I haven't given the sign up process a lot of attention, especially lately. It was made out of necessity, and really isn't the smoothest, especially for anyone interested in a paid plan.
Today I'm fixing that so that each plan has a dedicated sign up flow, explains what you get for your money, and is less work overall to sign up for a paid tier.
Another unsaid thing here is that all our growth is completely organic, and has been for... over 2 years? Or all of our existence?
In addition to not displaying ads, we don't do any advertising, or buy users, or anything like that. We spread purely through word-of-mouth and by building a good product -- and with that, we still grow every single month.
We grow, but relatively slowly and steadily.
So at this point we see tens of thousands of visits every day across our platform, but only a very small percentage actually turn into customers.
If we can increase that percentage *just a bit* through some small changes to the site, we soon cement our status as a permanent publishing platform on the web. And then I can keep doing this for decades to come, as I've always hoped to.
Ended up being a ton of work for this new user onboarding flow -- it's tied up in everything. But I think it'll be a huge improvement. Once it's deployed, I'll be keeping an eye out for user feedback and seeing if people run into snags.
Okay, deployed! Everything seems to be running smoothly.
You can see the new flow (especially if you're logged out) by going to this page: https://write.as/start -- that's where the process starts for most new users now.
The free plan isn't going anywhere, but I'd like to try steering more people to the paid plans, for a few reasons.
Of course, more paying customers means we're profitable / sustainable much sooner. But more importantly for everyone, the platform is most useful on the paid plans (especially Pro). People who never go past the free tier miss out on everything we offer, and may think Write.as is less useful than it actually is.