Enhancing user experience
The number of websites requiring visitors to create a user account to enjoy their services can become a turn off. After the first few profile creations, many visitors will leave a website if they have to create yet another user account.
This week we talked to Rakesh Soni, co-founder of LoginRadius, which enables website visitors to register and log in using their existing accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, YouTube or any one of 30 major social platforms out there, eliminating the annoying registration process that all online users have come to dread.
The integration and maintenance time is minimal. Soni said that while website owners can expect to spend 300 hours on integration and maintenance with Facebook and Google alone, the process is under two hours with LoginRadius.
With more than 100,000 websites using LoginRadius to reach more than 15 million users each month, and partnerships with giants such as Amazon, Mozilla and Microsoft, this startup is onto great things. Here’s more from our interview.
How did you come up with the idea for your startup?
We were working on another product where we were getting significant traffic to our site, but we found that users were not engaging with the product, which was a big disconnect from the great feedback we received during trials. We soon realized it was a pain for users to register, between filling out long forms and remembering an additional username and password. So, to simplify the process, we decided to build a solution to enable users to register and log in via their existing accounts on Twitter, Facebook, Gmail etc.
Upon some research as well as conversations with several website owners, we found there are over 50 million websites that use a log-in feature and many of them faced the problem of low user registrations and engagement. However, these website owners don’t have the time and expertise to build and maintain such a solution. That’s when we de- cided to offer it to everybody and LoginRadius was born. What makes you different? We are a unified connector to all social platforms. Our solution is simple, easy to implement and affordable for small and medium businesses.
What has been the biggest challenge so far?
I’d say finding the right fit for our product in the market. For the first year, we were primarily focused on product development and customer relations, and not successfully demonstrating that we can build a large customer base.
We started to get engaged in developer communities, find early adopters to try our product and use their feedback to make improvements. This resonated well and the word of mouth from these communities was a key factor in the exponential growth we saw.
What’s new with your startup that we can share?
We have added five new team members. We also just announced our partnership with oDesk, which is a platform that will help us spread our product with the help of millions of developers.
What has contributed to your success to this point? What advice would you like to share to early stage or new entrepreneurs?
The biggest contributor to our success so far is having an amazing product that is solving a real world problem for businesses and developers.
My advice to early stage startups is to talk to customers, identify their pains and build a simple solution for it, and everything else will follow. We spent a lot of time trying to find the right communities where our customers hung out, engaged with them and made them our early adopters, and ultimately our customers became our evangelists. Also, surround yourself with experienced people who you can call for advice and guidance.
What made you choose to go down the path of entrepreneurship?
We’ve always been interested in innovation and leadership, and we weren’t able to experience that in our typical 9-to-5 jobs. We wanted to build something to help people, so we started working together on some new ideas, and here we are!
What do you and your startup need?
As an early stage startup, there is a lot we need to turn it into a successful venture. Other than customers and partners, we are always looking for talented people and have openings in sales, marketing, and development. We are also actively looking for mentors and board members. Visit LoginRadius.com for more information.