For the record, this person makes his living selling a few services in the same space as the original poster, and has been in the exact same position of having

For the record, this person makes his living selling a few services in the same space as the original poster, and has been in the exact same position of having launched a product and watched tons of potential users bounce away because the "try it now" button asked for a single username and password. I also run a service that gets 100% of its business as a result of people converting from free trials to paid users, and the biggest lesson I've learned from that site is that the more people you can put into the top of the funnel, the more come out the bottom. It's not a matter of getting more trial signups at the expense of a worse conversion rate. It's a matter of the conversion rate staying constant and income going up in direct proportion to how much friction you can remove from the signup process.