
Show HN: Referlist – Increase email sign-ups via word of mouth referrals - parthi
Hi there HN!<p>Excited to share Referlist (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;referlist.co&#x2F;), a simple way to increase sign-ups on your landing page for pre-product launches. Give your users early access to your product when they share it with their friends!<p>I make A LOT of landing pages. Whenever I want to test an idea, I&#x27;ll make a website with a sign-up form to see how excited people are about a concept. I wanted to encourage word of mouth growth and incentivize my users to share these sites with their friends. Robinhood was able to amass nearly one million sign-ups via their referral program, so I tried googling for an easy way to add something similar to my page. Everything I found was expensive, too complicated and came pre-packaged with a landing page which I didn&#x27;t want. I ended up building a custom solution for myself and it worked great!<p>I noticed other friends launching projects doing the same, so we built Referlist to save everyone some time. No coding required. It&#x27;s plug-and-play like Drift. Takes 5 minutes to setup. It&#x27;s free to get started. You only pay if you get more than 100 sign-ups so you can feel free to launch as many failed experiments as your heart desires at no cost! You can export your users to CSV or Mailchimp. Also add a custom message, custom colors and seed your waitlist so that it doesn&#x27;t look completely empty for the first few sign-ups.<p>Any feedback is welcome! Also feel free to email me directly at parthi@referlist.co<p>Cheers,
Parthi and the Referlist team
======
degenerate
Looks like you are using Hakara mail server ( _edit:nope_ ) and Firebase.

[http://haraka.github.io/](http://haraka.github.io/)

Site is clean, documentation is simple and everything seemed to work great.
Thanks for sharing. The only issue I see: I can sign up using my own referral
code seemingly unlimited times with fake emails, and I don't even need to do
this on a real domain... the JS code works from a local HTML file [0]. So
people that want to bump their place in line, or competitors wanting to cost
me money/headache, can seemingly sign up dozens of fake referrals per second.
I assume nefarious use was not on the high priority list before launch, but do
you have any plans to mitigate this type of activity in the future? Perhaps
rate limiting and IP / browser session checks on the server side to start?

[0] [https://docs.referlist.co/#/?id=install-embedded-sign-up-
for...](https://docs.referlist.co/#/?id=install-embedded-sign-up-form-in-a-
website-builder-like-squarespace-webflow-wix-etc-you-write-0-lines-of-code)

~~~
parthi
We don't use Haraka but we do use Firebase!

Thanks for the feedback!

You only move up the waitlist if a person you refer verifies their email.
Robinhood Crypto had this issue where they didn't check email verification and
people gamed it. Made sure to handle that nefarious use case. But thanks for
asking! I guess you could own a ton of fake emails and still be adversarial.
In which case, I should probably implement an IP rate limit like you
suggested.

~~~
degenerate
Glad you already thought of the email verification idea. Great!

~~~
agustif
Next step would be blocking temporary emails domains, which is a rabbit hole,
and also adding captcha to the verify I guess.

Also allowing only hotmail/gmail/etc might help

------
Joe8Bit
Looks interesting! Few bits of feedback:

\- The signup widget doesn't submit when hitting enter after entering my email
in the text-box, which is a reasonable expectation from an accessibility POV

\- On the 'complete' page I see that the email I entered is part of the page
query string, which makes me really uncomfortable. It's commonly accepted
practice (in places like adtech[0]) to not pass PII in the URL as it can
easily be leaked

\- As a potential customer, when I view your Privacy Policy and Terms of
Service it reads pretty ambiguously if the customers that signup for my
service and this services stores will only ever be used by me or if Referlist
retains some rights to use my list as you see fit. Worth clarifying

\- Pricing seems reasonable, but I'm pretty sure you could charge me more.
Also, I'd love a CTA I could click on directly within/under the price columns
(I had to go hunting for a bit to find out how to pay you)

0:
[https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6156630?hl=en](https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/6156630?hl=en)

~~~
parthi
Thanks for the helpful feedback!

\- That's a bug more than a feature because I unfortunately haven't tested the
site for accessibility (but I should!) \- Re: the email being in the query
params, that's a good point. Will see if I can change that to a POST request.
\- We don't want to use emails you collect. Will clarify! \- I probably could.
Businesses like Viral Loops do. I wanted to make something accessible to
builders. Might consider restructuring tiers as and when I add more features.

------
louisswiss
Interesting!

You probably know this is a crazy crowded space - there are tools out there
like ViralLoops and ReferralHero, to name just two of the more popular ones
that have been around for years. What's your value proposition over one of
those tools?

BTW I've been working in this space for ~2 months now, with a small referral
tool built _only_ for newsletter creators. It's super private early access
(not even a website) - but we're seeing our early users growing their lists by
>10% MoM in some cases!

That is with more established newsletters though - many hundreds (ideally
thousands or tens of thousands) of subscribers.

We didn't see 'new' newsletters without an initial audience get too much value
out of a referral program so far - so I'm excited to follow along and see what
you do differently to help those early stage founders :)

~~~
parthi
It is crazy crowded. Everyone else is expensive and a little "too much". This
is an affordable side project I made for myself that I wanted to share with
the world since I wasn't happy with what was out there. Not trying to gouge
people on pricing. Hope you find it helpful!

To your point about who finds these kinds of tools helpful: Yeah, I think
viral mechanisms only work once you've nailed core value prop. But they
compound very quickly if you do get past that hurdle and can change the slope
of your growth trajectory.

------
colinbartlett
This looks really cool, nice work launching. I'm ready to use it on a project
that I'm building.

However... When I signed up on your site, I received the confirmation email to
my Gmail inbox but when I clicked on the link it said:

> Suspicious link > This link leads to an untrusted site. Are you sure you
> want to proceed to referlist.co?

I'm not sure why Google would think your site is suspicious but I'll refrain
from using the service until that kink is worked out, as I wouldn't want my
prospective users seeing that.

~~~
parthi
Can you email the message at parthi@referlist.co?

Super weird since those are being sent with Firebase that is owned by Google.

------
nselman
Hey Parthi, do any of your pricing plans allow us to host the success page on
our own domain?

~~~
parthi
Not yet. But something I want to add. Setup will be a little bit more
complicated since you will have to change DNS records.

------
swalsh
To me the real utility of this, is testing "concepts". The way I would see
myself using this is to create a few keyword campaigns, and then send them to
these pages to see how much actual interest there is for the idea.

Perhaps this might be a "premium" feature, but what would go along with this
is a root "project", with multiple landing pages. Then I'd like some analytics
to compare. Basic conversion funnel stuff. If it integreated with google
keywords directly, that would be awesome.

I'd also like the customize the page a bit more too, it's very generic looking
today.

~~~
parthi
Yup, that's a good idea. I think that's pretty effective for e-commerce and
consumer especially where paid advertising can be used to test CTR, CAC and
general interest.

I think the next step there would be to build a landing page generator. There
are a ton of them like Unbounce and Instapage. Maybe I should partner with
them since building one of those out is quite the task.

You can customize message, colors and add your logo today. What else would you
like to customize? Will definitely consider adding it!

------
maury91
I get a white page, both on: \- Firefox + uBlock \- Firefox without uBlock \-
Chrome in incognito (no extension enabled)

I wasn't able to get a not white page in any browser. For a split second
appears the text "Loading...". On the inspector, it says you are using a dev
build of Firebase SDK

Edit:

solved, I was accessing "/index.html"

~~~
parthi
How did you get there? Did something link you.

Also didn't realize there was a dev build of Firebase SDK. Looking through
docs right now. It seems to be one and the same. Will update you if I made a
mistake and needed to flip a dev to prod flag somewhere.

~~~
maury91
HN doesn't highlight links, Firefox doesn't have the popup menu option
"navigate to {selected text that is an url}", and I didn't want copy-paste, so
I selected it, and used "Search on google for {selected text}". The 3rd result
on google for "[https://referlist.co/"](https://referlist.co/") links to
"[https://referlist.co/index.html"](https://referlist.co/index.html")

------
sertaco
Very exciting product. Congrats. Just joined the waitlist and had a
waitlistception.

~~~
parthi
This whole project is very meta :-)

------
sixti60
Nice project! I tried the demo, but it didn't work for me:

* I joined the waitlist with a@example.com, then I was redirected to [https://referlist.co/joinwaitlist/referlist?email=a@example....](https://referlist.co/joinwaitlist/referlist?email=a@example.com). 84 000 people ahead of you

* I copy/pasted the link [https://referlist.co?ref=TOKEN](https://referlist.co?ref=TOKEN) and sent it to another email address

* From another browser, I clicked on the link, and joined the waitlist for b@example.com and I was redirected to [https://referlist.co/joinwaitlist/referlist?email=b@example....](https://referlist.co/joinwaitlist/referlist?email=b@example.com&ref=TOKEN): "84 001 people ahead of you", ok this is normal

* BUT: when refreshing the page for user A: [https://referlist.co/joinwaitlist/referlist?email=a@example....](https://referlist.co/joinwaitlist/referlist?email=a@example.com), I'm still 84 000. Shouldn't it be 83 999?

PS: I didn't receive any email at all, not in the spam folder too. I have a
gmail address.

TL;DR: I shared link to a friend who joined too, but I didn't move up in the
waitlist position. (For Referlist demo).

~~~
parthi
User B needs to verify their email for it to count. Otherwise you could enter
a fake email and move up the list. When user B joins the list and verifies
their email, A's internal score increases. The final list is sorted by score
and then sign up date. So what you described is working as intended.

However, what you might be getting at is that you want a different sorting
mechanism, which is a feature request. What would you expect to happen? Maybe
I can consider that

~~~
sixti60
How should B verify their email? I guess by clicking on a link they receive
via email? In my test, B received no mail. I double checked in spam folder;
I've tried with A and B two gmail addresses.

Something else: Let's say I am 84 000th on the list, and a friend joins in, so
I am 83 999th. Then during 3 days I don't do anything. Question: Will I stay
83 999th or are new people arriving in the meantime and sharing a lot going to
pass me, and I will finally be moved back to 90 000th?

------
Kiro
What YC batch are you in?

~~~
parthi
This is not a YC company. Apologies if there is any confusion. Title has been
changed to Show HN.

