Ask HN: This is our YC W2014 application. Can you give me feedback?

I'm not sure about the "hacked system" answer, I don't think it demonstrates a novel insight used to identify something exploitable. It's obvious that pure graft and time will let you sell a lot of raffle tickets, but would you still have won if your competitors deployed an equal amount of effort in the same way? Did you win because of a unique insight that yielded a competitive advantage, or did you win because your competitors didn't care enough? That's not clear.

That said, I do think it demonstrates some ability to hustle. Here, what you're really doing is getting HN to write, or rather optimise your YC application. You're exploiting the vanity of HN, i.e. everyone wants to look smart by providing an ingenious comment. You synthesise the best into your application, and make off like a bandit. That would be a pretty novel hack in itself. :)

Your competition: "Our strongest competitors are customer apathy and DIY solutions that are cobbled together."

the fact there are no competitors gives me pause. That's actually not a good thing.

--------------- "Assuming we obtain 4500 customers within 5 years, charging an average of $1000/mo, we expect to earn $54M in annual recurring revenue from our products and services."

- this is waaaaay too unrealistic IMO. Any company willing to pay $1k per month for this would probably just build the feauture themselves, no? I don't think large companies are your target market. -----------------------

- dejamore: I love the video - dealonaire.com link didn't work

Here's a quick overview of what we do:

Our product helps software teams “make something people want.”

When teams build or improve software, they crave data to inform their decisions, but calling, emailing, and surveying customers falls short. Product teams can’t afford to get this wrong given limited and expensive engineering resources.

With FeatureKicker, a team can quickly add a “call to action” for a new feature on a website. When a user clicks on the experimental button, our tech opens a modal window and gets user input on the new feature.

Similarly, teams can get feedback on existing features of their website, so they can improve their product.

Honestly, I think it's a cool widget! It doesn't sound nearly big enough to get a 10x return on VC though. How big is the market really? I watched your intro video and came away a bit underwhelmed: Can't someone just replace this with an analytics event of "clicked" and extrapolate that only people who want a feature are clicking on that feature?

Have either of you worked on product teams before? Do you have feedback from product teams? Usually this isn't a problem of competing features, but usually of "will people use this" at an entire product or project level. MVP is how most people I know attack these things.

I actually think this is a pretty good idea. However, could there be some way of having these "proposed" features turned off by default and giving users an option to turn them on? Otherwise, as people have commented, it might cause frustration as people try to use features that aren't implemented yet.

Could you have a view for end users so you can see all proposed new features? Sort of crowd-sourced product marketing...

Edit: What about letting end users suggest completely new features this way? (e.g. allowing them to draw on a screenshot of the page and say "I want a button here that does XYZ").

(I'm not involved with YC, so take this with a grain of salt.)

I think the idea is really cool and I can see how useful it could be for companies, but do you have evidence that users actually give feedback via your method?

I'm trying to look at this product from that side of the equation, and I could see me getting frustrated that clicking "Sign up with Google+" doesn't actually do that. If you have evidence showing that users are willing to give feedback, or have some type of insight regarding that, I'd definitely include it in the application.

Goodluck!

Don't get too hung up on the critical feedback here. It's a good idea and the application is solid. In my opinion there is a big enough market for this. Stick to the idea and nail the original premise for the company - saving developer hours.

One idea would be to make your video a little more natural and less 'cutesy'. They are trying to get to know the real you.

Good luck! Our company, Loveseat (formerly Bidbash) got an interview for summer '13 - but, we didn't get in. Met PG and that was fun. We're still doing it though! Stick with it.

Here's some feedback on the last questions about something surprising you've found. Instead of putting something any middle schooler could find on google, you should but a unique insight instead. For example, what features (out of the many you claimed to have built), have had surprising results? Perhaps this could be something nobody thought would move the needle, but ended up as a breakout success. This would provide a much more powerful insight, and also help justify the product you want to build.

You asked me to give it to you straight.

Seems like a cool little widget, but I doubt the market for it would be big enough to be worth your time. It's a small enough of a problem that most people won't notice it, and if they do they could easily solve it themselves. People won't be looking for a solution, and it's not cool enough that people would share it just because.

As for your questions, your responses are way too long.

Great overall concept. I think it's something my company could use.

One concern I'd have if using this product, is that often the customer says what they think they want, but don't actually need. So I'd expect there to be some decent "management" tools for working through all the feedback. Maybe some sort of internal scoring or feedback system within the company or something.

Congrats Sandeep! I think your application is well written.

One thing I think you guys should consider in your target market is mobile app developers. Also consider looking at Backend-as-a-service providers like StackMob/Pars in your market size estimations.

Good luck!

Ummm... looks like we maxed out the number of concurrent viewers (max: 50) who can see the Google Doc. We're going to move the application to our blog.