We arrived at these solutions by doing a detailed analysis of every page to try an understand what barriers were on those pages. We did 4 detailed tests on usertesting.com to understand what fresh eyes were seeing with our signup process. We also informally brought in a few of our friends to give us their impressions/opinion on the changes. Once we had our approach solidified, we internally iterated through a few sets of screens before we got to the current versions. Once we have more data on those screens we will iterate some more.

We did not do focus groups, my experience is that focus groups can be hit or miss; They are also not really on the agenda for a lean startup.

I am sure that over the next few months we will continue to tweak our pages to help further tune our conversion ratios. -Brett

From a success standpoint, we have had the changes in place for about 2 weeks and our signup rate (conversions), is up ~120% Although 2 weeks of data is not enough to draw a final percentage of improvement, we can definitely see the changes working.

We made all of the mentioned changes at the same time, so we can’t single out the effectiveness of the individual changes, just the cumulative effectiveness of our changes.

On your point about the credit card, we intentionally did that to reduce the number of actions the user would have to do to complete the signup. Also: Negative billing techniques requiring cc to take a free trial are being disallowed by a lot of the merchant providers; As a startup we want to have as good of a relationship with your merchant provider as possible. -Brett