No way to browse contacts. When I use the search, Chrome's suggestions appear on top of your suggestions, which is quite confusing. Quite neat though for a first draft, though not sure that it offers much beyond standard webmail contact management.
Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#22I think it will help if you are more descriptive about the problems it solves and how it solves it. Before I am welcomed on your site you are already putting pricing in my face. Asking me to put a contact before I can 'have a seat'. It is all too sudden
What I would advise is this, visit 37 signals and copy the format of their apps like BaseCamp. It is pretty the industry standard for productivity software.
Best of luck.
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#231. If the whole app experience is as quick & snappy as the screens I've seen just poking around without entering data, you're doing something very right.
2. As a potential customer, I need a screencast that shows me what your service does, how it will help me accomplish X and Y better than my current system, and why I should spend time exploring it. See dropbox for an awesome example.
3. You should come right out and name your competition and explain what you do better. It's a giant pain in the ass to switch CRM midstream, and yet there's so much room for improvement.
4. The name is atrocious. It fails multiple tests (can your users pronounce it? spell it? remember it? understand it?). You should really consider changing it.
Good luck!
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#24I like the speed and simplicity, but without the ability to import contacts, I'm going to treat it more like a toy than a tool.
VCard import is already there (available in Firefox and Chrome and any browser supporting FileReader). Outlook import on its way.
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#25I would be interested in the technology and architecture behind it.
Javascript. NodeJS. TokyoCabinet. Views and controllers are HTML and JS. 2 static files: index.html and application.js served by Nginx. Server is an API. Authorization and filtering done at the meta-data level: set union and intersection on database indexes to avoid JSON deserialization/serialization overhead.
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#261. If the whole app experience is as quick & snappy as the screens I've seen just poking around without entering data, you're doing something very right. 2. As a potential customer, I need a screencast that shows me what your service does, how it will help me accomplish X and Y better than my current system, and why I should spend time exploring it. See dropbox for an awesome example. 3. You should come right out and…
Re:
1. Thanks. It gets better when you add more data. 2. The idea is to let you jump right in and try it for real. 3. Let me know what you're using so I can build an importer for it. 4. What do you suggest?
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#27Just focusing on the design aspect, I'm split between thinking "I love the simple, clean, minimalistic look" and "It looks like it's half built, I'll come back when it's finished". Perhaps even just the inclusion of a small logo or a bit of colour anywhere, would give the added impression that at least "something" has gone into the design and that this isn't just the default look & feel of a CSS framework.
Thanks. It'll look fine when you add data.
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#28I can't seem to find any screenshots of how your app does what it promises to do. And the only way I know what it's supposed to do is because you told us in the HN submission, not on the site itself. The first interaction is for me to type in some pretty sensitive information (email, phone number, etc.), which I am simply not going to do until I feel it's worth it. Also: your site breaks in weird ways in Opera (10.60…
Opera not supported.
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#29Who is this app aimed at? If it's aimed at people who would pay to manage their contacts, then it must be able to import from any reasonable email system. That includes outlook, Notes, Eudora, Thunderbird, Mail etc. Importing means basically scraping most of the context and content of email, contacts, notes and appointments. To me this sounds like a CRM system, and if someone came to me and said, I want to build a CR…
Thanks, VCard import exists. Outlook import coming. Let me know what you need.
Re: Ask HN: Review My Startup: Szpil
#30I peeked the code a bit and you got some good stuff there, like the Model class and the Http class to wrap on top of Prototype Ajax and also support Jsonp. I'm actually building an app that has the contacts feature as well so it's interesting to see another design and coding approach .
With the foundation of your application right now, you can extend it to support CSV (or sources other) import in no time, or adding a bunch of new functionalities. The biggest question is to find out how to charge people for your service. I truly believe in startup that aims to make money on day 1 and this is the only future-proof way to keep your service running for the long run.
Also, get at least IE7 support. IE is a must for serious businesses, not like this:
if (Prototype.Browser.IE || Prototype.Opera) {
var safari = Html.a({ href: 'http://www.apple.com/safari' }, 'Safari');
var chrome = Html.a({ href: 'http://www.google.com/chrome' }, 'Chrome');
var firefox = Html.a({ href: 'http://www.mozilla.com/firefox' }, 'Firefox');
var links = safari + ', ' + chrome + ', ' + firefox;
Notice.error('Your browser is not supported. Please use:', links);
}