A discount wheel and a quiet hesitation

We needed a way to say thank you, something more than just a pop-up. The idea of a spin wheel felt playful, but I kept thinking about the ask. It was a limited-time thing, a small experiment to see if anyone was even interested.

The moment before the click

Setting it up was the easy part. Choosing the colors, the little sound it would make. The hard part was writing the text that appears before someone spins.I must have rewritten that line a dozen times. Every version felt either too pushy or too vague. I wanted it to feel like an invitation, not a transaction.

Asking for an email address

I remember my cursor hovering over the field label. ‘Enter your email’ felt so cold. I changed it to ‘Where should we send your offer?’ It was a tiny shift, but it mattered to me.The hesitation was real. I didn’t want to be another site grabbing data. We were a startup, and trust felt like the only currency we had. The wheel had to be worth the exchange.

What landed on the wheel

We filled it with things we could actually deliver. No fake ‘grand prizes’, just honest discounts and a couple of free shipping codes. It had to feel fair, like a genuine thank you for a moment of someone’s time.

The first spin that came back

Seeing that first entry come through was a quiet relief. Someone had taken the chance. The discount they won wasn’t huge, but it was something. It felt like the beginning of a conversation, not the end of one.