Caterpillar Cowboy

When new customers would try this product, they weren’t required to register at first. They could simply come to the website and start using it. Only after they started to have some success would the system prompt them to register – and after that, start to offer them premium features to pay with. It was a slick example of lazy registration and a freemium model. The underlying assumption was that making it seamless for customers to ease into the product was optimal. In order to support that assumption, the team had written a lot of very clever code to create this “tri-mode” experience (every part of the product had to treat guests, registered users and paying users somewhat differently).

One day, the team decided to put that assumption to the test. The experiment was easy to build (although hard to decide to do): simply remove the “guest” experience, and make everyone register right at the start.  To their surprise, the metrics didn’t move at all. Customers who were given the guest experience were not any more likely to register, and they were actually less likely to pay. In other words, all that tri-mode code was complete waste.