Launch HN: Rownd (YC W22) – Add authentication and accounts to any website

[mhamann]

Hi HN! We’re Matt, Rachel, and Rob, the founders of Rownd (https://rownd.io/). We make it easy for developers to sign up users through a code snippet that adds account creation and authentication to any website or web app—like Stripe for accounts. We made a page for you to try it out: https://rownd.io/hacker-news, and a video to walk you through the flow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7fv17HSYrc.

For example, one of our customers is a film festival. The festival requires everyone who buys a movie ticket to make a user account. That's a big drag on conversion rates and requires technical upkeep. We take care of all that for the festival and make account creation and maintenance less painful for their users, which leads to more ticket sales. Further, the day of the festival, they can text “tickets” to xxxxx (our short code) and we send a specialized magic link so they can log in quickly and see their itinerary and tickets.

Rownd works across all your websites and apps, so (for example) if a user has subscribed to your newsletter, that data automatically gets contributed to their account for your app. No one needs to re-enter their email address!

Turning a website visitor into a user is hard. Turning a waitlist member or a newsletter subscriber into a user is even harder. There is a huge gap between marketing pages (landing pages, blogs, docs) and actual products (web apps and mobile apps). The culprit is the traditional sign-up/login page. Sign-in pages add friction and lose users in your product funnel.

Your marketing pages should transition seamlessly to your actual product, but most sign-up flows act as a giant wall: stop, enter information that the company often already has from previous interactions, verify email/phone, remember your password (hopefully it’s in the password manager!), and finally, if you’re lucky…you’re in.

We eliminate this gap, stitching together user accounts from your startup’s CRM, mailing lists, and database, making authentication work seamlessly across your websites and apps. If a user verifies their email or phone number anywhere (including in marketing emails), we authenticate them everywhere. Visitors and subscribers become account-holding users.

We give you a code snippet for websites (which you add to your footer), and an SDK for web apps, to add authentication. Our “hub” (i.e., our standard sign-in and account management widget, specially designed to look and feel trustworthy) is then visible on your pages, and the account data is available to the browser/app through a simple API. Additionally, if you already have information about that user in other sources, such as CRM/marketing tools (Hubspot, Mailchimp, Airtable, etc), we integrate it into the onboarding/authentication process. The account data is available to your website or app through our browser API, so there is no need to build a backend for user management.

In more detail: We create an anonymous account around any visitor to your website. When a user comes to a site that has the Rownd Hub, a unique ID is created. Any form that is attached will fire that data to our Hub as well. The registration process can take place over several days if a visitor returns periodically. The data is stored in browser memory until they either press the "verify my account" button or click a button or link that is tagged as a Rownd authentication button (a bit like how Discord lets users view a server, but only comment once authenticated). If you link us to relevant data in your CRM, Airtable, or database, we make “claimable accounts” that are initialized from these data sources. Users claim their accounts and sign in with our passwordless authentication (via email or phone number today, but eventually perhaps crypto wallets too!). You can also use our “instant account links” in your own email and SMS campaigns to re-engage with users and bring them back to your app or website, fully authenticated when they arrive.

We are a team of former IBMers that have worked together for years tackling authentication, API management, and data protection. The predecessor to Rownd was a company helping startups comply with data privacy laws. We started to notice some pain around sign-up and onboarding for our own product and were frustrated that our funnel had so many holes in it. Then we realized that other companies were facing similar problems converting their site visitors to users. So, one day during a team discussion, we said “okay, let’s solve that problem!”

Since we’d already built a backend for secure data storage, the account layer was essentially there. We’ve therefore focused on building the layer that streamlines user authentication, connecting data directly to the user’s browser session as well as the custom backends that most products have. In the future, we aim to allow even more seamless, opt-in authentication across different websites as our network grows. We’ve got a ton of new features in mind from mobile app support to a broader array of SDKs to enabling “sign in with crypto.” We’re excited to make this crucial part of the internet easier, more scalable, and more distributed than ever before.

If you’re a developer, please let us know what you think! We’d love to hear your questions, feedback, ideas, and experiences around this space. You can also try Rownd for free at https://rownd.io/hacker-news. We look forward to hearing how we might help developers accelerate building products, and companies speed up growing their user base.

[moonlighter]

Congrats, looks very promising. I find the pricing page confusing though. First, the "Startup" option is $99. $99 for what? A month? A year? The unit of time is missing. Second, the "Set up a call" button is a turn-off. I don't want to call anyone. I want to simply sign up for the service to try it out, as frictionless as possible. Having to CALL someone in 2022 is exactly the opposite of that.

[rgthelen]

Hey! I fixed the pricing (added the per month) and added a button to the landing page to "Try it now".

Thank you for your very focused and tactical feedback. Easy to change!

[la64710]

For Authz solutions targeted at HN audience it is way overpriced.

[mhamann]

Apologies for the confusion. The pricing is monthly, but we're lowering it to $49/mo for anyone coming from Hacker News.

I'm a huge fan of self-service as well. Picking up the phone to call someone is like...the last thing I want to do. So 1990s! :-D

We're hard at work making Rownd much more self-service. We'd love to hear more feedback once the process there is a bit smoother!

[rgthelen]

Thank you for your feedback and sorry about that.

Try this: https://rownd.io/hacker-news . We'll add a button to the main site!

We are in the transition from "do things that don't scale" to "scale and grow".

--Rob

[danielmarkbruce]

This looks cool. Please get a great product marketing manager. It took me 5-6 mins to understand what it is. I'm not a PMM, but for example this could have made things much clearer from the get go:

> We create an anonymous account around any visitor to your website

Doesn't this single sentence sum it up? Anyone who would think about buying an auth service is going to understand the implications of this. I get that you want to pitch why anyone would care, ie the value prop:

> We make it easy for developers to sign up users through a code snippet that adds account creation and authentication to any website or web app—like Stripe for accounts.

But the auth space is filled with... mostly bs products. If you pitch the value prop first, at least in auth, people will roll their eyes won't they? And the Stripe analogy isn't that great. Your value prop is that you make it easy for your customer's end users. Stripe's core value prop to customers is they make it easy for you. Both are valid, but you are sort of conflating things with the analogy.

[rgthelen]

Thank you for this!

You are absolutely correct. Is it very easy to say the same thing 5 times. I really (sincerely) do appreciate the feedback. Seeing what is important and what resonates is really important and one of the best reasons for a Hacker News launch.

You really found the crux of our g2m a/b testing - appeal to the developer (this is really easy) or appeal to the product manager (this will get you more users, faster).

Hit me up sometime if you want to chat more (would love to pick your brain - robert (a-t) rownd (dot) io. ). Thank you!

[mywittyname]

> We create an anonymous account around any visitor to your website.

I like this idea. As a user, I hate that companies force me to make an account in situations where I don't want to make an account. It sounds like companies that use your product will allow me to buy products from someone without having to create a damn account.

Accounts are negative value for most customers who don't regularly return. It's a source of friction: who hasn't forgotten the password for a site their rarely go to then decide it's not worth doing the password reset (even if you use a password manager, it might not stay updated for "junk" sites)?

Plus, junk sites are the ones that tend to get pwned, and leak information.

[rgthelen]

> Accounts are negative value for most customers who don't regularly return. It's a source of friction: who hasn't forgotten the password for a site their rarely go to then decide it's not worth doing the password reset (even if you use a password manager, it might not stay updated for "junk" sites)?

We want the internet to be kind of like Discord's auth, one where you can see what is going on in a server but there are some actions that require verification/authentication. Like you said, if you just want a sneak peak, no reason to verify your email or create a bad password. But if you want to leave a comment, you have to verify.

[rgthelen]

That is our goal. There are a few different use-cases where no account is great and a few where you may want to create an account.

Buying something from an ecommerse website could be either or. You may want to save some specifics or preferences. Others may need you to create an account to come back, especially if there is critical data being stored. I agree that passwords are dangerous.

We used our own auth to create a "try it out" page on Webflow. We do need an email (but it does not have to be validated) so we can go to our backend and create an App key so you can try the snippet. If you come back, you also do not have to validate, but if you want to go into our app deeper, we have you validate because otherwise, you will not be able to get back after the tokens expire, you use a different browser, etc.

What is really exciting is a world where you can validate without an email or phone number. So you can come back without needing more data.

[XCSme]

> Accounts are negative value for most customers who don't regularly return

Don't most ecommerce websites allow you to checkout as a guest?

[jph]

Great idea. I'm your target customer. My feedback: you've got a stellar opportunity for your home page, to add a big "Try It Now" button. And you already have the functionality in your "Log In" link-- just make it much more obvious.

[rgthelen]

Done! Try it now is up and running!

Edit: Also, if you're willing, can you shoot me an email robert (a - t) rownd.io? would love to chat about your thoughts on the product.

[bobbyradford]

Hey, that's great feedback @jph! We do want to highlight the usefulness in an obvious way.

[rgthelen]

Thanks! That is an awesome idea. Always looking for more ways to show off our tech! Appreciate it!

[rachelradulo]

Totally agreed on this!

[mhamann]

Great feedback! We'll definitely work on improving that.

[davewasthere]

on https://rownd.io/pricing

'Up to 1 website', is an odd way of saying it. You can't really have less, can you? Also in Pro you've spelt 'Unlimited' incorrectly.

Any plans to add social auth, or just magic link going forward?

Watched the video, hopefully you'll experience the network effect going forward. Best of luck with the product.

[runako]

Congratulations on your launch!

Feedback on the site: I read the site and still really don't understand what the product does (I immediately saw it as an Auth0 competitor). Your "In more detail" paragraph would be a good bit of text to include prominently on the site.

Good luck!

[mhamann]

Thanks for the feedback! Sorry that things weren't clear! We'll work on that...

[orliesaurus]

Wait, it's not an auth0 competitor? Ok I am lost.

[dot_michael]

Maybe I'm tired but after reading the landing page twice. I still have no idea how it works. Can I use the product without signing up? Or a video of someone using the product?

[mhamann]

Thanks for the feedback. It's not you, it's us. ;-)

We've just been making some updates to our home page to hopefully make it clearer, but we realize we still have plenty of work to do.

If you sign in at the Rownd website, you can experience how the product will work on your own website.

We'll definitely get a shorter demo video posted soon that helps explain this too.

[rmbyrro]

They provided a tutorial video [1] in the post.

I tried watching but didn't go past 90 seconds. Too verbose, TBH...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7fv17HSYrc

[jph]

Sign up goes well. But your email confirmation link seems to be broken or on a reject list: when I click the link, then it fails from domain "pstmrk.it" and doesn't seem to reach rownd.io. IMHO email confirmation links should go directly to the expected domain and company, not anywhere else.

[slig]

Congrats on shipping! How does this differs from Userfront?

[mhamann]

Hey, thanks! There are a number of companies working in this problem space, and certainly Userfront is one. But one of the most obvious differences is that the first thing Userfront does is ask you for a password. We'll never do that because we firmly believe that passwords are essentially a Web 1.0 construct that needs to disappear forever.

That said, we're not just authn/authz software. We're helping companies improve their UX across every facet of their web and mobile presence. We focus on how account data spans various systems, not just isolated within one datastore. We also consider how user data flows through various UIs, is part of personalization, etc.

At the end of the day, we want to make the relationship companies build with their users more akin to how it works in real life. It's often a conversation, not just a transaction.

[lajr]

Quick question: the NextJS demo seems to be doing auth on the client side which would result in a flicker on page load while it waits to see if the user is authenticated. Do you have a server friendly component in the react library? Other libraries (ex: auth0) have a special function which is deployed as a getServerSideProps function on each page, as well as an API route that handles auth requests.

[mhamann]

Great point! Thanks for the observation. Unfortunately, at the moment, we only have the client-side handlers built, but we do plan to add support for server-side rendering in the authenticated state.

For now, you can use our `is_initializing` flag to wait until the authenticated state is fully loaded before completing the render in the browser. I realize that's not an optimal solution for this use case. We'll get there!

[tommiegannert]

Nice one. I love the SOLID project, separating apps from storage, and moving the users in charge of their data. This fits really well in that space.

Is it possible to use for users without Javascript enabled?

Any plans for a Go API? The HTTP API seems clean enough that it's barely needed, but I guess standardization is good. :)

Your pricing page doesn't say if it's monthly or annually.

[abuehrle]

Nice launch. How does this compare to clerk.dev?

[mhamann]

We envision a future without passwords and where you can take your identity around with you and plug it in wherever you want, while also maintaining control of that personal info. Interestingly, the first thing clerk.dev asks for when you sign up is a password...

Additionally, we don't think you should have to have a React/Vue/Next.js/etc site just to add auth. We want this to be plug-and-play anywhere and work across all of your web properties (and eventually mobile too). That could make the marketing, docs, and support experiences better at so many websites with a level of integration that used to take weeks or months to build (if anyone even bothered).

[adamqureshi]

ok i am a 1 man shop and outsource Auth to Auth0 but i am paying $25/month to them without offending you how can i justify paying $99/month for this ( I am building another app ) and doing it in webflow as MVP and want todo Auth with a stupid simple JS integration to at least test the MVP. But i like your dead ass simplicity.

[westoque]

I am mostly a one man shop myself but I would encourage everybody to self host their authentication. With so many open source libraries, there’s no good reason why you should use an external provider. In most cases, if the app is relatively successful you will very likely add functionality to your app, and this means you need control of your data and everything else that comes with it.

In the bigger scheme of things, I envision a world where adding auth to your app (or any functionality) is as simple as adding a docker service.

[rgthelen]

Hey Adam!

That is a great question. We are new and want to find those folks that are willing to pay 2-10 times more than the competitors. Most all of our competitors are free for 2-12 months hoping to lock you in. It is very counter-intuitive, but our first 20 paying customers have such a real pain point that are not being met, then even knowing that there are cheaper alternatives, they turn to us.

We do offer 50% off of that rate for hacker news ($49 a month). We will decrease our price over time as we really understand more about our customers, their problems, and make onboarding super simple.

Having said all of that, reach out at robert (a-t..) rownd.io and if you are willing to give us feedback I'll find a price to make it work.

[yodon]

How does GDPR, etc. factor into this?

[rgthelen]

It is the very foundation of what we are building. We started as a data privacy company. When you authenticate with Rownd, the Rownd hub (on every website screen that uses Rownd), shows all of the personal data that has been collected by that app/site and you can turn it off with a button click. You can also go to mydata.rownd.io and self opt out of ANY data on any app that Rownd partners with.

We fundamentally believe that the end-user should control their data, we turn it into a feature.

Thanks for the question!

[tapsboy]

What is your opinion about Gigya, LoginRadius and other old timers in the CIAM space? How are you changing this space? Also how does it compare to AWS Cognito, GCP CIP and others?

[rgthelen]

Thanks for this question.

Two big changes: Most players in this space treat authentication as a point in time decision and it is usually static. IE, you are about to enter an webapp, we will now authenticate you. We think authentication should be a gradient. You can be unauthenticated, authenticated but unverified, and you can be fully authenticated. The ideal user experience is that users should be able to try an app or experience prior to having to "login".

Second, we also hold account/profile data for users and make it available to apps and websites to personalize and customize their experience. This is critical as we move into "hyper customization" in the near future. We allow sites to slowly gather data through trust. At the same time, we give the end-user control over this data (they can turn it off, edit it, just like they would a profile).

[vincentmarle]

> Sign-in pages add friction and lose users in your product funnel.

Sounds good but why don't you apply the same principle on your own website?

[jn31415]

Do you happen to be hiring for customer support / support engineer roles?

[mhamann]

Thanks for reaching out! We have a couple of positions that we'll be opening up soon. DM me over on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthamann/) or drop me an email ([email protected]) and we can chat further. :-)

[rgthelen]

Hey! Not right now, but I have do doubt we will in the future. Shoot me your info at robert (at) rownd.io .

[getcrunk]

Shocked no one complained about the fact that you have to give them your email or phone number to get any more information from the hn specific landing page. Pathetic for a company that claims to "transition seamlessly" from marketing to product. I'm already never going to use it.

[rgthelen]

Sorry about that experience. You can also check out https://rownd.io for more info. We wanted to show off a new feature called "unverified", but if you are having this reaction, others probably are as well.

Thank you for the feedback.

[rgthelen]

Hey HN! I am a co-founder at Rownd. Let us know what you think! We started down this path about 8 weeks ago and are very excited about the possibilities of what authentication SHOULD be not just what it is.

[rachelradulo]

Hi Hacker News! I'm a co founder and heading up design at Rownd. Looking forward to feedback and questions about your experiences trying out our product!