After buying into the LTD and spending ~24 hours of looking on how it works, I am prepared to give the follow.it service a tentative 5 tacos for trying, even though not all the promised features are available just yet :)

What I like about follow.it is that it offers a relatively frictionless way to attract new subscribers for your own blog, corporate or e-commerce website. Behind the standard 'leave your mail to hear back from us' trope there lies a hidden selection from multiple actual notification choices (single email notification for each update; including all updates into a daily 'newspaper' style email, itself including full texts or titles only; and even a 'subscriberless' RSS feed)

At the same time, follow.it gently introduces the users to its own service, which immediately increases its own usefulness and makes it so much easier for the user to register for the service itself.

The beautiful part is that the names of the popular feeds already registered in this service will carry your sad, pathetic feed on their shoulders. After all, who wouldn't subscribe to the CNN or a 9gag newsfeed to test out the service? By the time the user reaches the opt-in confirmation screen, he or she may have already forgotten they came to follow.it from your website, but you will still get their email and the chance to make them like you by reading your content!

At back-end side, the service offers a lot of actionable advice on how to integrate and use the service. And I was pleasantly surprised to hear from the authors of the software very quickly and to negotiate the ability to translate the user dashboard into my own language, because most of my prospective users are not English speakers.

All in all, follows.it feels like a simple binary choice: it will either not work for my business (in which case I will have lost a small amount of money & effort trying it out) or it will help me gain readers faster and retain them for longer than using the tried and tired 'leave your email to receive updates' approach.

Unlike most services that we pay for and use solely for our own benefit, the follow.it model is much more symbiotic: when I earn a subscriber, they earn a subscriber; but the kind of service they provide also makes it easier to retain that subscriber. I find this approach smart and refreshing, and that is why I give this deal an optimistic 5 tacos.