from Hacker News

Ask HN: Can a SaaS be successful with only social login?

by nirushiv on 5/12/21, 6:06 AM with 6 comments

Hey HN,

A friend and I are working on a SaaS productivity tool. Not our first venture, but we realized that building email+password login is a huge PITA because of password management/ password recovery / signup confirmation emails / weird ‘email not verified’ states / spammy signups / spammy logins / forgotten email / change email or password and many other cases we need to handle.

So we are thinking - why not offer only social login (at least for our MVP)?? It certainly seems much more preferable as we can focus on our core business, but it’s also so hard to find successful companies that went this route? How important is native email/password login anyway?

Are there any examples of companies that were successful with only social login (Login with Google / Github etc)? Will I alienate our users by going this route?

  • by mradzikowski on 5/12/21, 7:41 AM

    There will always be users that are too lazy to sign up by email and ones that do not use Facebook and/or Google to log in. Any obstruction of the sign up process can reduce your conversion. But you do not have to handle all the states by yourself. Delegate it to Auth0 or something similar.
  • by sonmicrosystems on 5/12/21, 8:25 AM

    I think supporting only social login in the MVP totally makes sense [1] as account verification/authentication requires boilerplate code that isn't core to your product.

    [1]: https://simplelogin.io/blog/do-not-create-own-auth-system/

  • by coderintherye on 5/12/21, 6:54 AM

    Why not just use Auth0?