I found this annoying as well. I just give a junk first and last name and throwaway email.

Would be nice to make these optional. Just throw me into the canvas and if I want to add people then make email required.

Interesting point - I personally am fairly easy about signing up to cool new products that I like the sound of. Although it makes sense that some people might be hesitant to give details away so easily. Do you reckon featuring a video demo would help mitigate this?

At minimum, I assume if I sign up you're going to start emailing me, and I haven't even seen enough to decide if I'm actually interested yet.

Worst case (often the case) those email addresses get collected and eventually sold off to some marketing spam list that just adds more junk to my inbox and adds a little bit more information to some marketing profile about me somewhere.

A video demo would definitely help demonstrate that at least there's a "there" there.

Not OP but have the same frustration, and no a video would not be helpful. Let users maybe view the first N items of an itinerary before requiring an account to see the full thing. As-is I have no incentive to sign up for an account because everything interesting is account-walled.

Letting the public trips be visible would make the most sense. I'll create an account when I'd like to make my own trip.

I also didn't login to the site. I wanted to see what it is about, but why do I need to sign in to see information?

Same here. I was keen to see the functionality first. Encountering a sign-up form as the first step is an instant closing of the tab for me.

The confusing thing about this strategy to me is-ok let’s say I give you my email and I hate the product.

What benefit do you get from that?

Are you going to send me an email reminding me to try it again? That’s going straight to spam.

If I like the product-at some point I’ll have to sign up, and then you have my email.

Why the intermediate step? The only thing that comes to mind is limiting resource usage? If it’s just free people might use it just to use it-but isn’t that kind of the point of a demo?

that's a good point. I've just changed it so you don't need to sign up to view a publicly shared itinerary. so you can browse through itineraries on the homepage without requiring sign up.

Awesome-congrats on you for building and shipping! Im criticizing but I haven’t shipped shit. Sometimes I forget that you posted this and can see the comments. Didn’t mean to be that guy. My bad and good luck!

Same as the other commenters in that I don't know what we're dealing with because I didn't sign up, and I didn't sign up because I don't know what it does or if I need it.

Rather than rëengineer your site, consider just putting up a static walkthrough of key features, or a short video demo.

Cheers!

so i've now added a page that will route you to view the itinerary you clicked on from the main page without requiring you to sign up. Hopefully this helps. Sorry for the delay in getting this up and running - was working a 12 hour shift, so had to wait until after work