I've been mostly lurking, semi-active on HN for over 4 years. For most of that time, I've been working on my startup, Learndot. I have always wanted to do a "Show HN" post, but I never thought it was ready.
We've now finally launched web signup and using a freemium business model. I feel I can now post and offer something to the community (a new app to try out) and hopefully get good quality feedback.
Here's the site: http://www.learndot.com
Would appreciate any or all thoughts: From pricing/positioning, to design/performance.
The app is written in Sproutcore and backed by an API written in Scala.
Thanks so much,
Paul
1. Are you creating the content yourself? Are you partnering with domain experts?
2. Are you targeting corporations or individuals? Corporations likely have their in house training tools. For individuals and small business owners, "Learning is a competitive advantage" is a very weak message. Most people who would want to buy from you want to know how to get more traffic, how to get cheaper traffic or how to make more money from the leads they get.
You are competing with serious hustlers like Frank Kern and Perry Belcher, both of whom are extremely aggressive at what they do (they've had issues with the FTC) and also extremely successful.
Having hung out in both worlds, here is common issue I see. The HN crowd is generally very bright and talented. They have great design insticts, coding skills and a healthy dose of "do no evil" sensibilities. But they are too soft-core to make money online.
The hardcore internet marketing crowd (think warrior forum) doesn't care about design or saving the world. They make do with ugly 'geocities era' landing pages. But they sure know how to make money online. I would suggest you spend some time in this latter world. You will learn a thing or two that will help clarify your offering, target customer and value proposition.
The site looks great, aesthetically. But I wasn't sure exactly what your product was until I scrolled down quite a ways on the homepage. "Make learning a competitive advantage" is a good tagline, but not great for being the only text I immediately see on your homepage. Something based on the "platform for customer, partner, and team training" would serve better.
I'm not certain who your target market is, and I don't know enough about the product to really say, but there is a large gap between $0 for your smallest plan and $250/mo for the next plan. Keep reading and you can get the $10/mo/learner with the free plan (at which point it's no longer free), but my immediate reaction is the large price gap.
Also, the "see pricing and plans" button doesn't need to be up on top with your tag line (because its likely that users won't know about your product from the current tagline alone). This should be somewhere down the bottom after someone has gotten a sense of what your product does.
In fact, I think you already wrote your most powerful tagline: "We’ll be the software behind https://learn.MY-COMPANY.com. Just put that up top.
I just concentrated on the front page. The color scheme is quite pleasing :)
This is great. :)
This high LTV customer you're aiming for in the B2B sector is only going to scale really well if you can do an arbitrage through Google Adwords or other channels. This isn't a viral, word-of-mouth type business (for the most part). So you want to lower the amount of time it'll take someone to understand what you're offering after they quickly click on an ad. You should really sit down with people, like your target customers, and ask them, "What does my website offer?" and see how long it takes for them to answer.
I like the design a lot but you need to take full advantage of it with more clarity in copy.
https://signup.learndot.com/#/plans/1
Would love to hear some feedback on it as well.
I'm confused on why the pricing is a monthly price per learner.
With our internal training we have a set amount of information to communicate to our team. Once they've learned it, they're not going to need to go back to it regularly. It's a one and done situation and wouldn't make sense to continue paying after a team member has learned the info. Why would it make sense for anybody to pay a monthly fee per learner?
Maybe I'm just confused on the market you're going for and how it works.
On this page: http://www.learndot.com/customer-success/ All your links go to pricing rather than telling me something.
Who did you mean by "their"? We are soliciting feedback on our more B2B channels too. But I'm posting here because a) it's a startup and HN likes startups and b) I like HN and wanted to share. :)
I'm sorry, but I don't understand this sentence. Do you mean that you are getting feedback from prospects? Or getting feedback from other businesses (that are not prospects)?
By their, I mean businesses who might actually buy your product. That's the only feedback you should really pay attention to. Asking for opinions on HN is good, but ultimately, less valuable than trying to make a sale with a real prospect.
