Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

btw I'm in a similar situation : 34 with 2 kids + one on the way and I'm almost out of money after investing on my 2nd startup. You shouldn't see this as a desperate situation but as a challenge with an opportunity to focus on what really matters ( in your life and in your company ). Good luck ;)

Your medium article is 50X better than your website. Your website is useless for promoting your product. I don't like the headline font for your site, the lack of screenshots, basically the lack of focus on a product that will live or die on its usability and interface. I'm not a fan of the Z in openloopz. Combined with the comic sansy looking headline font it doesn't feel polished.

The inventing of a new words ("loops") is to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. You are now not only trying to tell a (very) mildly interested reader about your product you need them to learn a new language in order to understand it. This is an unrealistic cognitive burden for a sales pitch for a todo app. I strongly suggest that you use the simplest possible terms in plain language to describe the focus of your product, how it fits into the users life, and what problems it solves for them.

Your post here is more focused on your personal suffering than on your product. We are all eating shit to try to launch our companies, but too much focus on that makes for a downer intro to your product. I'd try to separate your moments of sharing the struggle and the moments of sharing the product. Do you want people to be genuinely excited about it, or pity you? Which emotion do you want to be a stronger first response?

Scanning further over your medium article (It's longer than a casual browser will give it time, ie 5 seconds) I suggest you take whatever the salient feature of your product is, maybe the hashtagging to create inline tasks and put that front and center in a huge picture and font. I'm still not sure what problem you are solving or who you are competing with, is it todo lists, slack, what? Where does this tool fit in my life? I suggest you take a look at the way that slack conveys information https://slack.com/is/team-communication (notice even the url hammers home their function).

I think that honest feedback is very imporant and that your main problem here, which is something that affects us all, is that you are too close to the product. You already understand it, you speak its language (invented words and all), and you are now longer able to communicate it to the passing man in the street. I suggest workshoping your pitch and language with fresh ears constantly until you are able to get someone to understand the basics of what it is and how it helps them in 10 seconds or less. All that said, I'm rooting for you, best of luck!

One thing you might want to do is update your dns so that your app also answers on openloopz.com.

Currently you receive a heroku message stating "There is no app configured at that hostname. Perhaps the app owner has renamed it, or you mistyped the URL."

Honestly, it'd be a miracle for anyone to look at the website and decide they need to sign up. Not because the product isn't amazing. But because I have no idea what it is and I'm not in the habit of signing up for services if I don't know what they are. That's how you get Cat Facts.

EDIT:

Also, you need an Editor really badly. I don't mean to be a dick about it. But this is your family's welfare on the line. Find someone hyper-critical to tear your writing.

ie:

> What is OpenLoopz? > OpenLoopz makes it easy to manage and share your digital content online, as well as helping you get things done quicker and communicate better!

I've just tuned out. That sentence is as empty and as much bullshit as they come. A very direct question was asked and you disrespected my time. You could be describing Facebook for all I know.

If you want your site to be compelling: Be Brief. Every word needs to tell me something useful and important. Your broadcast is all noise and no signal right now.

Anyone saying the Medium post is good: Don't believe them. It's better. But that'd be difficult not to do. It's still completely useless for moving units. People are just being kind.

Get an editor. If there's one rule you need to follow, it's brevity. Brevity. BREVITY. It's not rocket science. This isn't beyond you. You aren't doomed to failure. Be brief. Be critical. You've failed at communicating your product's worth. Now try again. Not tomorrow. Today.

And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. It's not going to take you a week to fix this. Limit yourself to 400 words, and some screen shots. Fix it today. After that's done, keep iterating. Revise revise revise until you have the perfect 400 words and can't think of how to improve it further. Then find someone who can.

Good luck!