Review HN: RewardLevel - Increase conversion on your forms by offering rewards

Something is fishy on HN. This story was #3 and then immediately jumped to #38 (on the second page). Was it secretly penalized or something?

So I tried signing this up and throwing it up on my site, and I got some reward for a free coupon to UserTesting.com. I am mostly confident my customers will have zero interest in this reward. The $5 gift card at Amazon though would be great.<p>I was wondering if it was possible to configure the rewards offered. I actually tried playing around with the snippet of code you give your publishers:<p>&#60;iframe src="<a href="https://www.rewardlevel.com/plugin/index?plugin=XXX" rel="nofollow">https://www.rewardlevel.com/plugin/index?plugin=XXX</a> width="100%" height="60" frameborder="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0" scrolling="no" allowtransparency="true"&#62;&#60;/iframe&#62;<p>XXX is an integer, and I was able to get different rewards to show up by changing its value.<p>I assume this isn't intended and my value for XXX is supposed to be static indicator of my account ID. But how do you plan on configuring the rewards offered by the publisher?<p>Shoot me an e-mail if you want talk to more. My site gets quite a bit of traffic and I'd love to offer some easy incentives and this is way more streamlined to use than anything I've tried with TrialPay et al.

I'm a little confused now that TechCrunch has a story up. It seemed from the discussion here that you were only making money from your affiliates, but you also charge upon conversion?<p>"Reward Level charges $5 per conversion, but if the company offering the reward is also a publisher with Reward Level’s widget installed, they only have to pay $2.50 per conversion."<p>Is this accurate?<p>If so, I might find it hard to justify paying $5 per conversion, especially for a .2-30% conversion rate increase. This means I'd be paying for <i>every</i> conversion, essentially spending what I'd normally spend and then $5 for each and every signup on top of that? No thanks. While this might make sense for some, it probably wouldn't make sense for those following the freemium model. Sounded great when it was "too good to be true," though.

This looks like a great idea.<p>I think it would be great to use as an incentive for participating in a site after signing up. For example on my site, Scribophile, I don't consider a user 'converted' until they 1) sign up and 2) post a critique. Just signing up is useless to the site unless the user also participates.<p>Looking at the way you've implemented the widget, is there a way I can make the above scenario happen? So say there's a message after you sign up for Scribophile that says something like "write a critique within 5 days of signing up and get xxx reward!"<p>Also, how do you target these rewards? Again, for a site like mine, users wouldn't want a Kissmetrics account. They'd want something writing-related, like an Amazon.com gift certificate, or the like. Is there a way to choose specific rewards?

The language on the home page around 'too good to be true' made me pause before signing up. It almost sounds like you're saying 'there's a catch!'<p>I think being a little more clear about your business model will go a long way to allaying concerns among users signing up for RewardLevel.

Interesting idea, Noah. But there are two questions in my mind:<p>a) How are you going to monetize this? (You say on website it is free for companies using it, but you must have thought of some monetization strategy)<p>b) You incentivizing users signup for a service just to get that exclusive offer under the signup box. Aren't those users going to be no better than "no-users"? I mean, if the only (or part-of) reason for a user signing up for a service is because he wanted to get that exclusive offer, chances of him becoming a long term customer are pretty low. Right?

Love the idea! Just some design suggestions/thoughts from my first look around. Because of the heavy contrast between the white in the upper portion and the blue on the bottom, I get the impression that the bluk of your relevant content is in the lower section.. when in reality of ease of adding the 'Reward' feature to the form seems like it should be your focus.<p>When looking at your signup form, it's not really obvious what I'm supposed to do, because the reward button, question button, and submission button are grouped so closely and look so similar. I would tone down the yellow of the input boxes a bit and change the colors for the reward info buttons - example: <a href="http://i53.tinypic.com/29mt4l5.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i53.tinypic.com/29mt4l5.jpg</a><p>Also, I think if they click in the reward box it should only check the box, not check/uncheck like a label.<p>Great idea though! I Apologize if you don't like my thoughts, just some quick first impressions!

So any raw figures on conversion rate changes?

Really like the idea. At first, I thought you were building a funnel for your other venture, but this application has much bigger vision. My one primary turn-off here is relevance of the reward to what I'm signing up for. I'm sure this is what you're going after and hasn't materialized yet due to lack of offers to pass around. But I'm curious how you're planning on solving this in a way that scales well.<p>PS: Tidy up those "Reward Detail" popups! Keep it up!<p>PPS: The email link on the about page is "protected" (hi [at] rewardlevel [dot] com) whereas the email link at the top is not.

Is there any way to stop the service offering competitors products?

I see it's easy to sign up to put the rewardLevel code on one's website but nowhere to sign up to become a reward offerer? I assume it's only for a handful of known clients for now, will this change and eventually allow any business to offer it's products/services to be shown in the rewards network?

Can I select the type of offers that can appear on my site? for example, financial products/services

In the long term, as a publisher, what is preventing me from getting my own deals from the same vendors?<p>Are you getting me any exclusive deals with these vendors?

How does this work on non-US websites? Do you geo-locate offers or only offer US-specific offers at this time?