The hypothesis was that we could boost the number of people who signed up for a free trial, and then ultimately subscribed, if we removed friction from the initial sign-up by not requiring people to input their credit card information. Steve was adamant that subscriptions would dramatically increase, yet the results were abysmal: they plummeted by half. He was so stunned that he really wanted to run the test again. Debating the result, we realized that, ironically, in trying to remove friction we had introduced more by effectively forcing people to go through a sign-up process twice.
