Here's a complain that would go along nicely with our Seven rules for Web 2.0 start-ups: Keeping me waiting for an account activation email, or anything else for that matter. Say you have a potential customer who wants to run a cool Ajaxy poll on his blog. He googles and finds that there are at least a dozen companies offering a free Ajaxy poll service. Your site looks good to him, so he jumps through your registration hoops (clearly you didnt' follow rule #2), slicks on the Submit button, and then... he has to wait.I'm no Guy Kawasaki, but here's a free bit of business advice: If you're trying to compete in a field with a half-dozen nearly identical products, don't make a potential customer wait. If it takes five minutes for that account activation email to show up, he'll have already wandered along and found a different service that does what he needs without the wait. Thirty seconds is too long. The vagaries of the world's email relays aside, if your service's SMTP server isn't lightning fast, get another one, or you've just a pile of impatient customers--and on the internet, they're all impatient.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-29-2007 @ 3:45PM
Jonathan said...
So very true. I needed to find DJ software for a wedding this past weekend. One of the demos required registration and confirmation before the download link would appear. By the time the confirmation e-mail came, I'd already found and purchased a different piece of software. Though I did run into another problem:
Rule #9: If you're going to charge for your app, make damn sure your store actually WORKS.
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1-29-2007 @ 11:20PM
alex dante said...
I really like the Geni model: you just start making a family tree, _then_ you create an account, and if you really think you'll use it, _then_ you set authentication. (Having said that, it's hanging trying to connect atm, so it's already violating the point of your post :) )
Yesterday, I hit a vendor's knowledgebase and couldn't even find out if it contained the information I wanted without joining. So I didn't: what incentive do I have to give my personal details to a site that might not even have anything in return?
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