Because of the opportunity cost associated with building a sign-up flow. That means I can't spend my time working on a feature that's core to my service / application.
Agree with this statement. Thanks for the feedback!
Readit Newsjacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
jacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
This is a very traditional development view. "Build it and be done with it".
Signups are the gateway to your product. Often times, you need non-technical team members to be able to experiment and iterate with them. This type of work is often boring work for the engineering team.
Thanks for the feedback, I totally agree with this. We often see this mindset but its a matter of education or push the product from non-technical teams.
jacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
My immediate thought was "man, this is going to be so useful for so many people". I'm saying that as a non-coding founder.
One immediate thought for a feature (you may or may not have already thought of this...). A picklist of options for "how did you hear about us?"
That will help marketing and sales to get more granularity than the usual 80/20 split between "referral" and "direct" in Google Analytics. With all the brand-building efforts like newsletters, videos and podcasts going on - traditional "last touch attribution" tools like Hubspot or even multi-touch tools like Bizible don't capture brand.
That’s a typical feature you can add to your signup flows: asking where did you hear about us, the user role, etc. To better qualify users and focus on the ones that matter: triggering email sequences, displaying different walkthroughs, etc.
Thanks for the feedback!
jacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
Hey, so this feedback is a bit leftfield but might be useful. On my home network I run pihole using some popular blocklists, and sdk.arengu.com is blocked in two of them, one of them since about 2 years ago. As a result the sign in example on the homepage didn't load initially. It looks like the required forms.js doesn't load.
Of course this is an edge case, your company can't reasonably be expected to cater for how people on the internet decide to filter content on their personal networks, and the majority of people won't run their own DNS servers & take the same slash and burn approach to whitelisting as I do, so I understand if it's seen as a non-issue or rare edge-case.
I'm guessing the SDK URL got flagged on the list because the form builder has been used by some websites for various marketing related purposes triggering a blacklist maintainer to blanket ban the URL (I've had to whitelist common things like cdnjs for similar reasons).
That's fine for marketing forms / flows, but I'm thinking since a website or application's login is more of a primary / critical feature it would make me think twice about using the service if I were designing an app aimed toward tech & privacy savvy developers.
As a workaround, does your service still work if developers decide to host the needed assets on their infrastructure or proxy them under their own DNS? Could be a way around it.
Anyway the feature looks interesting, login flows are far from trivial once you get into the area of social login, OTP, device authentication, 2FA etc. I'm hammering out the architecture of a SaaS service at the moment so I can appreciate the niche you're trying to hit, good luck with the launch and hopefully the above feedback is useful.
We’ve noticed that before and that’s a situation, unfortunately, a bit out of our control. Sometimes we try to request those blacklist sites to remove sdk.arengu.com but without much success.
Allowing developers to host the asset would be a workaround, but that can end up with unexpected issues when we update it. We already had in mind the DNS approach but still analyzing potential security issues before moving forward.
Thank you very much for the feedback and if you want to give Arengu a try, feel free to ping me :)
jacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
Congrats on the launch! We may try this on our WordPress sites that use multiple plugins to provide paid membership, social login and other member functionality.
On the pricing page (/pricing), could you support USD? Also, what are "Gold Integrations"? There doesn't appear to be an explanation but it's listed for every pricing tier.
Yes, you can replace those plugins with Arengu and make it reusable across different sites or technologies. Happy to chat when you want to give it a try!
Gold integrations are Salesforce and Hubspot. You’re right we will clarify that as it’s a bit confusing.
Regarding USD we’re supporting it in the next weeks :)
Thanks for the feedback and questions!
jacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
It is very help full for new startup idea to speed up their development. Nice!! Congrats.
Indeed, this can speed up your initial MVP. Thanks for your feedback!
jacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
I can attest to the pains of working with a complex onboarding flow... At my job, we have about 30 different paths the user could take depending on their usecase. And it's not modeled as 1 30-prong fork that everyone routes through, it's forks that lead back to other steps, skip steps, get data from elsewhere, etc.
The difficulty is that it's typically the product and marketing teams who need to understand the flows the most, in order to understand the conversion metrics and how to optimize, yet they have almost no visibility into the actual state logic that dictates the flow in code. Giving them more control over control flow is a huge win
Just curious, What was the company about (eg. fintech)? I totally agree with this, thanks for sharing your experience!
jacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
Congratulations on the launch! This looks really awesome, and I plan to try it out for a project I am working on.
A feature request: I would absolutely love to have something like Arengu that also handles the rest of the boilerplate SaaS stack. Key is a branded user portal with a billing area (I should just give it my Stripe keys and let it generate the screens); user/team management, etc.
To give an example: if you click your avatar in the top right of a Github page, I would like to outsource all of those pages. (How would that work? I would provide APIs and then have some kind of page builder in Arengu that would display the data & handle user input. So for example if I were Github, I would have an endpoint that would return JSON for the repositories for a user, and Arengu would display github.com/$USER?tab=repositories. There could also be API contracts where my API essentially returns the HTML for part of the page.) Basically -- use your front-end builder to reduce the front-end code I need to write & manage.
This is a really interesting use case. If you use Stripe, you can use the Stripe Customer Portal to allow your users to handle subscriptions, update users' information, billing details, etc: https://www.arengu.com/tutorials/passwordless-authentication...
Anyway, there are many boilerplate SaaS blocks that might make sense to explore for Arengu, but currently we're focused on signup and onboarding flows/screens.
jacobovidal commented on Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows · Posted by u/jacobovidal
Love the energy going into this problem space. I've been using a competitor (https://clerk.dev/) and excited to check Argengu out too.
Thanks for the feedback!