Yeah. Tho in all honesty, and I'm not trying to be mean, but looking at the sort other projects from OP I'm getting less and less interested in this. This is the kind of hype around techy/startupy type projects that I stay away from as confidence level goes down the more emoji mixed with dark patterns are being utilized. Your data is shared with an awful number of services to delivery something that's supposed to be as small and simple as a script.
To give some context, we indeed make these "side projects" hoping to drive signups and engagements to our core projects (Mailbrew and Typefully), but we always do them with the same care of main project, focusing on utility and user experience.
Typefully itself, now an essential part of our business, was born as a Mailbrew side project.
Even Feeds Mage, while it may appear silly to some people, could actually be further developed to become a great discovery tool for the Twitter social graph. In a way these projects are always also long terms bets for us, even when they're small bets that took 2 weeks to build, like in this case.
> To give some context, we indeed make these "side projects" hoping to drive signups and engagements to our core projects (Mailbrew and Typefully), but we always do them with the same care of main project, focusing on utility and user experience.
Doesn't seem like it's done with the same level of care though. I checked the other projects, and although Typefully for example follows almost the exact same aggressive flyover popup thing that obstructs interaction with the background before getting that number counter to flip one more time via a sign up, it still has the "try instead" link.
FeedMage still does not. For a service that was built in 2 weeks, adding a tiny hide button shouldn't take more than 3 days.
While you're free to do whatever you see fit for your business and brand, I'm just letting you know that people pick up on this. IMO tactics and darkpatterns like this are the root of a lot of awfulness on the web (but that's another matter). To me this is really disrespectful to your company's user base and the fact that it's still (checked as I'm typing this comment) doesn't have a close option sort of proves it. Even those aggressive ads have a tiny albeit hidden "x".
