All of us want customers on our platforms. However, a sign-up is very different from an engaged user who keeps returning and finding value over time.
Creating the right user experience, without being too intrusive, spammy, or in your face , can significantly improve engagement, increase conversions, and reduce churn. In my experience, a platform s success is defined far more by its active users than by the total number of people who have ever signed up.
Below are a few approaches I ve seen work well, along with some that haven t been as effective.
As users, we all want to try a product before committing. As builders, we want to show real value without over-engineering and investing time 'just for show'. Finding that balance is harder than it looks.
I just shipped my demo for Rewo (https://rewo.app), and intentionally went with a live, real demo:
Fully functional product (same codebase as prod)
Uses demo data instead of real integrations
Some interfacing + sync pieces are disabled
Auto-resets on a schedule so anyone can jump in fresh
Yesterday, I had an unpleasant experience. For a few minutes, I lost my LinkedIn community of several thousand people (TL;DR: I was falsely accused of using suspicious software).
Fortunately, I got my account back but it was a strong reminder that we don t own platforms, nor our profiles on them.
