[brudgers]

To me, the big idea of sketching daily is sketching daily. It's not lessons. It's not getting reminders. It's not a system that tracks progress...because I can see if my sketches are better or worse and the better and worse that matters is "better and worse for me."

An example of a site that does not require signup is this one. The most important user function -- encountering intellectually interesting material -- does not require signup. And my suspicion is that most of the people who create an account, read Hacker News for a while before doing so and that many people read Hacker News for a long time without making an account (unless applying to YC). And it is worth noting that an HN account only requires selecting a user name and password: no email and verification nonsense.

And again it is worth emphasizing that HN offers substantial benefit without signing up. The same with Google because singing up is orthogonal to the core function.

Looking at SketchDaily.io, the reminders and email are orthogonal to the acts of sketching and learning to sketch. They apply as much to sketching with a pen on paper as to sketching on a web site.

Because a person can sketch daily using a pen and paper instead of a website, the value of the website has to be in providing a better user experience. The odds that providing a website with a valid email address will provide a good user experience are often close to zero.

Maybe there are great features behind the signup screen. Maybe there aren't. Putting the signup screen in front of those additional features means that the website misses the opportunity to sell those features to any potential user who does not want to bother with the friction of signing up.

How bad is it? Well I'm no your page and your signup process sends me away from your page to another application in order to verify my email address and I cannot proceed until I do. So I can get distracted or not bother or the email can go into my spam folder or just get stuck because SMTP is an unreliable protocol. And all of those things stand between me and whatever enthusiasm I had five minutes ago.

I mean it's good for Google if I check my Gmail account. It's not good for me. It's probably not really good for your site either because your site gave me a chore. And the chore is in lieu of what is really useful for both me and the site...my use of the site so that you can learn what works better and worse and make improvements.

I'd put it this way, two people have complained about signing up after actually landing on your page. This might be evidence that some fraction of potential users don't see an obvious benefit from signing up. If the signup was not there, you might have received more interesting and better feedback about the actual function of the site rather than its administrative policies.

[ripexz]

I guess I got carried away with the usual dev stuff, "oh well need an account to keep track of sketches", "oh better require email address so they can reset their password", "hmm better confirm it so bots cant spam sketches and fill my s3 buckets" and so on... I've just gone through the signup process myself - for the nth time, and felt myself that after submitting that first sketch it didn't feel right that the next step is to leave the page and confirm an email address...

I did make the confirmation optional previously, I think first step will be to go back to that and work from there towards a signup-as-an-edge-case approach.

Thank you, you've given me a lot of food for thought.