alexwestholm

Hi HN! I'd love for you guys to take a look at my lean-style project growth tool, Feature Pop! It's is a side-project I've been developing over the last month and a half (in between working on my primary startup project, trying to find a job at a law firm, and surfing a lot). It aims to help users vocalize their desires about the direction an application takes, so that you can grow your product based on what's actually popular with your users rather than guesses at what they might want. It was the result of wondering how I can easily validate my assumptions about where to take my main project after we release it, as well as experience at another startup watching overly vocal users steer the product in a direction that's probably not where it should have gone.

It basically operates as follows: a single page is given to users, where they can order preferences in sets of 10, which are then merged into an overall ordering. Project owners have a page that shows them this popularity based ordering and some data about its accuracy. There are a lot of features I plan to build into it as it matures, but I thought I'd get meta about it and ask you guys to check out the FP page for FP itself to suggest the right direct: http://www.featurepop.com/feature_pop. I've also posted an FP page for Hacker News, just so you guys can play around with something familiar (I'm not sure I agree with all the feature suggestions I've posted, but that's the whole point - the crap filters to the bottom): http://www.featurepop.com/hacker_news

If you like it, tell me. If you don't like it, tell me why. I'd love to hear some insight about the UI - if you view the (poorly recorded) screencast at http://www.featurepop.com, you'll see that I've already tried to improve it, but visual design is not one of my strongsuits. Also, do you guys think there might be a way to monetize this at some point? I'm a flat broke recent grad, so I can't really afford to keep it running if it gets popular (I'm on the free plan at Heroku right now).

Thanks guys/gals!

I'm curious to get some feedback on what other HNers consider to be the most profoundly insightful books they've read. I picked up The Haskell Road to Logic, Maths and Programming as a result on posts on here and so far it's been one of the most worthwhile coding reads I've ever had. So what about you guys? Other programming books? Business books? Just downright good books? Thanks!