Please review my startup: BuzzLabs

Hi Hacker News,

Always been a lurker, love what I learn on here. Would appreciate your thoughts (good, bad, ugly) on a startup I've been working on. The company is BuzzLabs, a six-person Seattle startup. We've received strategic seed funding from a large player in the local business space.

The goal is to save business owners (think restaurants, hotels, spas) the hassle of checking dozens of sites to find out what people are saying about them online. They want to focus on improving their business instead of surfing the web and figuring out what's relevant and interesting to their business.

Our technology aggregates social media activity for a local business (i.e. reviews, tweets, blog posts, etc.) into one place, and supplements that activity with deeper analysis and trends. Behind the scenes, we're doing relevance filtering, scoring, classification, and natural language processing to make the report relevant and meaningful.

We've built two separate products on the same technology platform: Find My Buzz (http://www.findmybuzz.com), and an interactive dashboard (http://www.buzzlabs.com). Find My Buzz is intended to be a lightweight, stop-and-go version of the dashboard -- simple, less-frequent printed consumption by small business owners. The dashboard is for larger businesses/chains with lots of online activity, where daily, aggregate "real-time" brand monitoring is crucial.

Any feedback would be appreciated. I can also be reached at [jason at buzzlabs dot com]

Thanks in advance, Jason Tan, CTO

Looks interesting, trying it out now (waiting for the report). Just some quick thoughts: On the "please enjoy our animated story of social media love" page, the animation is choppy and rather hard to follow... I lost interest in it very quickly.

More to the point: it's not exactly clear that the user can navigate away from this page (the animation may imply to some users that something is still happening). The flow feels interrupted at this point and it seems you might better direct/capture the user to do/read something else. I'm not sure what that step might be, but it feels like a missed opportunity (for you).

nice

It's an interesting idea that I think local businesses would be interested in marketed properly. I have 2 remarks on the design.

1) Not all businesses have a single Zip Code. It is the right idea for a restaurant or bar for example, but only if there is only one location. For example, if I owned a small chain like 16 Handles for example I may be interested in how people like my business in general, not on one store. I can see how the feature could be useful, but it should be optional (and clearly marked so)

2) When I tried to click on the screenshots, I thought that the text was way too small to really understand what you were seeing. When I squinted I could figure it out, and it did seem really cool, but I am only 20 and using Chrome on a MacBook Air, so I think you should make the font waaaay bigger for your target middle aged user on a 5 year old Dell using IE7.

good catch, thanks! we've fixed it