Well nice webapplication. But a startup? Isnt that suggesting that you will make money from it?
Ask HN: Critique my startup
21–30 of 31 posts
Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#22The title of the main page may need some work. "Blog Topic Suggestion Application" seems to lack any fluency when you describe it. Perhaps "Cure your blogger's block" or something like that, except much better. You also might want to think about bringing your signup forms up to the front page, or at least making the buttons stand out a little more. Maybe bringing the login/signup from the top and putting it above you…
Thanks for the feedback. Yeah I recently moved some things on the homepage, added the slider, but I need to put some prominent "sign up now" type of badge in the sidebar.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#23Great Pstam! I agree with you. People actually need topic ideas to blog about(depends on what kind of topic they focus on). Consider a popular example, Arrington wouldnt find news to talk about if no one tells him about it or if he hasn't read anything. I just read the idea. I haven't seen the site yet, i'm on my mobile phone, so will take a look at it later.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#24What's your business model? That's the most important question. If you don't want to talk about it it's okay but there is no point in discussing about a startup without knowing the business model. If we do, we are talking about something else than the startup.
The core of our business model is freemium. We have a set of pro features lined up that we have determined users would find value in paying for. We also have two complementary items to support it, which I cannot talk about at this time.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#25Do people ever get the undirected urge to blog but don't know what to blog about? Usually people blog about the things they care about, and don't need suggestions.
It's a system for a feedback loop.
If I have a blog for subject, I would still like to understand what it is my audience want to know more about such a subject as to guide what I write in the future.
What this is supplementing really is just email, in a more passive way.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#26Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
hey andrew!
It seems a shame to me that a couple guys saying hi to one another got downvoted into oblivion. I've noticed a lot of downvoters piling on lately. I'm going to see if I can tweak voting to prevent this.
Err... What manner of tweaking would solve that problem? Just curious, since to me it seems to be more of a community issue.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a shame to me that a couple guys saying hi to one another got downvoted into oblivion. I've noticed a lot of downvoters piling on lately. I'm going to see if I can tweak voting to prevent this.
Err... What manner of tweaking would solve that problem? Just curious, since to me it seems to be more of a community issue.
One thing I tried (released yesterday) is more aggressive graying out of negative comments, in the hope that people wouldn't be so prone to downvote something they could no longer read. I also increased the threshold for downarrows to appear. Neither of those helped in this case, though.
So for now it's back to the drawing board-- or rather, vi. I'll write some code to analyze voting patterns and see if there is some way sw could distinguish mean downvoting from e.g. the downvoting of trolls and spammers.
Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#29What's your business model? That's the most important question. If you don't want to talk about it it's okay but there is no point in discussing about a startup without knowing the business model. If we do, we are talking about something else than the startup.
The core of our business model is freemium. We have a set of pro features lined up that we have determined users would find value in paying for. We also have two complementary items to support it, which I cannot talk about at this time.
Have you done market research? The most important question will be: "How much individual blogger (in average) would pay for the premium product"
If you want to learn from other peoples experience and mistakes (which is always a good idea) good questions are "Who are my core competitors and what is their business model", "Who have done something similar in other sectors (by other sector I mean for example news reporting in other media) and what was their business model and profit margin (and why you are different or similar)" and "Who have tried the same thing and failed and why they failed"?
That's just some food for thought :-D
Re: Ask HN: Critique my startup
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Err... What manner of tweaking would solve that problem? Just curious, since to me it seems to be more of a community issue.
One thing I tried (released yesterday) is more aggressive graying out of negative comments, in the hope that people wouldn't be so prone to downvote something they could no longer read. I also increased the threshold for downarrows to appear. Neither of those helped in this case, though. So for now it's back to the drawing board-- or rather, vi. I'll write some code to analyze voting patterns and see if there is some…
Have you thought about just putting a floor on downvoting?
It seems anything that truly merits a -10 is firmly in 'getting killed by an editor' territory, with possible account deletion, and, if there were a floor, anything that doesn't deserve a -10 would not get modded into oblivion for no reason.
Maybe you don't want to change the modding system that much, but I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on the idea?