While each of your objections are a matter of personal preferences and there can be discussion around them, you are certainly not entitled to label asking for sign-ups as 'dishonesty'. Using unnecessarily strong words without knowing the entire context (did you read the entire post or have seen the nature of our content or where we are trying to "milk" you?) is uncalled for. We don't track user with cookies, don't block our content (the overlay is dismissible), aren't showing any advertisements. Dishonesty is when I claim that I will not share your personal information with third party and still do so. How a sales process should be driven is a function of both being ethical as well as being cognizant of human behavior / market paradigms / reality. Both have to co-exist. And just to tell you what the actual behavior of our target segment is, they don't see everything in such stark light of suspicion (and neither do we misuse that) and thinking themselves to be the sheep. You can definitely judge us, but you could be doing that with lesser bias and pre-suppositions.
That is a good point. We tried that but were not convinced about whether we are able to capture's user intention only via scroll tracking since our pages have images and users tend to quickly scroll through to get a "feel" of the content.
The post details how to show overlay at a more effective time. Intent is to use time spent on page as a proxy for user engagement since scroller tracking was not so effective.
Yes, the overlay became more effective. Saw 4-5x increase in sign up rate in some cohorts. It certainly gave a much higher sign-up rate than without any overlay. In fact, just trying a dismissable overhead banner was also not working as great as an overlay.
Of course we would grow out of GNUCash some day. I have not explored yet on what solutions we may end up looking at though. Since we are not an e-commerce outfit, we can live for some more time with basic tools just recording our expenses. The day when we start issuing invoices (or if we had to procure inventory to convert to saleable goods), we would need something other than GNUCash.
Well, we are not using it for any invoicing but just maintaining our records. The year end reporting to the CPA was a cakewalk this time compared to all the head breaking we went through pouring over Excel entries, bank account statements etc last year. There are other alternatives but GNUCash works well for our needs.
I think most important things would be:
1. Understanding double-entry accounting
2. Passing entries for liabilities and later squaring off them against payment from bank (e.g. credit card, deferred taxes)
3. Managing all the hosting services and other SaaS tools monthly payments as an expense item
4. Understanding how to account for equity