Sprouter demonstrates a nice and simple bit of signup engagement

I found out about Sprouter via a slightly tenuous route, as it’s a Q and A type site for entrepreneurs and business-owners which I actually found out about reading a blog post by Tara Hunt about women in startups and technology. I’ve been a big fan of Tara’s blog for what seems like ages now, and she’s one of the people I enjoy reading even when the subject isn’t necessarily core to what I’m doing. Plus I’m also really into her startup, Buyosphere, and the way they’re thinking about personal data for shopping and commerce.

Having signed up, I got the traditional welcome email back, with one really nice and simple touch

Click to make it bigger, but the key lines are:

Thanks for taking an interest in Sprouter

We’d like to return the favour and do something for you

Can we sign up to try your app? Can we help connect you with a potential partner or investor?

Now, I haven’t got back to them and tested whether they’ll become readers of OnlineRaceDriver.com on a regular basis, but considering the people they want to be joining the site, all of whom are developing ideas and businesses, it’s just a fantastic simple and effective way to make someone feel welcome and that there’s interest in them and their ideas, with a relatively light touch.

I’ve been using Quora a bit, but it occasionally manages to annoy me in the way it informs me some questions aren’t phrased correctly – while I sympathise with the difficulty in trying to obtain high quality questions, I can feel patronised and slightly stupid without needing to visit a website. And I wasn’t sure I was going to be all that active in a site for entrepreneurs etc, but after that welcome email, I’m a lot more likely to give it a go, and to put the effort in to provide a decent question quality.