
Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything - raviparikh
https://heapanalytics.com/
======
DodgyEggplant
Poor man's analytics: events, client side, server side, whatever. Set up a
separate DB with one big table, many columns for properties. One server call
to write an event (a row), one ajax call to write from the client, throw it
wherever you need. A bit of good old simple SQL for queries and reporting, and
you are done.

~~~
pc86
I've often wondered about the efficacy of having a simple catch-all script
that just tracks _everything_ a user does on the site. I would think it would
pound the database relentlessly under even modest load.

~~~
darkxanthos
One trick is to not use a database but a flat text file. You can optimize for
querying nightly.

------
meritt
Windows user here. The fonts on your site do not render well on Windows
machines. I see an increasing number of sites using embedded fonts that, for
whatever reason, render poorly on Windows. Please cross-platform test your
sites.

<http://d.pr/i/T7Wq> Chrome 25

<http://d.pr/i/p0AO> Firefox 19

~~~
matm
Thanks for the heads-up, we'll fix this asap.

We've run into this issue before, and it seems to have something to do with
the font's Unicode values being "out of range" on Windows, whatever that
means.

~~~
crazygringo
FWIW, I've worked on projects where we "blacklist" embedded fonts on certain
combinations of OS+Browser -- particularly chrome on older versions of
windows.

Based on the user string, we would serve up a version of the HTML that didn't
request the embedded font, and then those users would see Arial instead of,
for example, Proxima Nova.

Super-annoying to have to deal with. But it works.

------
azov
What happens if I'm a smallish site and suddenly get slashdotted / DDoSed?
Will I be charged thousand dollars? Is there a way to cap monthly costs?

~~~
matm
With the current model, your charges would spike. Which is bad.

But we plan to offer caps and the option to auto-sample if you exceed your
tier.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Your target market is also probably familiar with
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing>

------
huhtenberg
Welcome to the blacklist.

I, for one, very much object to all my clicks and "activity" on a page being
captured and streamed down some black hole for god knows what purposes. Not to
worry though - you are in a good company with all other analytics services out
there. The only difference is that you are far more open (and proud?) about
how obscenely intrusive your service is, so you get an honorary 2nd spot,
right after KissMetrics.

~~~
pc86
I don't mean this to sound as snarky or mean as it probably will. I'm truly
interested in your answer.

Why should you have the choice to object? What is obscenely intrusive about
tracking how you use an application you (may or may not) pay for? I don't see
why anyone would have any reasonable expectation of privacy when they're using
a service online.

Note I am only referring to analytics contained on a single domain. I'm not
making an argument for or against services like FB that track activity across
multiple domains.

~~~
huhtenberg
> _Why should you have the choice to object?_

What? Are you asking me to justify _having an option_ of being able to object?
That's a bit too meta, with today being Friday and all.

~~~
emmett
You can't opt-out of server-side tracking. They could easily architect the app
to require a round-trip to the server on every call (this is how typical early
web apps worked). In that case you really don't have an option to object.

Does that bother you too? (A service recording your usage of it)

Why is measuring on the client-side different from measuring on the server-
side?

~~~
icebraining
The difference is that server-side tracking doesn't track my clicks,
scrolling, mouse moves or if I mistakingly type or paste some personal data
(e.g. password) into some text field.

Server-side tracking is much more controllable in what and when the
information is sent, instead of essentially having Telescreen[1] websites.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescreen>

------
nostromo
Why do a HN launch with "request an invite"?

This seems like a common anti-pattern.

~~~
matm
Our thinking is that it's an efficient way to grow responsibly while still
gathering user feedback early and often.

We tried to include as much tangible product as is possible with an invite-
only product.

~~~
evolve2k
Feel free to launch with whatever you like, i just dont agree with calling an
invite page 'Show HN' as it's misleading.

------
acgourley
I'm positive there is a market for it. Unfortunately "capturing everything"
has an unsolvable problem beyond capture performance, storage cost and query
performance (which are hard but solvable) - it let's you find the outcome you
were looking for all along.

~~~
raviparikh
This is a really good point - blind data analysis without any notion of
multiple hypothesis testing leads to false positives. This XKCD is a great
illustration of that: <http://xkcd.com/882/>

This is something we're thinking about and are definitely conscious of.

~~~
saosebastiao
Not just false positives in a confirm/deny scenario. It can also lead to
overfitting in a modeling scenario.

I once created a model that showed very strongly that US/China exchange rates
were a driver of revenue. This model was intuitive based on the market
dynamics as we understood them, and they helped provide a strong predictive
power which helped reduce operational costs. Over time, this model began to be
taken as irrefutable truth among quite a few people in the org. Then when the
economy collapsed, we very quickly learned that it wasn't US/China exchange
rates that was the strong predictor, but rather something else which
correlated with those rates.

Not only was the model broken, but it had now breeched trust in the ability of
model based forecasts. In other words, if I were a business, I would be
bankrupt.

I think the best value-add that you can possibly provide with your service is
a way of helping your customers understand what is meaningful and what isn't.

~~~
foobarqux
What was the actual underlying correlation?

~~~
saosebastiao
Inflation...specifically using an industrial goods index.

------
codegeek
The demo page (<https://heapanalytics.com/dashboard/demo>) fails in IE8.

Is it just me or IE8 is just not considered by web startups anymore ? Sorry to
deviate a little but every time I try to look at a "Show HN" in IE8 (work
computer), it fails for about 85% of the time. I could understand that some
startups heavily depend on latest browsers but what about others ?

~~~
mbell
IE8 is a complete mess in comparison to modern browsers. To support IE8 you
often have to go through a lot of extra work after the site works in modern
browsers to get it functional even if your not doing something particularly
complex. At the very least its often a whole bunch of different CSS /
replacing CSS with images to get the rendering to look decent. In addition a
lot of 'Show HN' posts tend to use 'cool new tech' that just doesn't work at
all in IE8. To get it functional you often have to implement an entirely
different approach just for IE8. Most 'Show HN' links are MVP products, the
devs just decided to release quick instead of spending a few extra weeks
dealing with IE8's shenanigans.

~~~
dubcanada
IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users.

If you have an analytics software that doesn't work in IE8. You lost analytics
for 20-30% of your users.

And since array.prototype.slice.call is not supported in IE8, this analytics
software is about 80-70% useful. And maybe even less if you have a large IE
clientele.

Seems strange to me that one would limit themselves that much.

~~~
ricardobeat
No, it's not perfectly fine. It's terrible and takes a good amount of extra
work to get working for any mildly complex website.

Around here IE8 is at < 7% market share; if your product is slightly related
to tech that's more like 0%.

~~~
dubcanada
I spend more time fixing issues in IE10, Opera, and the WebKit family then I
do fixing IE8.

Sure it doesn't support a lot of HTML5/CSS3. But if you build a site using
100% HTML5/CSS3 then why do you even care what it looks like in anything but
WebKit. Why spend 15 hours getting it to work in IE8. Let IE8 look like IE8,
and the rest look like the rest. That's how it's suppose to be done.

IE8 is old, if you want to support it. You use older technologies. That's the
point. If you want to use the newest and greatest you lose old support.

But to call it terrible is wrong, it is/was a solid browser.

~~~
ricardobeat
That's the point. IE8 is old, and not 'perfectly fine' if you're creating a
web-based product and not just looking for rounded corners. It was great after
living with IE6, but we moved on. Even Google has dropped support for IE8 in
most apps.

------
vyrotek
Looks great! I'm mostly intrigued by the ad-hoc Group By query functionality.
Traditionally that's an indicator of some sort of relational database on the
backend, but is that the case here?

On the other hand, the dynamic nature of the data makes me inclined to think
that they're using MongoDB or something similar. In the past I've had to
create similar systems but we denormalized the data coming in based on pre-
defined Group By settings.

I'd love to learn more about the stack and database used for HeapAnalytics and
any other similar services.

~~~
matm
We initially tried to build this on Mongo, and it was a huge pain. I'll need
to elaborate on why at some point, but the very ad-hoc nature of all our
querying precludes any non-relational database from being our store (at least
any that I'm aware of).

~~~
vyrotek
It sounds like you and I had very similar experience. :) Please do share and
elaborate some time.

For my past implementation of a similar data-store we had some different
requirements that let us cut a few corners. But, if I were to take another
stab at it with your requirements then I would try a new approach.

I think I would use a single table to represent the 'event' itself and have
that table be essentially owned by the customer. This table could be put on a
specific shard set aside for each customer or you could just name it
"{customerId}_{eventName}" and have a lot of tables. Then each event coming in
would potentially perform an 'alter' on the table in order to make sure all
custom properties have a column.

Are there any downsides to this approach I'm not considering?

------
kybernetyk
First: The service sounds great. Something I would sign up for.

But I don't really get the pricing structure:

What if I have less then 2500 unique users/month? Do I pay $25? Is it free? If
it's $25 what then if I have more than 2500 but less than 20000 users? Is it
$150 then?

~~~
raviparikh
Right now the way we price is pro-rate it for people who are between tiers.
For example, if you have 3000 uniques per month, then you'll pay $28.75 ($25
for the first 2500 users, and then $3.75 pro-rated for 500 additional users on
the next tier). If you have below 2500 users, you just pay for the portion of
that $25 that you use (a site with 1000 users would pay $10). We're updating
our pricing page to clarify this.

~~~
pc86
Thank you for explaining this. That's a huge difference that the impression of
tiered pricing that I got.

Any plans for either a free trial period or a very small (<50 users?) free
plan?

~~~
raviparikh
Definitely - we offer a one month free trial of the lowest tier plan (2500
users/month).

~~~
TylerE
I would highly advise you to rethink that. What if we're a larger site? To be
honest, your pricing is way out of our ballpark anyway (We're a smallish daily
newspaper, ~300k uniques/monthly), there's no way I'd ever get approval for
$20k/yr for analytics, no matter how cool, and I'd never get approval to spend
$1k+ just to try it.

For orgs like us, your pricing seems rather brutal, as we're probably much
lower in pages/visit than an "app" type website. (We're at ~10 page views per
visit, average)

~~~
matm
Feel free to reach us at sales@heapanalytics.com. We'd love to talk about fair
pricing, and we certainly need more data points to evaluate what that fair
pricing is.

~~~
corin_
Do you feel there's scope for pricing coming down a lot? I'm in a similar boat
to TylerE: around a million monthly uniques, but in publishing, so there's
really no way to justify $4k/month for Analytics when stuff like Google's
already exists. 10% of that might be justifiable, but even then it's not a no-
brainer.

~~~
TylerE
Yea, precisely. I'd say for us we could maybe to like, $100/month. Also - how
does it work for multiple sites? We actually have 4 separate sites for
separate towns.

~~~
raviparikh
Depending on how usage looks on your site we can find a way to accomodate.
Shoot us an email at sales@heapanalytics.com and we can coordinate a time to
chat.

------
isalmon
It's ironic that on their website they don't have their own code (well, maybe
it's on the backend) and use Segment.io + Mixpanel instead.

~~~
dubcanada
? It certainly does have their own code. Look at the second script tag in the
head.

~~~
isalmon
Ha they just added it!

------
erichocean
Yes! I've been doing this for awhile. If you feed the data into a Bayesian
classifier, you can figure out what kind of user you're dealing with, too.

~~~
seancron
That sounds really interesting. Could you describe how you do that a bit more?

~~~
erichocean
Sure. The simplest approach is to use a naive Bayesian classifier (you can
find a bunch of open source implementations).

In my app, I actually track client-side actions -- essentially, clicks, but
with more context. Anyway, you can treat a single user session like you would
the text of an email, where the "actions" are the words.

From there, all you need to do is capture a bunch of sessions and tell the
classifier which users are not strong computer users and which know what
they're doing, passing the corresponding "documents".

Now you can feed in new documents and determine which of your users know what
they're doing, and which aren't really computer users.

(It my experience, people fall into one of those two camps.)

~~~
robflynn
I have done something similar before but also measured which content was being
consumed. Are they readers, listeners, or watchers?

Eventually, you can pretty easily detect the best way to approach each
potential client from a marketing perspective.

------
joonix
Dumb question but how does this work?

    
    
      Since Heap captures everything from day 1, all analysis is automatically retroactive. There's no need to wait days for data to accumulate.
    

So it studies my server's web logs? I'm confused about what this means.

~~~
darkstar999
It means that if you start tracking on day X, then on day Y you decide you
want to generate a certain report, the data is already there, you don't have
to start tracking anything new.

~~~
flippyhead
But also if you change your page structure your reports might stop working

------
soneca
I liked it _very much_ as a non-tech founder that is not quite sure how to
define some events on KissMetrics and regret not having qualified a particular
form of sign up as an event before.

Comparing prices though, a question: is every visitor of my site a new "user"
for you? If it so, then my monthly average events for user would be very low,
then an "event based" pricing would be better for me than a "user based"
pricing. Comparing prices with KissMetrics, my guess is KM would be cheaper
for me with an average of 3 events per visitor. But if your "user" entity
doesn't consider, at least, the ones that bounced, then maybe is a good deal.

~~~
raviparikh
This is a really good point and something we thought about when constructing
the pricing model. Right now we're not a very affordable option for sites with
a lot of bounced traffic or low amounts of user interaction. However we'll
soon be amending our prices to better accomodate customers such as yourself.

~~~
soneca
In my case, if you just say "we don't count bouncing visitors as users",
tchanananam!! you just became the perfect analytics tool for me. Even still
considering that I have a lot of users that just click once and leave. Please,
consider it.

PS: "tchanananam" is a brazilian expression onomatopoeia when there is a punch
line revelation...

------
tommoor
Interesting pricing model, it's actually kind of nice to see it segmented by
user instead of events - definitely a case of putting the more useful
information for the customer first rather than just using events.

My first impression is that it would be a bargain for some businesses (low
number of users / high value) and far too expensive for large consumer sites
with low user value, I guess this is the case for most analytics providers
though.

------
AaronFriel
This seems really interesting, but starting at 250 users per month seems high.
I notice the price/active user starts at a penny and falls 60% as the users
climb to over 500,000.

Would it be possible to create a price option for even smaller companies, demo
sites, etc, at a higher rate?

Say, what if the owner of a small blog wanted to use this to do really fine
grained analysis of users actions but they average 250 hits a day?

~~~
matm
Our bottom tier (which includes a 1 month free trial) lets you track 2,500
users/month.

That said, pricing is really hard to get right. There's basically zero chance
we nailed it on the first try.

~~~
web007
You definitely didn't get it right. =) That's one of the joys of startup life,
A/B test it until you do!

Even for a "successful" site (>1mm MAU) $2,000 a month feels insanely
expensive. The performance difference between this and GA ($0) is not high
enough _initially_ to offset the sticker shock.

Look at NewRelic, Tracelytics or even Mixpanel (expensive IMO) for better
pricing levels. You've built the equivalent of "hosted snowplow"
(<https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow>) with a nice GUI and tools, you should
expect to charge something much closer to cost than your current approach
appears to.

~~~
eddmc
I'm not saying that Heap have got the pricing right but you should absolutely
NOT look at cost when you put pricing together - rather, you need to ask your
customers about the value of what it is you're providing. For example, Heap
will be saving the time and hassle of deploying a generic solution on a server
and the time of customising it. Plus Heap will be improving their product
every day whereas the self-hosted version would need a developer to add new
features. These sort of things all add up - you'll be surprised what you find
out when you ask your customers.

Pricing is hard. There are a lot of good articles and discussions on HN if you
do a bit of searching.

------
bertomartin
Great technology, but you guys will know a lot about my business and my users
and I'd like to be convinced that you won't do ill with this data...not that I
don't trust you, but it would be more comforting if you made your policy
towards the information you collect more up-front and clear. But great job.

------
physcab
I imagine that your event feed is going to get pretty unwieldy if you have a
thousand events named like the following:

    
    
      div.star.empty
      button.btn.btn-primary
      button#nodisturb.muted
      a.bold-text.text
    

Do you have any ideas how you are going to overcome this? It seems
unintuitive.

~~~
matm
Very keen observation. There are a number of ways to solve this problem.
Machine learning helps (there are a few simple heuristics we currently use to
sort the Event Feed).

But the right interface for defining events helps even more.

Sorry for the frustratingly mum response.

~~~
pnt
What if you tracked the event's parents, e.g. button <\- div <\- .sidebar <\-
body, etc.? When presenting the events to the user, you could hide generic
parents like 'div' and only show interesting parents with ids or classes. To
search through events, perhaps the user could use css selector syntax in
addition to the current UI you have.

------
bravura
Can you discuss how you address the "schema-on-read" problem?

One of the downsides of the cheap bit-bucket approach of tech like NoSQL and
Hadoop is that it's easy to get the data in, but harder to get it out. The
producer of the data has less work. The consumer of the data now has more,
since there are no longer guarantees on the structure.

An emerging 3rd-wave approach is that of an "eventual schema" (see
[http://arunxjacob.blogspot.com/2011/11/schema-on-read-not-
so...](http://arunxjacob.blogspot.com/2011/11/schema-on-read-not-so-fast.html)
by Arun Jacob, chief of data at Disney). But best practices for eventual
schema are immature and evolving.

How do you approach the problem of getting data out, and allowing people to
use common concepts to query their data?

------
flippyhead
I love the concept, definitely addresses a pain point in using other
platforms. The thing I worry about is when I make some change to the styles or
HTML structure of my site I have to now consider how that will break my
analytics.

------
Cakez0r
Great job! I think other analytics platforms will start to follow suit as more
people start to realise that it's cheap enough to just mercilessly capture
every user event. The UI looks beautiful and seems very intuitive too.

------
Jasber
Looks very cool––what kind of performance hit is introduced by logging every
event?

~~~
matm
It's essentially imperceptible. We measured it, and our client-side script
introduces a 0.1% CPU overhead.

~~~
raylu
I don't think anyone is concerned about the CPU overhead. (Also, let's not
talk about measuring things without defining exactly what was measured. On a
blank page I'm sure your JS runs great.)

How does it affect network performance? If I click a link and it takes me to
another page, how do you track that?

~~~
matm
Good point. In terms of network performance, we try to batch events and
minimize server requests.

For link tracking, our method is similar to how other analytics products track
link clicks - we delay the page navigation the min of: 1) 250ms, 2) the time
it takes for our server to respond to a click event.

~~~
uptown
>we delay the page navigation the max of: 1) 250ms, 2) the time it takes for
our server to respond to a click event.

So if your server takes 10 seconds to respond to a click event, the user
waits?

~~~
matm
Oh, whoops. Good catch. That should be min, not max.

------
pnt
Does Heap track event streams like mouse position and scrolling? The storage
overhead would be significantly larger than instantaneous events like clicks,
but this data would be interesting.

~~~
matm
Unfortunately, we're not tracking those events now, mostly because they don't
fit neatly into the event-based analytics model (i.e. they're not as
"graphable").

But that doesn't mean they aren't important. Agreed the data can be very
useful.

------
reddiric
I'm obviously outside of the audience this is for, and probably most other
commenters since only one other person mentioned performance.

Perf??

And of course, this follows the "include a script tag to our server" cloud
product web API pattern. This isn't setting off giant alarm-bells for anyone
else? This gets past the sniff test?

The fact that this doesn't fail the sniff test for most people is probably why
most web-apps feel like most web-apps feel, instead of like
<http://prog21.dadgum.com/>.

------
namabile
This looks great. I was looking in the docs and you even have a way to track
purchases/revenue and identify users.

In addition, the fact that you're able to associate identity data with past
actions should help tie users together across sessions and devices, if I'm
understanding correctly.

From the Heap docs: _User properties are associated with all of the user's
past activity, in addition to their future activity. Custom user properties
can be queried in the same fashion as any other user property._

------
jstsch
Looks nice. I do worry about the privacy implications of analytics like this.
I'm also pretty sure that this doesn't fly in Europe... something to consider
perhaps!

------
dropdownmenu
Awesome idea to help make capturing data more easy, but how will you deal with
the problem of the curse of dimensionality? As you start to capture more
variables you data begins to appear far apart leading to less meaningful
results.

Also, while 'capturing everything' sounds like an awesome idea it can lead to
worse performance if you don't take into account that your data now has more
variables that can each introduce noise.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
The thing about the curse of dimensionality is that it only really kicks into
play when you try to put every variable into a model (or when you have low n
relative to p, generally). If you restrict yourself to analysing events that
you actually care about, its much less of an issue.

------
k3n
Anyone know of a decent user-tracking / analytics package that isn't SaaS? And
isn't log-based, like Urchin (which I just discovered is yet another victim of
Googlicide[1])?

My app is in dire need of user-tracking and analytics, but it's a self-hosted
application and many of my clients run it on LAN segments that don't have WAN
connectivity.

1\. <https://www.google.com/urchin/>

~~~
namityadav
Piwik (<http://piwik.org/> , GPL 3, PHP-based) is perhaps the best analytics
solution that you can host on your own.

~~~
k3n
Thanks! I'll definitely look into this.

------
smnl
What if my site uses e.stopImmediatePropagation() in any click/event handlers?

Would this still be able to capture those events? And if so, how?

------
netvarun
We use heap at semantics3 and it's really awesome. I highly recommend it. It's
really like crack for devs.

------
anonfunction
Wow this is pretty amazing and something I wish google had offered for awhile.
The one area where I think your going to need to work on is your pricing. It's
just to high for most websites. Of course, if your an elephant hunter...

------
dm8
I would love to use this product! I was talking with my team recently about
having product similar to heap and we've used bunch of analytics products in
the past.

@Founders of Heap:

I would love to do beta test for you guys. When do you guys open the gates for
beta?

------
czzarr
this sounds really awesome if they can manage to stay up under heavy load.
It's such a huge pain to set up and maintain the tracking of events in
application code. Having everything retroactively sounds positively great.

------
shadowmint
I'd be amazed if we don't start seeing a "Tracking BlockPlus" for this sort of
thing, if it doesn't exist already.

edit: Sort of already does it seems: <https://www.fanboy.co.nz/>

------
randall
Closing the lightbox doesn't stop YouTube, fyi. Also, can you handle scrolls?

------
soneca
Does it also offers cohort abalysis based on the time of a particular event
(not just a particular property like Browser)? eg. filter everyone that signed
up at the first week of January.

------
kerno
Looks like a great tool and I'm looking forward to putting it in action.

But, what's with the robot and spaceships blowing up a city in the background
of your site?

------
krazydad
Cool service, but the pricing is insanely high. My piddly website gets 100k
uniques a month, which would cost $600 to track. Kraaaazy.

------
philfreo
You should integrate with Analytics.js...

<https://github.com/segmentio/analytics.js>

------
coolsunglasses
I plan to make my next website for mainland China, I really need to know that
IE is going to work fine here and which versions thereof.

------
michaelmior
Strange. I was just envisioning a service like this last week. Cool to see
someone actually building it. Best of luck!

------
enigmabomb
I'm really excited about this, I signed up. We've been trying to solve this
with different things for a while.

------
lingben
looks great but you should take a look at your pricing structure! pricing is
extremely difficult so I don't mean to over-criticise, the thing is that
you've basically priced yourself out for 90% of potential customers,
especially larger ones

------
endlessvoid94
What are the performance implications on, say, a javascript web application?

------
gcb0
Hope your sites don't have dialup or mobile over 2G users. ever.

------
blakeeb
Reticulating Splines!! Amazing Maxis reference, I'm sold.

------
markus_tipgain
That looks awesome! I definitely try it out.

------
homakov
2 questions

1) why would i need this info?

2) how do u track follow/like events

------
biolime
This looks absolutely amazing, great work!

------
philfreo
Please integrate with Analytics.js!

------
orangethirty
I suggest to test the text on orange button. From "Request an invite" to:

"Get exclusive access"

"Learn more"

"Take a better look"

"Find why N is for you"

"Join our FREE client club."

"Get a FREE account" _Note that free account != free product. Just give then
login details._

~~~
Samuel_Michon
_"Get a FREE account" Note that free account != free product. Just give then
login details._

Wow, that's really sleazy. I really hope nobody actually uses that idea.

~~~
orangethirty
That is one of the highest converting messages you can put on a button.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
I think that depends on what kind of conversion you're after. If you just want
to harvest email addresses, then sure. If you're looking for satisfied paying
customers, this kind of trickery won't work.

If you build a button that promises something for free, you need to give
something for free — free tier, 30 day trial, ebook, screencast, etc. Having
visitors fill out an account form is not a gift to them, it's a gift to YOU.

~~~
orangethirty
The issue here is that I'm sharing findings from my own data. This is not me
making stuff up. I have actually used this very same button text to increase
conversions (up by .04% on a site with thousands of visitors). It was not used
to harvest emails. A practice that simply does not work, unless you plan on
sending Viagra ads. I don't do such things.

 _If you build a button that promises something for free, you need to give
something for free — free tier, 30 day trial, ebook, screencast, etc. Having
visitors fill out an account form is not a gift to them, it's a gift to YOU._

See, this is where you miss the point. The person is getting a free account.
You might not think its something, but there are a lot of accounts out there
for which you have to pay. Need to go to Costco? Hey, you have to pay for
membership (an account), just to make sure you can enter the store. Free
accounts may not be what they used to be (in your opinion), but they are still
very valuable overall.

Now, of course you are not going to just give them an account. That would be a
waste of a good lead. You will then follow up with another offer. Say, pay
half-off your service price for the first month. And so on.

I know some of this stuff looks rather strange to people here. But the
business world is very, very different from programming.

~~~
Samuel_Michon
Thanks for your explanation. I think we have different definitions of what an
'account' is. For me, an account is in which a user shares his contact
information (maybe also business & payment info). That in itself doesn't add
value.

From your last comment, I gather that (to you) 'account' surmounts to 'access
to the service or product'. If so, we agree.

When you apply for Costco membership, you get something in return: the chance
to buy products for less than they would normally cost. I don't see how that
translates to the example provided.

NB: I'm a publisher, marketer, editor, and designer. I develop software, but
I'm not a programmer.

~~~
orangethirty
I'm happy to be talking to another business dev. Shoot me an email. I love
sharing data with others.

