Only a relatively few people like you and me really want to dive in without having a story first. Turns out, to my surprise (!) that most people don’t want to dive into your app without reading about it or watching a video first.
Teachers, kids, business users, they all have different questions they want answered before they spend time trying to learn a new app, they want to know if there are reasons this can or can’t be the thing they use from now on. Learning a UI is a time investment, and people want to make sure it will be a good investment before using their time. They don’t want to be tricked into learning your UI for a week or two or more and then find out later it can’t group and copy-paste shapes, or that the price goes up, or that they can’t share they way they need, or that your app doesn’t have a on-premise installation.
Getting in quickly can have a low barrier to entry, I’m with you there, but my experience on the other side of this is that it’s not good to go directly to the app without an intro first, generally speaking.
Aside from this there’s also the fact that users who don’t intend to pay are on average way more demanding, way less patient, and way less understanding about communicating and learning the UI and dealing with bugs or misunderstandings. It was surprising for me to see from the other side how rude the free users are on average compared to the paying users.
In my experience, this also applies to cheap vs expensive projects (consultancy). Customers start to get really pleasant and polite when they are charged at least 100K or something like that for doing some custom software development. They get very demanding when it's below 10K.
Or create a youtube channel for it.
No need to spoil the tool for everybody with marketing cruft.
- Does it actually lead to higher sales? If not, nobody is going to care about our wish for more companies to do this.
- It doesn’t work for many products. How do you just drop someone into a cloud storage product? You could give them some temporary space where they can drop some files if they want, but what do you do if they abandon them? Delete them after some time? Might confuse some customers who didn’t realize they had to actually register an account. Maybe a huge banner with a countdown would work… you start to have to solve a whole lot of problems to make it work
This stifles development of things that are actually useful. It puts money and influence in the hands of people who shouldn't have either, creating bad incentives in the market and within the company. It gives marketing a gloss of false legitimacy, allowing for all the things that have us in a feverish race to the bottom.
Everything you just touted has been achieved despite the Idiocracy fan-fic that seems to be the current mission statement of corporate America.
In the webapp ecosystem, those transaction costs take the form of annoying signup pages and mail spam. Could be worse.
- Products that don't require any of this stuff.
- Products that require some form of registration since it stores user data remotely. The person registers so they may secure, modify, or remove that data. The handling of personal data should serve this role exclusively.
- Products that require some form of initial setup and onboarding will facilitate that setup for the vast majority of people. The user should still be able to bypass the onboarding in case their use case doesn't reflect the common use case.
When marketing becomes involved, things become problematic. That friendly offer of assistance to get started usually reflects marketable features rather than any form of genuine training. That collection of personal information is used to harass the person using the product rather than to facilitate the use of the product. (Heck, I have companies contacting me over a decade after I last used their product to try to make a sale.)
I think this is a really, really interesting phenomena: the human brain (perhaps when sufficiently institutionalized) exhibits some sort of fundamental bias toward disruptive UX that breaks flow and productivity, and this approach must be proven wrong, every time, on a case by case basis, and doesn't fundamentally internalize.
It's crazy: because it doesn't lead to higher sales, it's seen as a bad approach. WHY? "Just because."
If the goal of a company is to create higher sales, then it is a bad approach.
If the goal is to create a great tool used by people and not worry about adoption or supporting a large business through profit, it's probably a great idea!
Shouldn't it be win/win? Both sides giving something to help each other? Software gets tricky I guess since it's fun to develop, and mere attention or praise is enough for many devs. And ads blur the line of "free". But the level of childish entitlement gets a little depressing sometimes.
I don’t see it as having to do with entitlement, more as a case of it being easier to standout in a crowd of options when your thing is easier to start with.
You are also advancing the art. Which is an objective good.
But it's not exactly clear how you plan to turn that into, say, revenue. Build it and they will come, sure. And the more leads you stuff into the top of the conversion funnel, the more conversions, right? What do you mean 'qualified' leads?
If your product's viability will rest on turning some percentage of those free users into subscribers or purchasers, then you have to do some upsell, at some point. And if they can get into the full product without any obstacles within milliseconds, you're going to have a very, very hard job getting those conversions. Meanwhile you're winning over free users who cost you money and time to serve in handling their support and feature requests, and you're bringing in ever more people who are never going to give you any money.
It is viable to build your product this way if the primary product your business sells is 'convincing investors that by building up loyal active users, and developing rich understanding of those users' behavior, you will somehow create a reservoir of value that can be sold for 10x the amount of money you're asking them to put in to keep your servers turned on for another few months'
And it's probably viable if you aren't trying to be a business at all.
But as generic 'this is how all products should work' advice, it's pretty terrible, unless your main advice is 'don't try to make a business around offering a software product unless you're primarily interested in selling engagement monetization fairytales to investors'.
Ready to save your new work of art?
Or higher resolution?
Or premium features?
You do it when the user is hooked.
I was not advocating for “no revenue”.
Also it seems self evident that such advice does not apply to all software…. Do you think I’m saying this is how SAP should be sold? No…, obviously the advice applies to software suited to this approach.
‘Thanks! Oh wow, this is great!’
‘Glad you like it.’
‘I love how you don’t try to upsell me on things or push any kind of premium paid features, just give me the whole product without limitations’
‘Yeah, that’s our philosophy, let you fall in love with the product’
‘Cool, thanks. Okay, I’m gonna save my work now.’
‘$20, please’
‘I’m sorry what?’
‘$20 to save.’
‘Er… could you have mentioned this earlier? I just spent ages using your awesome product and you just let me in and I didn’t have to sign up or anything, and you never mentioned a premium upsell, so I just assumed…’
‘Yeah, I thought I might be able to trick you like that. We call it “bait and switch”. Isn’t it so much better than all that marketing BS?’
The key realization is that while the unauthenticated open source model works really well for individuals, it’s hard for companies to adopt.
They want authentication, security policies, private spaces to collaborate, access control, search… all of this requires having a company behind it in practice and the open source model doesn’t work as well.
The two versions so far work really well alongside each other right now.
How did you get people to try the free version? What worked?
I love that - and that's how I aim to build things now.
Excalidraw has few calls to external domains as well - just Google Analytics and Sentry.io. That's still two that can be reduced, but it's much better than most modern clustertrucks.
That said, those two have been really important for the success of the project. Google Analytics is helpful to get a sense of how important it is to people and motivation for the team. The second one helped us fix a lot of edge cases that couldn’t immediately be found via normal testing.
Everything:
“ You're in #
There's no onboarding. No signup. No confirmation email. No OAuth. You're just in the product. Are there any flashy overlay tours with annoying animations and pulsing buttons? Is there a modal upselling you on a paid plan[1]? No. You're just in product, able to use it.”
Get rid of your fancy growth marketing people, your advisors with their “request a demo”.
Get rid of your intro page talking features.
Dump your stupid signup before starting.
Just. Fucking. Let. People. Instantly. Use. Your. Full. Product.
Instantly. Not after they give their email. Not after they click three dialogs. Not after they jump through whatever remaining hoops you’d really really love them to jump through before.
Show them, indeed GIVE them your product without the slightest fucking delay.
All of it. Stop arguing about why you’d really love to make them do something else before using your product. Make your marketing person stop insisting the marketing thing gets done first.
Get people into your actual full product within the shortest possible time. Milliseconds if possible.