I guess I'll wait to sign up until a user refers me to your website. As it stands, I read your article and then visited your site; I was curious about what kind of service could get away with not describing what they do.<p>I think relying solely on a positive k-factor is a bad customer acquisition model. Everyone wants their business to grow virally but the reality is that the reason turntable.fm grew quickly is <i>not</i> because of their lack of a homepage, it's because the service lends itself to virality.<p>I do, however, agree that you should focus on building an awesome thing that people want to use, but if you're serious about building a business you should be serious about broadening your customer acquisition channels.
This assumes a certain type of user: someone who will signup first and ask questions later. I'm not that type of user. You might think, well it's so <i>easy</i> to signup and play around, who wouldn't do that? But I'm actually a lot more cautious about giving out my email and signup with yet another password.<p>I like to research the services and products that I'm going to use. If I like your text, price, and screenshots then I'll signup and try your demo. If you have no content, I better have gotten a really good referral otherwise I'm just got going to bother.
Hmm... I think I disagree with this approach. This assumes $USER already knows what your service is about, before they get to your home page. If that's true, then no problem. If not, how do they know what they're signing up for? How do they know what Housefed even is?
This assumes that you're doing more marketing of your service than you are coding of it. Otherwise, how will the general public know who you are, what you're about?<p>Putting this info on the homepage almost seems like free marketing, in a sense.<p>Are you assuming that if you build this "product" (housefed.com site) that people will come? Is there a market for what you're making? It seems to me that you'd have the greatest degree of success in finding your market <i>first</i>, and then building a product/service to meet that need that you've already vetted... instead of making a product and trying to convince people they want it.
This is ridiculous. Due to this HN link I visited housefed.com for the first time, having never heard of it before. I guess that was a waste of my time, since I still have no idea what it is.
"And I go to the site, and I still have no idea what the hell it does. I'm just hit with an ugly login page, and no incentive to sign up at all."<p>What he said. what the blog is suggesting is what Dropbox does amazingly well (which his site does not)- Explain what the service does on the front page with little to no navigation, show how your day could be improved by using the product - and then split second the user thinks "mmm, maybe I'll give it a shot" they should be registered and using your product in less than 5 seconds. Super quick registrations with no verification emails and those damn password/email 'type your email again' boxes will sell me every time. Hell, let me just type in a username and email, log me in and shoot me the password later. If it's worth using, I'll come back and use the password you sent. So while the blog has a good point, it's just applying it to the wrong area.