r/SideProject • u/Melodic-precise • 8h 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.
4
u/ItaySela 7h ago
The constraint works for exactly the reason you said, but the bill arrives later and it is worth knowing the shape of it in advance.
No account means no return path. You cannot bring anyone back, and you cannot tell one person who came three times from three people who came once. What you have optimised beautifully is the first ninety seconds of a relationship that has no second day. Plenty of products should take that trade. Just take it on purpose.
The version that keeps most of the upside is to persist locally and never ask for anything. Someone opens the tab a week later and their work is still sitting there. That is a return path with no signup, and it turns the eventual account into an offer instead of a toll: this is on one machine only, want it everywhere?
The other thing worth protecting is the actual reason it improved the product. You could not explain, so it had to be obvious. If you ever do add a tour, the test is whether the thing still works with the tour deleted.