How a useless dashboard panel helped us boost usage by 200%
When we first introduced [Taurus](https://taurus.io) to [Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com), we were elated by the amount of attention and praise it received. Which is why we were surprised to see our first batch of about 100 beta users mostly flop out and do absolutely nothing. There aren't very many steps you have to take after creating an account on our site. In fact, we kept our dashboard lightweight on purpose. After logging in, the user was greeted with a barebones account-settings page where you could change your password or update billing information. And, of course, a link to the installation guide. But people were signing up, only to bounce immediately on our account-settings page. We didn't even see very many people click through to even try and figure out how to install the thing. After a couple emails asking how much it cost to get set up ($0, which was noted), and some time in my [mind palace](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKFMV0S5L44#t=22), I realized we were seeing the effects of a paywall, but without actually having a paywall. In an effort to keep our account-settings page simple, we had been inadvertently telling our users, "thanks for signing up, now let's see some plastic." The mere presence of billing information was apparently enough to jump ship, regardless of captions and callouts indicating that payment wasn't necessary. To remedy this, the first thing we did was install a worthless dashboard (which still exists and is only slightly less worthless). It consists of a bar graph that measures how many tooltips have been created and a link to our installation guide. More importantly however, it's the first thing you see after creating an account. The account-settings page (thus billing information) was hidden away in another tab for until it was necessary. Later that week, we released another batch of invites and, like magic, watched usage rise.
