I Made a Mistake That Cost me 612 Users

Last week, I wrote a blog post that reached the front page of Hacker News. I was very lucky, and it got thousands of impressions for my app. There were two big problems, though.

People left 1 star reviews

Ouch 🤕

People were instantly uninstalling

Why? Well... I had some pretty intense authentication requirements. Here's a few:

Your password must have at least 8 characters, have a lowercase and uppercase character, a number, and a special character

Turns out, this doesn't work with most password managers, and most people don't have a password that has all these requirements. I honestly don't know where I got the idea that this was the standard 😅

Verify your password

Giving people one more thing to type in just makes the onboarding more cumbersome. If they typed their password incorrectly, they can just reset it when the time comes.

You can't login until you verified your email

Why did I do this? Totally regret it. Makes the process very slow, sometimes mail gets lost in spam, and honestly? Nobody is trying to spam fake accounts on my app. Nobody even knows about it, why would they create a bunch of fake accounts? Just log them in after a successful signup.

Lesson Learned

What do I think I am, a government?

My auth flow was like this because I had done something similar before and it was very quick to reuse my old code. I try to ship quickly, and it's totally fine to make mistakes like this, but it's just as important to fix those mistakes quickly. Unfortunately, I took a bit too long.

Since I pushed this update, I have seen a decrease in uninstalls while installs have remained constant. Now, I just need to take a bit too long to add in third party authentication 🙃

You can download and uninstall my app here.

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