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Stop building apps no one wants

launchsky.com

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111–120 of 143 posts

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#111

Post by joeld42 »

I'd use this.

Certainly some ideas are different and exciting enough that you wouldn't want to audition them publicly. But for the most part, it's execution that matters. This site seems like a good idea to gauge reaction to those ideas.

How are you planning to get a good volume of user feedback on these ideas? That seems like a pretty big challenge.

Rather than a "yay or nah" style, I'd rather if the feedback were more open ended. Such as: "What do you like about this idea? What don't you like?"

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#112

Post by jmathai »

Some feedback. I was curious to read some ideas. Reluctantly, I put my email address in. Then I was asked to spread the word (on what exactly, I'm not sure since I haven't been able to use it yet). Dismissing that message took me back to the screen asking me if I'm interested.

So all that "hidden" content may or may not be real. I'll never know. It looked real though. But at this point I'd probably never use the site again. Felt like I was taken. At least you got my email address, I guess :).

That's all constructive criticism. I know it's hard to decide exactly how to roll out some of this stuff but hope it helps.

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#113

Post by vlokshin »

danso wrote: post #110

This concept has three competing flaws: 1. The most obvious: how do you prevent your ideas from being stolen? 2. If your idea is vague ("A site where people can post Hipstamatic-like photos, but easily share them!") then you will get a lukewarm response, even if the actual idea (and implementation) is great. 3. If you spend the time fleshing out your idea into something that excites users...then you've committed enou…

Well said.

Hopefully we can refine the product between now and launch as best as we can to combat all 3 of those concerns. We've got our homework (and assume, test, analyze, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat) to do here.

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#114

Post by vlokshin »

jmathai wrote: post #112

Some feedback. I was curious to read some ideas. Reluctantly, I put my email address in. Then I was asked to spread the word (on what exactly, I'm not sure since I haven't been able to use it yet). Dismissing that message took me back to the screen asking me if I'm interested. So all that "hidden" content may or may not be real. I'll never know. It looked real though. But at this point I'd probably never use the site…

It definitely does help, and sorry that the feeling was "taken".

The product isn't there yet, so our goal is the email drop -- so that we have a way to contact a user-base once the product is built.

But your concern is definitely heard, and we'll be sure the real product never evokes that kind of emotion out of the users. Promise :).

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#115

Post by bpatrianakos »

mosselman wrote: post #95
nollidge wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confusion = good launch page?

I agree this is so annoying. I love the idea though... I have a good idea -> I pitch it and then 100 people start building my idea too. Nice! Now I don't think having an idea is the same as executing it well, but I could imagine people being hesitant. Oh and because of the annoying landing page I vow to never to use your site, nice try.

There are tons of people who called Quora annoying for doing the same thing. They also have a tendency to go around in public talking about how they won't use it because it's so annoying. Annoying or not though, it gets people to sign up and many of those same people who claimed to not want to join because of it being annoying end up on the site. Maybe it is annoying but the concept works.

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#116

Post by vlokshin »

joeld42 wrote: post #111

I'd use this. Certainly some ideas are different and exciting enough that you wouldn't want to audition them publicly. But for the most part, it's execution that matters. This site seems like a good idea to gauge reaction to those ideas. How are you planning to get a good volume of user feedback on these ideas? That seems like a pretty big challenge. Rather than a "yay or nah" style, I'd rather if the feedback were m…

I do think that's one of our biggest (if not the biggest) challenge.

Our "chicken" in the equation would be the entrepreneurs who post. We need to incentivize them to post to a safe platform that they get something out of, but in a way that saves them time and/or money (otherwise they'd use their own launchpage + adwords and/or the launchrock-esque services).

Our "egg" is the volume of (quality) users for feedback.

Then how do you get more chickens who make more eggs?

There might be a tiered posting service. Maybe one free, one cheap (feedback + full share feature + meta tags for SEO), and one more expensive -- but includes targeted keywords that you choose and targeted feedback from a group of users. Too early to tell at this point, but with enough awesome feedback like this, and eventually some initial users, I'm sure we'll get this figured out.

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#117

Post by vlokshin »

johnmurch wrote: post #92
vlokshin wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone has ideas, and some even have the ability to execute. We're trying to marry the two. Full disclosure: My team needs this product. We've built apps no one wants. We don't want to to do that again. We're hoping others are in the same boat.

A way to test the market or get social proof that there is a market for this. Checkout how buffer did it - http://blog.bufferapp.com/idea-to-paying-customers-in-7-week... You need 2 things: Landing page to describe product/etc and a community to support say yes/no BTW did you see http://www.startuprocketlauncher.com/ on HN today as well?

Awesome first link.

For the second, no I didn't see that until now. Hmmm. I wonder if that's somebody being clever to prove a point of how easy ideas are to steal? If so, kudos for the irony :)

Re: Stop building apps no one wants

#119

Post by pekk »

trotsky wrote: post #102

It seems to me that there is a significant group of users out there that are web app groupies for lack of a better word who will more or less express an interest in anything as long as it is pre-launch or early in the launch cycle. Since these folks are usually not your actual target market, their feedback is pretty worthless unless you're just looking for whether you fit neatly inside a web x.0 box. It seems like a…

There are a lot of users on HN who are positive about new projects (A) because it is nice and often more constructive as a start for discussion (B) it counteracts a prevailing negativity and one-upmanship (C) you actually don't know what is going to pan out in the end.
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