me to buy a premium account. (To give more context - I subscribe to lots of feeds, and rarely unsubscribe except from really noisy feeds, so I probably have a lot of dormant feeds sitting in Google Reader. I certainly don't recognise by name all of my feeds, or which ones I'd choose to keep if I had to choose 64. The autoselect by popularity is a good start, but for me isn't a good match with the feeds I actually get most value out of.) I fully understand why you'd limit free accounts - particularly with your servers on fire :) - but I would suggest imposing the 64 feed limit after an initial trial period, rather than immediately, so people get that initial great experience.
- conesus 16y ago
  Well, NewsBlur has auto-selected your 64 most popular feeds for you. All you have to do is hit the big green button that says "Turn Them On". This makes it obvious that the premium version is the way to go for your use case. It's very low-barrier and gives the user a conceptual model of what eventually has to happen for them to get more feeds.
  - samstokes 16y ago
    Maybe I gave the wrong impression - I thought the UI for choosing feeds was well implemented, but having to choose is itself laborious, however pleasant the UI for doing it. (And as I mentioned above, "most popular" was not in my case a helpful heuristic.) Put another way - if I had built this, the main reason I would have included Google Reader import in the free version would be so people could experience the value of my app without having to think - about what blogs to subscribe to, or what existing subscriptions to keep. Putting the paywall at this point in the first user experience removes that benefit in cases like mine. I might think about the benefits of your app and come back and upgrade - or I might forget - but you could have had me as an impulse buy.
    - conesus 16y ago
      I see your point crystal clear. But what happens when I don't make you choose a max of 64 feeds? I still have to fetch 100% of your other feeds, which could be in the hundreds. And I have to do this for every single user, which is currently in the thousands (ohh, my poor server). It just doesn't scale with my economics. If I were Google, sure, I could just throw money at more machines. As it is, I'm stuffing envelopes full of cash and sending it to Linode. Ideally, I'd make all feeds free and updated every 5 minutes. Realistically, if I force you to choose, I can perform that much better for everybody else. It's a trade-off which I try to stack in my favor by giving the user an easy-to-use UI to activate different feeds as they choose under the standard account. You could pay $12 a year and get unlimited feeds. That would make both of us very happy. :-)
      - 16y ago

trickjarrett 16y ago

That being said, you should fill in the email address when I need to create an account. Maybe make it greyed out since it is optional, but if I'm giving you access to do the import, I'm likely going to tie it to my email address.

conesus 16y ago
Great idea. Noted for later when the server isn't being hammered. Oh my god is it being hammered.

samstokes 16y ago

Very nice app, and as with the parent, Google Reader import got me to try it. However, I was put off by having to choose 64 feeds to "turn on" immediately after the import procedure. It meant my first experience of NewsBlur was the difficult and uninteresting bookkeeping task of figuring out which of my few hundred feeds I really, really cared about, and I pretty much disengaged from the app at that point. If I didn't have to make that choice right then, my first experience would instead have been simply my familiar feeds in a (rather nice) new UI - and at your current price point that would probably have been enough for me to buy a premium account. (To give more context - I subscribe to lots of feeds, and rarely unsubscribe except from really noisy feeds, so I probably have a lot of dormant feeds sitting in Google Reader. I certainly don't recognise by name all of my feeds, or which ones I'd choose to keep if I had to choose 64. The autoselect by popularity is a good start, but for me isn't a good match with the feeds I actually get most value out of.) I fully understand why you'd limit free accounts - particularly with your servers on fire :) - but I would suggest imposing the 64 feed limit after an initial trial period, rather than immediately, so people get that initial great experience.

conesus 16y ago
Well, NewsBlur has auto-selected your 64 most popular feeds for you. All you have to do is hit the big green button that says "Turn Them On". This makes it obvious that the premium version is the way to go for your use case. It's very low-barrier and gives the user a conceptual model of what eventually has to happen for them to get more feeds.
- samstokes 16y ago
  Maybe I gave the wrong impression - I thought the UI for choosing feeds was well implemented, but having to choose is itself laborious, however pleasant the UI for doing it. (And as I mentioned above, "most popular" was not in my case a helpful heuristic.) Put another way - if I had built this, the main reason I would have included Google Reader import in the free version would be so people could experience the value of my app without having to think - about what blogs to subscribe to, or what existing subscriptions to keep. Putting the paywall at this point in the first user experience removes that benefit in cases like mine. I might think about the benefits of your app and come back and upgrade - or I might forget - but you could have had me as an impulse buy.
  - conesus 16y ago
    I see your point crystal clear. But what happens when I don't make you choose a max of 64 feeds? I still have to fetch 100% of your other feeds, which could be in the hundreds. And I have to do this for every single user, which is currently in the thousands (ohh, my poor server). It just doesn't scale with my economics. If I were Google, sure, I could just throw money at more machines. As it is, I'm stuffing envelopes full of cash and sending it to Linode. Ideally, I'd make all feeds free and updated every 5 minutes. Realistically, if I force you to choose, I can perform that much better for everybody else. It's a trade-off which I try to stack in my favor by giving the user an easy-to-use UI to activate different feeds as they choose under the standard account. You could pay $12 a year and get unlimited feeds. That would make both of us very happy. :-)
    - 16y ago