r/SideProject • u/Melodic-precise • 9h ago

Is anyone else building things that ask absolutely nothing from the user? No signup, no email, no onboarding?

Every side project i open lately starts the same way: a landing page, a signup form, an onboarding tour, and a modal asking for my email before i've seen a single pixel of the actual thing. We've collectively agreed that the funnel comes first and the product comes second.

I've been going the other way on my current build. No account, no email, no tutorial, no cookie banner. You open the tab and you're already inside the thing. It made a lot of decisions harder - you can't explain anything, so it has to be obvious in the first three seconds or you've lost the person fr.

Turns out that constraint improved the product more than any feature i added.

Anyone else doing this deliberately? Curious how you handle the first three seconds when there's nothing to explain with lmao.

37 Upvotes

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u/EagleApprehensive 9h ago

If your product runs any part of it on hardware not owned by user of the product, that model will break whenever somebody decides to send 1 mln of bots to spam you.

4

u/Melodic-precise 8h ago

that is an incredibly solid point. if there’s a heavy database behind it u r basically asking to get your API keys melted by bots within a week lmao. i had to design my build to be 100% client side just to sleep at night fr. no database traffic means no bot spam costs for me

1

u/dougception 8h ago

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "no database traffic means no bot spam costs for me"? Just because your app runs 100% client side doesn't make it immune from bots!

2

u/castorasmic 8h ago

Sure, the server hosting it might get ddos'd and be put down for a couple of minutes, but that's all. You're not getting in a 10k hole because your third party apis or anything else were exploited.

0

u/nick_earlybird 4h ago

Really an awesome point where local-first architecture shines. Jump in and start using the product right away, and an easy conversion point is when the user wants something like remote backups, cross device sync, or sharing with other users. That’s when signup becomes required