Any planned launch dates?
What's your startup anyway?
We're quite busy with ours, we were ready to release a beta, but choose to redesign and refactor things again. What about yours?
I need someone who knows his way around Photoshop, CSS, and visual design, and I don't have a couple years to drop everything and go learn that.
CSS isn't rocket science either. It's a variant of html (sort of) where you choose stuff like font and background color (style, I guess) in one master document that all the other web pages refer to. It's like the Slide Master in powerpoint. It has slightly different punctuation than html, but it's not that special. It's just an easier system, and it's probably overhyped by design bloggers.
Visual design: there's all kinds of "7 mistakes begginers make" type articles in hacker news. Some are better than others. Just use common sense, good taste, effort, and knowledge.
That should get you acquainted with all three problem areas. In fact, after a few weeks one can design clones of homepages of Yahoo, Google, YC, delicious, facebook, and so on. Of course, I don't know what level of mastery you're talking about, and there's definitely a lot of fancy things you can do with photoshop that take a lot of knowledge, but the kind of design chops one needs to do a startup aren't that hard to get.
I'm reading the Head First book on html and CSS. I didn't know anything before I started. It isn't hard to pick up. http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/hfhtmlcss/index.html
Put whatever crappy design you can make on it, and then take it to some of the big name designers, and see how things go? Even if they do it, a few bucks to them and I'm sure they'll post about it on their blog... they get thousands of readers.
However, if the functionality of your app will be greatly expanded then it may also require changes to your CSS. Alternatively, you can skip a large amount of design. People don't access your website to see its innovative style. They access your website to get useful information.
We had some good early traffic (from a few great links to one of our lists), but unfortunately things have slowed down a lot in the past few weeks. We think the basic concept is great, but we're wondering if the UI is keeping people from really digging into our content. We're going to probably release a slightly tweaked interface on Monday. And, as always, we're always looking for feedback on how we could make Seekler better.
The home page appears to be a generic destination, as in, "if you want lists of stuff, we've got 'em" But, I don't think people just want lists of "stuff", they want lists of a few things that are relevant to them.
For example, I may be a movie buff who's very excited about the 2008 anticipated movie list, but charities, books, and comic books are of no use to me. It seems that it'd be better to offer the data on your site targeted to the respective niche audiences that they serve in an easily consumable way (FB App, Blog widget, etc), rather than expecting that there are people who just crave information because it's in a list format.
I'm generally a design snob, but I think your UI is fine for the stage you're at (though it sort of reminds me of a domain landing page). My advice is to refine what the value you're actually adding is, and then find ways to appropriately serve those people looking for your utility.
Of course, until we get a lot more data, people won't really start their search at Seekler. But we're starting to show up pretty high on Google results for a number of our lists, so we are trying to get our initial traffic that way.
Your point about the widget and FB is interesting. We have a widget that is being tested and we're strongly considering building a FB app to play up the social angle. For instance, right now the 'Best Movies' list merges the lists of all users - would it be interesting to see a list created from just the lists of your FB friends?
Thanks for the questions and feedback. We're learning something new every day...
Thanks for the heads up.
Glad to hear there's a market for it.
The main problem right now is non-intuitive interface. It's hard to predict where the camera will go when you click. Working on it.
Initial users seem to like it so far :)
On the other hand, probably less than 1% of users have a custom default background color...
We've had good feedback from our users which has helped shape our usability and also which features were important to them (like having ftp access for example).
Hope this helps, Peter
Appreciate your sharing.
Firstly reliable data backup is a real problem. Anything that can help solve this for users is going to attract attention. Writing your own backup script that reliably backs up your data with RSync and remote servers for example is doable but wastes time and effort. Secondly you can download the software, try it out, change it. But most consumers are not developers and are not interested in playing with software and hardware themselves so they look for a company that provides the service.
So the key bits here are
- Solving a users problem
- Show don't tell.
- Provide a service that users can use if they don't do it themselves.
- Have something that will continually attract new users (articles, software, discussion, etc)
The technical bits make for a good read and can be found here ~ http://allmydata.org/source/tahoe/trunk/docs/architecture.tx...
One thing I meant to mention earlier, we are self-funded so far.
pre-launch phase for a startup its very exciting time. Hopefully you will keep up your work with the same mood right after launching, and won't get dissapointed by the attack of anyone or non-immediate massive response of your application.
for everyone else, i think its interesting to pariticipate in commenting other startups as it helps them kept focused also in their starup efforts, so i suppose we wil hear from you again here.
but what about the salesforce users? you must be thinking exportability is key (entering in thousands of contacts again would not be enjoyable)
I vote on making a salesforce or google apps application that leverages your information already stored there into a super all-in-one
Its just a part time thing for me these days (still stuck in my cube), but I hope to get a beta release out there in a month or so. Things that are making me nervous/holding me back:
* Can't come up with a decent name for thing!
* While I don't think my app is ugly, its certainly not anywhere near as shiny as many of the other web 2.0 apps out there
* I keep tweaking and adding features instead of polishing what is there and getting the beta finished.
I am pretty pleased with what I have go so far, so at the least I will have learned Rails and created a tool I can use in my current day job.
My solution will require no hardware, be based on an open source tool people might already be using and be ridiculously easy to use if I hit my mark. I'd like to make it self service too.
We also secured a small seed round of funding ---enough to last us a few months.
How do you deal with the loss of flexibility once launching? You really can't make big architectural changes after launching in some cases. I.e., when were you confident enough that it was a good time to launch?
So, for example, instead of writing/installing/debugging a shopping cart, we just posted Google Checkout buttons. Instead of creating a database backend for orders, we have the form submit to email. Instead of creating the most beautiful website with the best copy, we made something that looked OK and populated it with some basic content.
Amazon Mechanical Turk competitor in the works (it also happens to be my senior thesis).
bug.gd plans to drive its revenue through corporate intranet sales of our software and P2P helpdesk solutions. The public-facing error database is expected to always be free and ad-free as a consequence.
Interesting primarily to places like YC, we're about to announce our http://featurelist.org which is really just a tool we use for our feature tracking and thought we'd open it up to the world. It's a free little Reddit-inspired site for startups and open source projects to let their community vote on features. Anyone can host a project there and have users visit http://featurelist.org/MYPROJECT to request/vote on features. This will probably go public beta in a couple of weeks, but it's really just a gift back to the community more than anything we want to make $$$ with.
Very, very busy lately. Back to work. :)
We should hit our beta milestone at the end of March.
Revenues are growing steadily. The team is 26 people (22 in Cambridge, MA) and we're getting deeper into search engine algorithms, Facebook apps for business and English text analysis.
Challenge right now is making sure the system will scale as we continue to grow our customers/usage. High quality problem.
Development took longer than I hoped, but we used our blog to really spread the word and get the 'movement' started in the meantime.
We're NewsCred, a digital newspaper that brings you news based on credibility from your favorite sources. Unlike Digg, which uses popularity, our primary criterion is quality/credibility. Plus we're an online newspaper, not a social news site. Whats the difference? Hopefully you'll be able to see for yourself soon!
Loved reading everyone else's ideas. Let me know what you guys think! http://www.newscred.com
A few months ago, 2 of my friends from college and I came up with an idea for allowing people to create polls online and give them tools to look at the results in more detail. Only problem was none of us knew anything about web programming and design. We learnt a lot from reading forums, through w3schools and other websites. After more than 6 months of tinkering and working pretty much on weekends (2 of us work as bankers), we came up with PollBag (www.pollbag.com). Its probably a bit amateur but would love to know what you think. We are always looking to get constructive feedback.
2. first product very soon, just need to do the final tweak and get some beta testing done to make sure its easy to use and hard to break :p
3. small simple web apps, I plan to release more than 1 app under my companies brand.
4. I just did a redesign of the first app and am happy with the look now. I am also working on tech demos for other products in my portfolio.
Next week I should release my first app.
We're aiming for a beta in the spring. I wish I could say what it is, but we're all hush-hush now (can't even say what it's called right now). Maybe in a few months :)
On a side-note, I'm looking for a programmer, particularly with for UI and design stuff. Let me know if you or someone you know may be interested.
