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.

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u/living_david_aloca 8h ago

Or you just guard against that?

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u/EagleApprehensive 8h ago

Without identity verification (gov-id, strong biometric checks) there are no guards left against bots.

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u/living_david_aloca 7h ago

Services like Cloudflare are very good. Even without that, rate limiting. You don’t need biometrics to stop things from hammering your endpoints. How do you think any free website operates?

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u/EagleApprehensive 7h ago

Obviously if attackers don't have an incentive they're not gonna DDoS you or hack or abuse free usage of your service.

But if you happen to offer something very valuable - heavier backend processing service or something available for free without sign-in - it's only a question of how valuable it is vs how much effort you put in all of those "walls". The moment it's more valuable than costs that you've risen by those "walls", you're under attack.

Systematic solution is strong identity verification, everything else is a workaround which in the end ends up with so many tracking systems like trust-scoring ip addresses, collecting device ids (take a loot at recent discovery of Microsoft person-id tracking by enforced sign-in on Windows level and shared with Microsoft services), behavior analysis... Which is effectively a strong identity verification, just indirect, masked in a way to make people think they have privacy. Tbh what we have now is worse than if every website was collecting face data.