The way we run Exist

https://exist.io/blog/the-way-we-run-exist/

by troydavis • 8 years ago

54 22 8 years ago

exist.io

santialbo4• 8 years ago

Asking for credit card details on a free trial is going to be a stopper for new users.

chatmasta3• 8 years ago

Clearly it wasn’t a show stopper for all their existing users, who are now paying two engineers their salaries.

santialbo4• 8 years ago

Well, it was for me. I read the blog post and decided I wanted to try it until I had to add my cc details on the sign up form. If you are providing a one month free trial why on earth do you need them?

chrisseaton• 8 years ago

It's pretty normal to ask for credit card details for a free trial. For example major services like Netflix do it.

santialbo4• 8 years ago

You are comparing this service I've never heard about before with a service everyone knows. I think there's a little difference there.

tomhoward• 8 years ago

I know the founders of this company (we live in the same city).

I've seen how much hard work and emotional energy they've put into their product over at least 4 years. And I've observed them go through a whole lot of different experiments on how to optimise their on-boarding process for new customers.

I can tell you that their current signup process has been tested and optimised to within an inch of its life, in order to get the outcome they want, which is to attract users who are serious about using the product and will be happy to pay for it as soon as they're convinced it does what they need.

As the article says and as another commenter pointed out, they now make enough money to pay both founders a modest monthly wage.

They don't sell advertising in the app, they don't sell your data, and they haven't taken funding. Every cent they make is from people who love their product.

Please believe me when I tell you they really don't mind when people are turned off by the requirement to enter payment details.

cube2222• 8 years ago

The app looks nice, but really, do you think I'll readily hand so much data over to a company which I barely know?

I do think this could be an amazing local-storage service though, not free, still paid as a subscription model.

codenutz3• 8 years ago

I've used Exist for a few years and love both the service and the way its run. The design of the app is great, its reliable and continues to evolve, but the biggest thing for me has been how open and transparent the dev team are.

sAbakumoff5• 8 years ago

Does anyone here actually use this odd app? Why? Did it bring any improvements in your life?

codenutz3• 8 years ago

I use it. Its great for bringing together data from various self-tracking sources and try to get some learning from them.

Why - several reasons. It means I go to one place to look at this data, and its presented in a consistent way. It also helps try to drive meaning from all this data by looking for correlations and commonalities.

Did it bring improvements. For me its helped me get in shape, its helped me find things that have a knock-on effect to my mood and/or productivity.

sAbakumoff5• 8 years ago

Interesting..if you mean physical shape, then I always thought that the most effective way to "get in shape" is a simple discipline combined with the primitive reward-system..Literally - just don't eat junk food, work out for 30 minutes per day and if you are happy about results, go ahead and reward yourself by a piece of apple cake or whatever(reduce your normal intake to keep everything balanced - for advanced users). This is so simple and so effective that you don't need anything else - no trackers, no complex data analysis or shrink visits. Amazingly a lot of people ignore this simple path and try various tools like this "exist" thingie.

anonytrary• 8 years ago

Why does this need to be centralized? This is like asking for the user's soul. For the good of everyone, services need to start thinking offline-first, smh. I would not use this service for the exact same reason I never used Facebook.

bitwize• 8 years ago

Yeah, everything will be hunky-dory until Belle and Josh are struggling to make their mortgage payments, and Facebook comes calling.

The way we run Exist

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