I've worked with Railsbridge in San Francisco and this is a great organization - Would love to see more RailsBridge outreach happening in the world.

This is great feedback. The magic about eight times increase in credit card capture is pretty huge. In my case, the application is very simple, and I think people need to use it before deciding to pay.

So I'm really thinking about going to a graduated payment/engagement solution. Doing up cells in the application might be the way to go for something with such a low price. In my case, I'm looking at charging $24 per year.

If anyone wants to check it out, visit http://last5.co

I looked carefully at MailChimp but I didnt see anything about being able to set up "Drip Campaigns" where people will get messaged using a predefined set of emails at given intervals after an event (such as a signup on a website). That's the secret sauce that I'm looking for - being able to add people to predefined workflows using an API and ideally push them down different paths, such as "Purchased" or "Didnt purchase after 60 days", so I can market to them more specifically and in an automatic way. This is what I meant by "Drip Campaign"

The magic word you're looking for in their documentation is Autoresponder. With the API, you just have some sort of state tracking field (I think they call them "Columns") and then segment the main list such that particular autoresponders go out to people who match a particular column value at N days past signup.

Make sense?

I am so concerned about all the other work that has to be done that I tend to fall on the other side of the spectrum; get the design to an 'acceptable' place and move on.

My attitude is something along the lines of 'If you're not freaking out, you're not working hard enough'

That said, I still havent launched publically, mostly because of all the 'details' of which you speak (core product works but is ugly).

I dont have a need for this day to day, but I was going to sign up to get updates, check out the tool etc.

Since I dont hvae a use for it today, I figured i wouldnt really use the 14 day trial.. What I really wanted was a free version so I could come back and use the tool when I had a need for it in my daily life.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

I fought with this, to be honest. Many people have requested a free account, but the issue I was afraid of - and decided to try and mitigate - is having to support a ton of free users, when I really need to get revenue coming in through the door.

Once things settle down and I have a nice core set of paid users, then I might consider doing that.

Who knows...this is just the first step, so expect lots of iterations from here on out :)