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Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

pickfu.com

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Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would personally find it more compelling, but I'd suggest that it shouldn't be a premium feature. When it comes to consume research, demographics are everything. Statistical significance of sub-samples can plummet quickly. If I'm marketing a product specifically to, say, 30-44yo men, it would be valuable to restrict the sample exclusively to those men and I think i'd have a better chance of seeing statistical meani…

To take the other side...there is currently a beautiful simplicity about this idea and execution. I pretty much just fall asleep when I start trying to deal with A/B testing, market research, ad effectiveness, etc. This is so simple that all I have to ask myself is, "Do I have a question I'd like to ask a bunch of people?" and "Do I have five dollars?" That's a really good place to be, because everybody in business h…

Fair enough... but if this is just a completely random, not-even-remotely-scientific man on the street approach, then what problem does this solve that a poll i can add to my website/blog/favorite forum via Fantastico in 180 seconds doesn't?

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#32
post #3

Looks great. I think the price is right. The website is very clear. Maybe the examples should be more business oriented. You should also include the time frame to get the 50 answers: 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week? Can we choose, or at least influence the demography (only women, only people below 35, etc.)?

Thanks. Good point about more business-oriented examples. The time frame varies since it depends on the people answering the question, but it's usually within a couple hours - good idea to note that on the site. Unfortunately, can't choose demography but we try to break out the responses in a bunch of different ways so you can visually filter which demographic you're interested in.

Justin, I've been mucking around for awhile in MTurk trying to use Qualifications to create an survey that would target a specific demographic. Have you cracked this nut? Is this something you're considering adding to extend the product? Or is it simply not within the scope of MTurk's capabilities?

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#33
post #6
post #3

Looks great. I think the price is right. The website is very clear. Maybe the examples should be more business oriented. You should also include the time frame to get the 50 answers: 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week? Can we choose, or at least influence the demography (only women, only people below 35, etc.)?

another one of the creators here, thanks for the warm comments. a follow-up question - how much more compelling would this be if you could choose/influence the demographics and # of responses (potentially at a higher cost)?

I'd pay twice as much to be able to target a specific demographic. Nice job John.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To take the other side...there is currently a beautiful simplicity about this idea and execution. I pretty much just fall asleep when I start trying to deal with A/B testing, market research, ad effectiveness, etc. This is so simple that all I have to ask myself is, "Do I have a question I'd like to ask a bunch of people?" and "Do I have five dollars?" That's a really good place to be, because everybody in business h…

Fair enough... but if this is just a completely random, not-even-remotely-scientific man on the street approach, then what problem does this solve that a poll i can add to my website/blog/favorite forum via Fantastico in 180 seconds doesn't?

It puts it in front of people that don't already know about your product.

I can ask usability questions of my users, but their existing knowledge will effect what is "easy" and "intuitive" (intuitive generally means, "what I'm used to"). I can ask marketing questions of them, but I've already pulled them into my site, so my current message will be the one that gets reinforced. I can ask "compare these two products" questions, but I already know a preponderance of people on my site prefer my product to our competitors (one of which is Fantastico, by the way). I can ask any number of things, and we do frequently ask our customers opinions on things, but by virtue of them being on our site the results are known to be skewed in exactly the way we don't want them to be for a large number of questions.

Also, I don't want to clutter up my site with constant polls. When someone is on our site, we have very clear goals we want to achieve: Teach them about the benefits, help them choose the right products, show them how to use it, answer their questions. Asking them random questions isn't my idea of good design, when it comes to those goals.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#36
Really nice overall, but I have one UI issue:

When I go to an example page, it says something like, "Survey says: B! (18 of 33 answers)"

And then I never remember which was A and which was B, so I have to look.

Why not "Survey says: Gmail!" or "Survey says: Obama" instead? Especially for the text ones. For the image ones it kind of makes sense to do A/B since they don't necessarily ever tell you a name for each image (though you could change that), but for the ones that are just text, it would be way more user-friendly to put the name in.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. Good point about more business-oriented examples. The time frame varies since it depends on the people answering the question, but it's usually within a couple hours - good idea to note that on the site. Unfortunately, can't choose demography but we try to break out the responses in a bunch of different ways so you can visually filter which demographic you're interested in.

Justin, I've been mucking around for awhile in MTurk trying to use Qualifications to create an survey that would target a specific demographic. Have you cracked this nut? Is this something you're considering adding to extend the product? Or is it simply not within the scope of MTurk's capabilities?

We looked at using Qualifications a bit, but quickly decided that it wasn't worth our time to deal with them, at least for PickFu in its current state.

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#38
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

another one of the creators here, thanks for the warm comments. a follow-up question - how much more compelling would this be if you could choose/influence the demographics and # of responses (potentially at a higher cost)?

I'd pay twice as much to be able to target a specific demographic. Nice job John.

Hmm, would you pay more than twice as much to target a demographic segment that was less that 50% of the population?

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#39

Here is a controversial thought: Your price is too low. You tell me $5 for 50 comments, and I think, these are low quality comments. You're underselling yourself IMHO. Position your service as a more premium offering. I'd do $50 for 50 comments. At least.

I disagree. I am almost guaranteed to use this in the near future because it's so ridiculously cheap. At $50, I'd think about it a lot more and probably attempt to do it myself. Are there more people like me, or more people who wouldn't use it because it's too cheap to trust?

Re: Ask HN: Please review my site - PickFu.com

#40
post #5

Nice site. Clear goals. One suggestion: Why limit at 50 responses? What if I want more than 50 people to participate in the survey/market research? Can I setup something? It wasn't obvious from the web site.

It's limited mainly for simplicity. Since it's intended to be a cheap and quick answer, we figured $5 and 50 questions seemed reasonable for most. Perhaps we can keep the standard, advertised solution at 50 for $5 but when you buy offer the option to upgrade to more questions.

If you go that route, make sure to make it more discoverable. If people write off your product because they need more responses, they're never going to figure out that they could get more.
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