Launched "Polite Email Popup" on Twitter

Three months ago I read this story on Indie Hackers:

➡️ "Tip: The most effortless way of growing your email list"

The author (Kacper), claimed he got ~10% of his site visitors to sign up for his email newsletter, for a total of 231 subscribers only 3 weeks after his product's launch!

Up until the point of reading that article, I always thought exit intent popups were super annoying and probably weren't very effective. I thought: an experienced internet citizen like me would never, ever subscribe to a newsletter if through a spammy exit-intent popup... right??

But then, just a few days later, I found myself entering my email address into one. It was on a technical blog of an author I really respected and I just wanted to hear more updates from him.

In that moment, I realized the truth: exit intent popups are NOT rude if you've given someone the time to get to know you and they've extracted lots of value from your website already.

Once you've provided some value for free, your visitors will be more than happy to sign up to receive even more value — it's a no-brainer!

So, I set out to find an exit intent popup for all of my side projects and websites (I have about 10 of them 😅) — one I could just paste in and forget about. My one rule was: "the popup I use needs to be polite and not invasive or annoying."

The best one I found was Poptin, which honestly looks like a great service. It lets you control exactly when your popup triggers — based on scroll %, time on site, # of pages visited, etc. It's really powerful.

However, there was one, tiny issue...

As an indie hacker, I release a new project every 3-6 months, so I have A LOT of websites I'd want to use this on. Not only does it need to be easy to set up... it needs to be inexpensive.

Unfortunately, Poptin (as well as most of the other email marketing services I looked into) charge not only by the # of visitors your site gets, but by how many domains you can use the popup on...

So, as a small-time indie hacker, I'd be looking at a bill of around $50/month (for their premium multi-site plans) just to have a simple email popup on all my websites. 😞

That's when the idea for Polite Email Popup really took hold.

The idea was:

• It would trigger two email sign up forms (one along the bottom of the page and one as an exit-intent popup) to collect visitor emails
• But, it would only trigger these when it was polite to do so — e.g. after a visitor had scrolled around and perhaps visited a couple pages
• It would be a simple script, so I could just plug it into all of my sites in around 2 minutes and forget about it. It would take care of 100% of my email marketing without a second thought.

In short, it would be polite, easy to install, and able to send new email signups directly into my email list of choice.

So, now, after 2.5 months of hard work, I'm finally ready to release the first public version (after testing it and making sure it works over the past few weeks).

• It's free and open source (hosted on GitHub)
• It's accessible, using best practices around modal accessibility
• It is, and always will be, polite 😇

You can find out more (and watch a demo) of it in the launch tweet: https://twitter.com/panphora/status/1299028909183381505