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
With the 30 day free trial, I noticed they didn't ask for a credit card. It would definitely help with sign up, but does it help with conversions? Anyone have any experience with that?
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