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Launch HN: Arengu (YC S21) – Frictionless Signup Flows
84 points by jacobovidal on Aug 6, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 36 comments
Hi HN, we're Jacobo, Sergio & Pablo, founders of Arengu (https://www.arengu.com). We let you build cutting-edge signup flows as Airbnb, Stripe, or Slack for your SaaS, without dedicating a full engineering team.

Building an application requires coding boring flows like signup, logins, payments, and waiting lists. As applications grow, more complex flows are required, and most of the time they can only be edited by engineering teams. If something breaks, sometimes it takes time to notice. Measuring where users drop off can be tricky. Growth and marketing teams want autonomy to sign up users in landing pages, test new flows and get insights into what performs better.

At our previous jobs, we were constantly asked by clients to customize the signup, adding logic or integrations. We didn't find a good solution to cover the UI and custom logic with APIs other than coding from scratch. So we built a low-code platform, suitable for non-engineering teams, where you can build all the UI and integrations with a visual interface. Then you embed the flow in your site where you want it to appear with just a line of code.

Key features include: email or phone verification with OTPs; Stripe integration to enroll users in trial subscriptions; rate limiting to avoid spam or brute force attacks; approvals to build a waiting list and manually approve or reject signups; analytics events to track any user interaction with your flows; native integrations to send data back and forth between us and your apps; custom HTML/JS to extend your flows’ capabilities.

We make money based on the volume of submissions you have per month or based on product capabilities (eg. adding payment flows in your signup).

Watch our product intro video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go_Dxbj0Jdo) or if you scroll down our homepage (https://www.arengu.com) to “Try a sign-up flow demo” you can see what the product looks like to the end-user and play around - it’s not to sign up to Arengu :P. There are more demos for every of the common use cases we have (https://www.arengu.com/use-cases).

We would love to get feedback about your experience building signups flows: painful parts (eg. UI, logic, security, etc), complex flows (eg. KYC, OTPs, data verification, etc); anything you would like to share with us, or if you think we can help you, feel free to reach out at jacobo [at] arengu.com :)




Building a sign-up/sign-in flows takes like a two hours at most for me with the frameworks i'm fluent with. And i can tweak anything and everything exactly to the product needs. I don't get why would anybody want to be dependent with such elementary thing on some external provider AND pay for it.

But i know people trying to outsource everything whats possible, i see this trend getting stronger and stronger, so perhaps it can get a lot of clients. Good luck anyways.


I get your point and yes, a basic sign-up or login flow can take a few hours to code using a framework. But when you start adding features like OTPs, social login with account linking, conditional logic, data validation, 3rd party widgets to verify identity or link bank accounts, automations to send a welcome email, store the data in your CRM, etc. And as you grow, more things come up and that's when this starts to get messy and most of the time you regret reinventing the wheel.


I think only the welcome email is really valuable to have from all the things you listed. And if you can't handle few ifs within your sign in logic... good luck with your business logic.


I can attest to the pains of working with a complex onboarding flow... At my job, we have about 30 different paths the user could take depending on their usecase. And it's not modeled as 1 30-prong fork that everyone routes through, it's forks that lead back to other steps, skip steps, get data from elsewhere, etc. The difficulty is that it's typically the product and marketing teams who need to understand the flows the most, in order to understand the conversion metrics and how to optimize, yet they have almost no visibility into the actual state logic that dictates the flow in code. Giving them more control over control flow is a huge win


Just curious, What was the company about (eg. fintech)? I totally agree with this, thanks for sharing your experience!


This is a very traditional development view. "Build it and be done with it".

Signups are the gateway to your product. Often times, you need non-technical team members to be able to experiment and iterate with them. This type of work is often boring work for the engineering team.


Thanks for the feedback, I totally agree with this. We often see this mindset but its a matter of education or push the product from non-technical teams.


I wish my site was simple enough to have one of the most complex and important pieces only take two hours of work. That would be the dream.

I think that "And i can tweak anything and everything exactly to the product needs" part is the difficult part. Not so much implementing the "Getting Started" tutorial from Firebase or Auth0.

Nice job on taking on this problem guys


Because of the opportunity cost associated with building a sign-up flow. That means I can't spend my time working on a feature that's core to my service / application.


Agree with this statement. Thanks for the feedback!


Holy crap you guys are awesome. I've brought this idea up with all my entrepreneur friends, everyone's surprised it hasn't been built. Super slick, flexible implementation.

The onboarding was smooth, and made it clear how feature-filled the debugging experience is.

Don't have a use case for this personally right now (iOS / Android apps only, native code), but will definitely use in the future. Congrats on the launch.

Really a tremendous accomplishment. I hope you guys are proud as hell of what you've built.


Thank you very much for your kind words! Feel free to reach me out when you have a use case, I would love to help :)


Congratulations on the launch! This looks really awesome, and I plan to try it out for a project I am working on.

A feature request: I would absolutely love to have something like Arengu that also handles the rest of the boilerplate SaaS stack. Key is a branded user portal with a billing area (I should just give it my Stripe keys and let it generate the screens); user/team management, etc.

To give an example: if you click your avatar in the top right of a Github page, I would like to outsource all of those pages. (How would that work? I would provide APIs and then have some kind of page builder in Arengu that would display the data & handle user input. So for example if I were Github, I would have an endpoint that would return JSON for the repositories for a user, and Arengu would display github.com/$USER?tab=repositories. There could also be API contracts where my API essentially returns the HTML for part of the page.) Basically -- use your front-end builder to reduce the front-end code I need to write & manage.


I believe you're looking for something like Outseta (https://www.outseta.com/)

They're a membership platform that supports:

- Payments

- Sign up forms

- CRM

- Authentication

- Content protection

- Email marketing

- Help desk

- Notifications

Pretty amazing if you ask me. I have no affiliation with Outseta, but I do follow the founder on Twitter.


Thank you so much! This appears to be exactly what I am looking for, and then some.

This is exactly why I keep coming back to HN.


This is a really interesting use case. If you use Stripe, you can use the Stripe Customer Portal to allow your users to handle subscriptions, update users' information, billing details, etc: https://www.arengu.com/tutorials/passwordless-authentication...

Anyway, there are many boilerplate SaaS blocks that might make sense to explore for Arengu, but currently we're focused on signup and onboarding flows/screens.


Tried the demo and got stuck at the Stripe payment step and hit the error "Provided API Key is wrong".

That said, this is a desperately needed product for small teams. Was considering building something like this as a SaaS for the last couple years. A small team I was apart of spent multiple sprints mulling over onboarding tweaks for our users involving all these components.

If it's not already a feature or being worked on, please consider making template Q&A flows that can plop users in a bucket. It's often asked for right before or after signup and is a relatively big lift to keep building over and over.

Looks great and good luck!


Thank you very much for the feedback! Yes, we see the pain on small teams and also on big companies with complex flows or when they want to scale user acquisition.

Can you provide an example of the template Q&A flows? You mean the onboarding screens?

Btw, we've just fixed the API key for the payment flow, thanks for reporting :P


https://www.noom.com/#/survey/basicHealthGoal

https://www.lemonade.com/onboarding/1

So many signups now involve taking a small survey that will sort you into a some cohort. Lots of times, this is required prior to even entering an email or password. Making this process easy, or having a template with predefined dynamic questions and answer flows (even if they're fake and meant to be changed) would be super helpful and solve a whole engineering effort in one fell swoop.


This is really helpful! Thank you very much.


Hey, so this feedback is a bit leftfield but might be useful. On my home network I run pihole using some popular blocklists, and sdk.arengu.com is blocked in two of them, one of them since about 2 years ago. As a result the sign in example on the homepage didn't load initially. It looks like the required forms.js doesn't load.

Of course this is an edge case, your company can't reasonably be expected to cater for how people on the internet decide to filter content on their personal networks, and the majority of people won't run their own DNS servers & take the same slash and burn approach to whitelisting as I do, so I understand if it's seen as a non-issue or rare edge-case.

I'm guessing the SDK URL got flagged on the list because the form builder has been used by some websites for various marketing related purposes triggering a blacklist maintainer to blanket ban the URL (I've had to whitelist common things like cdnjs for similar reasons).

That's fine for marketing forms / flows, but I'm thinking since a website or application's login is more of a primary / critical feature it would make me think twice about using the service if I were designing an app aimed toward tech & privacy savvy developers.

As a workaround, does your service still work if developers decide to host the needed assets on their infrastructure or proxy them under their own DNS? Could be a way around it.

Anyway the feature looks interesting, login flows are far from trivial once you get into the area of social login, OTP, device authentication, 2FA etc. I'm hammering out the architecture of a SaaS service at the moment so I can appreciate the niche you're trying to hit, good luck with the launch and hopefully the above feedback is useful.


We’ve noticed that before and that’s a situation, unfortunately, a bit out of our control. Sometimes we try to request those blacklist sites to remove sdk.arengu.com but without much success.

Allowing developers to host the asset would be a workaround, but that can end up with unexpected issues when we update it. We already had in mind the DNS approach but still analyzing potential security issues before moving forward.

Thank you very much for the feedback and if you want to give Arengu a try, feel free to ping me :)


My immediate thought was "man, this is going to be so useful for so many people". I'm saying that as a non-coding founder.

One immediate thought for a feature (you may or may not have already thought of this...). A picklist of options for "how did you hear about us?"

That will help marketing and sales to get more granularity than the usual 80/20 split between "referral" and "direct" in Google Analytics. With all the brand-building efforts like newsletters, videos and podcasts going on - traditional "last touch attribution" tools like Hubspot or even multi-touch tools like Bizible don't capture brand.


That’s a typical feature you can add to your signup flows: asking where did you hear about us, the user role, etc. To better qualify users and focus on the ones that matter: triggering email sequences, displaying different walkthroughs, etc.

Thanks for the feedback!


Congrats on the launch! We may try this on our WordPress sites that use multiple plugins to provide paid membership, social login and other member functionality.

On the pricing page (/pricing), could you support USD? Also, what are "Gold Integrations"? There doesn't appear to be an explanation but it's listed for every pricing tier.


Yes, you can replace those plugins with Arengu and make it reusable across different sites or technologies. Happy to chat when you want to give it a try!

Gold integrations are Salesforce and Hubspot. You’re right we will clarify that as it’s a bit confusing.

Regarding USD we’re supporting it in the next weeks :)

Thanks for the feedback and questions!


It is very help full for new startup idea to speed up their development. Nice!! Congrats.


Indeed, this can speed up your initial MVP. Thanks for your feedback!


What's behind the name Arengu?


Arengu means development in estonian language. The funny part is we're spanish and we're based in Spain :P


Trying the demo, the page is too wide for my phone, resulting in horizontal scrolling (Safari)


Thanks for reporting it!


I wrote a tutorial for fixing this issue, in case it might help: https://maxwellforbes.com/posts/fixing-mobile-page-layouts


Love the energy going into this problem space. I've been using a competitor (https://clerk.dev/) and excited to check Argengu out too.


Thanks for mentioning clerk.dev but I don't see it having any billing features which IMO is foundational for something like this. Arengu has subscription payments.


Thanks for the feedback!




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