Ask HN: Critique my startup

I am the co-founder of Skribit.com along with another developer and we also have substantial help from an active news.yc member and a business advisor. It started out from Atlanta Startup Weekend back in November from my frustration about finding original content to blog about. Skribit aims to help bloggers cure writer's block by allowing their readers (through a variety of ways) to suggest things for them write about. The most common way is a widget. We are doing ~4M pageviews/month including ~1300 widgets. Analyze that how you like, we realize counting widget loads as pviews is odd.. need to find another way to show our growth. We have been trying to lay low until we have a core set of features out, so users don't try us for a week, leave and never come back.

Fairly simple in concept, but we plan to do some advanced data analysis/etc and find related blogs/users and automatically suggest suggestions for bloggers - particularly useful if your blog doesn't have many readers. I've also pitched it as a "tomorrow's news" idea. Down the line we will be more of a portal highlighting today's hot suggestions in various groups/categories which could be tomorrow's news, or what have you.

So I'm here to ask what you guys think - of the idea, our implementation, feature requests, and so on. We are all developers so we are quite aware we'll need design help in the next few months. In the last few weeks we have been meeting with local investors to get advice on what we should do to take the next step and in result we have been hashing out a product roadmap and are beginning to think about market analysis. Financial model is three-fold with freemium being the core. I don't think I can talk about the other two yet, but we have a prov patent on one.

For those wondering, it's a rails & nginx app on an ubuntu box at (mt).

thanks

http://skribit.com

on an unrelated note, I find Satisfaction to be _great_ for getting user feedback. http://getsatisfaction.com/skribit

update: and people are already poking around for XSS exploits. :-P

I don't like the slider presentation widget.

1. It keeps moving automatically. That's irritating.

2. It always seems to be sliding too fast or too slow. I don't feel in control. Do you really want to place yourself in a situation where the best you can do is guess at the best compromise and hope your setting won't be too fast for the slower readers and not too slow for the faster ones?

I'm not a technical guy so I can't comment on the implementation. But it should say something that I'll absolutely use it when I get set up with my new blog. I like that Skribit's lean and won't clutter my sidebar or dramatically decrease my site's load time.

Are you distributing via any widget networks? I ran a search on Widgetbox (don't care for that one but there are others) but couldn't find you. It might be something to consider when you're through this period of laying low.

Also, I'd encourage you not to worry so much about scaring people away. I know that's a problem for new services, but there's nothing so off-putting about Skribit that would make users leave in some mass exodus. You may turn some folks off when you have those predictable hiccups, but the feedback should more than offset that loss.

As an aside, I saw you got a hat-tip from Problogger. Awesome.

hey andrew!

bloggers that like to blog regularly have this problem. I know that if I don't blog for a week I might get an email or two asking what's up as I usually blog more often.

I've run into this problem quite often when trying to keep up with my readers. Thanks for the feedback though - how can we make it more apparent that we are solving the "writer's block" problem?