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Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

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Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#41

Post by akmiller »

philjackson wrote: post #33
akmiller wrote: post #26

We just recently launched our first application at http://teamloopapp.com . It's intended audience is to help manage the communication of any type of sports teams. I'm most interested in feedback on the homepage and if it explains enough of what we do and the signup process through creating your first team. Any thoughts would be appreciated greatly!

I might be able to offer some criticism, if I may: * The screenshot on the right is possibly pointless as it doesn't actually show me anything (it's too small and texty). * The blurbs are good; I get a good picture of what the app is about. Though I would scale up in size everything in the blue stripe. * I would try to cut down the amount of text in the feature boxes.

Thanks for the feedback. I agree on the screenshot, just not entirely sure what to do with that space (I'm a programmer with very little design skills, but I'll try to remove it and works something out)!

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#42

Post by mikegreenberg »

ianpurton wrote: post #14

Mike, I'd appreciate some feedback on my sales page for Status2K http://status2k.com . Does it look professional ? Would you change anything about it ? Thanks.

I think the sales page isn't bad. But it feels bland.

- Your value add is probably not the elegant interface you're showing us. Sure, eye-candy is great, but the features you outline below talk about "Anywhere Monitoring" and "Multi-Server Listening Support", etc. Maybe an image of a guy staring at his phone (anywhere) with lines going from his phone to your logo to his servers. Give people an "at-a-glance" of how your product works.

- I'd draw more attention to your "Call to action". It let's me know immediately what you want me to do. Should I view the demo? Should I give you my cash? Maybe you want me to look at features? (You probably want my cash above all else. Why not show it?)

- (This is super nit-picky, but...) Your copy reads in blocks. (Imagine Ben Stein doing a voice over for your website.) There's no visual rhythm on the page. Spend a few hours looking at other sales pages (Here's a good spot: http://startupli.st/startups) and look for patterns (ignoring, of course, all the cookie-cutter landing pages).

-- The important parts of description text LEAP off the page at you.

-- Very focused call-to-action.

-- Strong images which relate their message.

+ This is a great start! You have the important parts of the page down. Now you just have to tweak it. (Even the best do this: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3007-37signalscom-homepage-ev...)

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#43

Post by pfui »

Do you think there's still a market for feed readers? I've built one (not public yet) with two somewhat distinct features: 1. you get a river of news with the ability to perform complex search queries against your feeds; and 2. it provides relevance sorting of articles based on your reading history. I've found that search, when accompanied by tagging, provides a reasonable alternative to the folder-based feed management approach while relevance sorting helps cut down the time I have to spend wading through the never-ending stream of articles. Should I consider opening it for the public? I don't want to spend money on hosting and bandwidth unless there's a reasonable chance to recover some of the associated costs.

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#44

Post by phzbOx »

chetan51 wrote: post #34

Hi Mike, Thanks for your time and generosity! I just entered the beta phase for my side-project OtherMind, a fast way to take notes and make lists ( http://othermind.me ). I'd really appreciate it if you could try it out and let me know whether you think it's useful and marketable. Any feedback in general would also be great. Thank you so much!

This is my kind of app; I really like it. Particularly how you can do everything from the big textbox and how can send stuff by sms.

Things I'd make better: - Provide a rest API; I'd love to be able to use it from my console - [Tab] would be really useful (To complete tags or date) - When I click "out" of the textbox when editing a todo, I don't want the [cancel] [save].. just save it. - I've tried to twitter it but it said something went wrong; It might be twitter or me though.. but still worth telling you - I'd like a quick keyboard shortcut a-la workflowy. I.e. If I have multiple tags and I want to remove one of them can I do -#tags? Or something similar.

I could suggest lot of other things that "could be nice but would make it more complicated"; but instead, I'll use it for a while and stay you informed on what I really find missing.

Also, little bug:

When you add your account info (Email, phone), there's a textbox on the main page but we see html tags in it.. i.e. a href=mailto instead of a link.

Keep the good work :)

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#45

Post by mikegreenberg »

gsiener wrote: post #36
mikegreenberg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thoughts as I go through: - Interface is quite busy. There is no clear call to action so I have to wade through the elements to see what I'm suppose to do first. (I highly recommend you play around with Wufoo's onboarding process to get an idea of a clearly defined path.) - I like how you broke up the steps to the left, but it's not clear they are steps until I click NEXT. Conventionally, links to the left of a page…

Mike: This is great, and helps us confirm and prioritize areas we'd like to improve. Would you mind if I emailed you with a few updates we're working on?

That's no (my initials) at nobulb.com will get an email to my inbox.

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#46

Post by Achshar »

hello mike.. :D

i be quick, i made a powerful media player inside the browser(html5/js) the response is average (for now). i would like to know what do you think about the idea. i understand idea is not everything and execution matters but it would really help if the base idea is strong.. app in question: goo.gl/kS86a

i would like to know what should i focus on, user experience (fixing small bugs, polishing along as i develop) or development (adding big features), add support for more platforms (web, windows 8, pokki, etc), or try to raise capital, try for YC or startup-Chile for example (i don't really need capital, but i could really use everything else that things like YC do for startups [most importantly they would allow me to work full time which i can't do currently because of college])

Thanks

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#48

Post by jxcole »

Hi Mike! Thanks for offering to help.

I am pretty good at programming but I know almost nothing about hosting or servers or hardware. I would like to make a website with a Go/MySQL back end (I know it's weird, but I love it). Do you have any recommendations for hosting? Should I use a cloud host like EC2 or Rackspace's cloud or should I use some other hosting service?

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#49

Post by chetan51 »

phzbOx wrote: post #44
chetan51 wrote: post #34

Hi Mike, Thanks for your time and generosity! I just entered the beta phase for my side-project OtherMind, a fast way to take notes and make lists ( http://othermind.me ). I'd really appreciate it if you could try it out and let me know whether you think it's useful and marketable. Any feedback in general would also be great. Thank you so much!

This is my kind of app; I really like it. Particularly how you can do everything from the big textbox and how can send stuff by sms. Things I'd make better: - Provide a rest API; I'd love to be able to use it from my console - [Tab] would be really useful (To complete tags or date) - When I click "out" of the textbox when editing a todo, I don't want the [cancel] [save].. just save it. - I've tried to twitter it but…

Thanks for all those suggestions! Those things are definitely in the pipeline.

About clicking out of the textbox to save an item, I actually had it like that, but I found that if I wanted to edit a long item and switch away to a different tab to refer to something and come back, it would have automatically saved it, and I would have to edit it again. So I consciously chose to have the current behavior (note that you can press Shift + Enter to save changes). But if enough people suggest to change it back, I will.

I'm not sure I understand what the little bug you're referring to is. Do you mind posting a screenshot?

Thanks for the encouragement :)

Re: Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

#50

Post by chetan51 »

phzbOx wrote: post #37
chetan51 wrote: post #34

Hi Mike, Thanks for your time and generosity! I just entered the beta phase for my side-project OtherMind, a fast way to take notes and make lists ( http://othermind.me ). I'd really appreciate it if you could try it out and let me know whether you think it's useful and marketable. Any feedback in general would also be great. Thank you so much!

You should definitely call it Overmind! (From Starcraft, it's the zerg master; or zerg brain if you will)

Haha, I didn't think of that. It would probably be a major brand name conflict if I did that :)
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