Part Two: The product · Finding and trying
A company wants an account, a card or a sales call as early as it can get them. A person wants the product to do something for them before they give anything up.
From inside the company each ask is sensible. An email address means you can follow up. A call sorts the serious from the curious. A card on file means more trials turn into customers, and it does. It also means fewer people start one. Count customers per hundred visitors, not per hundred trials.
From the other side, the person is being asked to pay, in attention, in personal details or in commitment, for something they have not yet seen work. The asks do the most damage where interest is weakest. The person who is half sure puts it off until later, and later does not come.
So give something, then ask, at the moment the ask makes sense to them: "Create an account to keep this." Now the account is a way of holding on to something they have.
Carrd, which makes one-page websites, opens straight into the builder. You pick a starting point and make the page without telling it who you are. It asks for an account when you want to save, and for money when you want your own domain.
Not every product can open its doors. A bank must know who you are, and software for a whole company needs setting up. There the ask is often a call, and a call can be the first thing of value if it earns its place. Send the price before it. Show the real product on the buyer's own case. Answer their hardest question. A buyer who is afraid of choosing wrong wants that conversation. What they do not want is a call that exists to sort them for the seller.
Therefore:
Let a person get something real before you ask for an account, a card or a call. When a call must come first, make the call itself worth having. Ask for the least you need.
In practice. List everything you ask for before the product does anything useful. Move each item to the latest point where it is truly needed. Some will turn out not to be needed at all.
Goes with. People arrive here from SAY WHAT IT'S FOR (30). The best thing to give first is A TRIAL WITH YOUR OWN WORK (32). Taking a card "just in case" and charging it quietly belongs under NO TRICKS (83).