Hello consumers! Figured I’d share some insights from the nerd side of the Facebook fence, as I’ve had a handful of folks ask me why they can’t sign up for Vendalize using their email address. And, I had to listen to it again a week later while working closely with my neighbors, the guys at Kudoala. Here’s to hoping I can be lazy and point people to this blog post from now on, rather than argue with them about their privacy — because no one should be arguing when they could be drinking a pumpkin IPA instead.
So, why can’t startup geeks like us just let you folks sign up through good ol’ email? Short answer: we can, we just don’t right now. Long answer: this.
First off, understand that in most startup scenarios, there are 1-3 guys earning a grand total of $0 in salary, trying to build a product as quickly as possible to get to a point where they can start making something more than $0. If we can cut corners, we’re gonna do it. We don’t have the time or disposable income to think any differently. Facebook’s universal login service (read about it here if you want to learn more about your privacy) is a much faster path than email-based login, so that’s a really good corner to cut. Here’s a short list of the additional work we’d have to do if we supported email login (and pardon my oversimplification here; I’m not the tech guy):
- Create a password authentication system to make sure you don’t screw up when creating your account, or make the password too easy for someone to guess
- Create and monitor an email messaging service so that we can email you to confirm you’ve created the right address. Part of this involves making sure our emails to you don’t get caught in spam filters
- Create a “forgot password” interface and verification system to help you get into your account if you forget your password
- Create some code to track your computer (still worried about Facebook privacy?) so that we can know who you are whenever you land on our site. Otherwise, you’d have to log in every single time you got to Vendalize.com, and since Vendalize is the kind of thing you might find yourself using several times a day, that could get really annoying for you
- Create a protection barrier to keep creepy hackers from sneaking into your account by cracking your password
- Create a system for you to add a profile photo, so you don’t look like a freak amongst all the other users whose Facebook photos we pulled automatically
- Create a system for you to provide us with basic demographic information, so we can celebrate when it’s your birthday, or learn that our primary user is a 25-34 year-old female, etc.
- Create a system for you to invite your friends to Vendalize via email address. You do remember every single one of your friends’ email addresses, right? Because Vendalize isn’t anywhere near as fun to use if you don’t have friends on it, which means you’re less likely to continue using the service
- Other fun stuff
Now, see all that work? That’s work we have to prioritize on an already-huge laundry list of work to be prioritized. Again, we’re just a couple of unpaid dudes trying to crank this stuff out, and we’re trying to do it in between marketing the site, learning how to be subpar lawyers, doing more financial projections than we’d ever want to do, etc. So we have to take this user request of “signing in with an email address”, and put it in a March Madness-style bracket in our minds to do battle with all the other things we could be doing right now.
So what’s going to grow Vendalize faster? Creating this email login capability, or creating the ability for you to invite friends and share your tags on social networks? Here’s your chance to play Project Manager! Which one did you pick to work on? Don’t forget to calculate and compare the viral coefficient… the odds that giving a user a feature will make them happy enough to convince others to sign up, and if so, how many signups they are likely to generate. Oh yeah, also don’t forget to calculate the attrition rate for folks who decide to sign up via email, but get annoyed or frustrated by having to fill out a signup form via their annoying phone keyboard, and fail to sign up. Still thinking? Did you forget that some folks will fail to remember the email address they signed up with? Or that they will forget they signed up via email already and decide to sign up with Facebook, possibly creating two separate logins for themselves? Yup, gotta take those issues into consideration as well. Still not sure? You’re taking too long — we already fired you. Hey, we never said we were sane people.
Image credit: Steve Weigl
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