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I thought so too, so I actually tried this. With a whiteboard app. And it didn’t exactly work, new users and engagement went down compared to having a “landing page” in front. Only a relatively few people like you and me really want to dive in without having a story first. Turns out, to my surprise (!) that most people don’t want to dive into your app without reading about it or watching a video first. Teachers, kids, business users, they all have different questions they want answered before they spend time trying to learn a new app, they want to know if there are reasons this can or can’t be the thing they use from now on. Learning a UI is a time investment, and people want to make sure it will be a good investment before using their time. They don’t want to be tricked into learning your UI for a week or two or more and then find out later it can’t group and copy-paste shapes, or that the price goes up, or that they can’t share they way they need, or that your app doesn’t have a on-premise installation. Getting in quickly can have a low barrier to entry, I’m with you there, but my experience on the other side of this is that it’s not good to go directly to the app without an intro first, generally speaking. Aside from this there’s also the fact that users who don’t intend to pay are on average way more demanding, way less patient, and way less understanding about communicating and learning the UI and dealing with bugs or misunderstandings. It was surprising for me to see from the other side how rude the free users are on average compared to the paying users. |
In my experience, this also applies to cheap vs expensive projects (consultancy). Customers start to get really pleasant and polite when they are charged at least 100K or something like that for doing some custom software development. They get very demanding when it's below 10K.