ActiveWords is a great program that many, many people are happily using. It is very effective at speeding up your work. If you have Tablet PC, it is pretty much in the must have category.
One of the good things about the sign up process the ActiveWords is the friction free way anybody can get the product and try it. The two phase approach is something you might consider for your start up.
No credit card/email sign up gets you a five day trial. Sign up with just an email address and you get 60 days to kick the tires.
For potential customers of yours, make sure you make it easy to just download and go or click and go, no friction.
You might hate this idea, but from a business perspective it actually makes sense. Here's what I do:
When you download TEO, there's no sign-up, no registration. When you install TEO, same thing. But the first time you run Outlook and attempt to use a TEO form, it asks for registration data. The stuff is optional, but the screen doesn't tell you this.
The way I see it, this registration data is very important to the business for upsell and upgrade notification. I don't really consider it evil, but it is a pretty good way to keep people from saying "ah forget it" cause once they already have it installed, if they really don't want to give me contact information, they'll just give me bogus information.
I'd rather they give me bogus information than just forget it all.
Posted by: Josh Einstein | August 26, 2006 at 14:34