

Ask HN: What pieces of user info during registration are most valuable? - KleinmanB


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swombat
Email is the obvious one. With their email, you can get back in touch with
them and pull them back into the site after they (inevitably) drift off.

Email is the bit that sticks... without email capture, there is no stickiness.
Without stickiness, growth is extremely difficult. You would need to make a
site so compelling that people come back to it even without being reminded.
That's really, really hard (think "building the next google" kind of hard).

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KleinmanB
Totally agree, but if you are going to capture little bits of info say: Zip,
Sex..etc From experience I was wondering which was most useful to increasing
activity and membership and how people creatively leveraged them.

~~~
swombat
Well, personally I don't think that any of the other fields are worth
capturing until you have started building a relationship with the user...
then, it depends on what sort of information you want to send them. What job
they have can be very useful (for example, if you're operating within the
construction niche and your message to project managers is very different from
your message to architects), but those are all things you grab in the form
_after_ the one that grabs email...

I think which elements are essential really depends on your site and what
you're trying to communicate.

