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Sign-up by email was among the worst decisions I made on a web "startup" years ago, because I was oblivious to how non-obvious this was for your average person.
by jambo 15y ago
Sign-up by email was among the worst decisions I made on a web "startup" years ago, because I was oblivious to how non-obvious this was for your average person. It's good that you seem to be aware of this barrier.
Potential users didn't understand the registration process at all when I told them to send an email to register. From talking to some of them later, many figured the sign-up email address was one that I was reading & acting on manually. Perhaps in the years since, average people are more at ease with the idea that a computer can just as easily process email as it can a web form. The lesson I learned is that there are some places where it's better to be conventional than clever, and on-boarding users is one of them.
Congrats on launching, and good luck.
- mikeklaas 15y agoOTOH, it worked great for posterous.
- jambo 15y agoVery true. Posterous executed amazingly. They addressed a large market with early adopters who were already primed by email-blog gateways & xmlrpc clients, and they had a great, repeatable message that was embedded in the email address: "oh you want to start a blog? just send your first post to post@posterous.com"
- simonw 15y agoPosterous ended up de-emphasizing the email signup aspect of their service (it's no longer mentioned anywhere on http://posterous.com/ http://posterous.com/ ) - I remember reading something about that decision somewhere, but I can't find it now.
- mikeocool 15y agoI think the email signup actually works really well in this case, since it's not actually presented as 'email to signup,' the whole product is just 'send an email and have it turned into a physical card.' As a user, you don't actually have to think about the drudgery of entering your password twice and pulling out your credit card until after you've already kinda committed to sending a card by actually writing it. And it works pretty nicely as a really simple asynchronous interface. Instead of watching an animated gif spin while the proof of your card is generated, you just get something to aprove in your email.
- jambo 15y agoThat's a valid point. It could be a good fit for this, but it's not as clear as something like Posterous, which mikeklaas mentions. You still have to go to the website first to figure out what it's all about.