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Comment by jkincaid | Hacker News Reader

Cheer up. There's a good chance that many of the big tech blogs didn't see your site at all, or your text pitch wasn't all that compelling (but maybe your site is), or any of a hundred other reasons.

The sad fact of the matter is that us tech bloggers get way too much Email. No matter how many Gmail filters we set up, it's a constant struggle to find those 'diamonds in the rough' — the sites that nobody has ever heard of and have no funding. If you get ignored by everyone for multiple launches then maybe something's wrong, but don't get too dejected because of one bad press push.

Shoot me an Email next time you guys launch a cool new feature (it's in my profile). Tell me why it's cool. Tell me why you're more than a Digg for style questions. No promises about a post, but I'll check it out. Also, just from a five second glance at the site, I think you might want to look into changing up the layout/colors a bit. I'm no designer though.

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Hey Jason, A bit off-topic: but can you comment on what a typical email looks like which gets through all your filters and you actually read it and visit the site? Do you prefer lengthy emails with all details about a startup or do you just prefer a brief email at first with a link to the site?

I also thought the design was a significant problem with the site (and I am a designer/developer). It's dark and cramped and the header is really uninspiring to me.

I seems like StackOverflow for fashion newbies more than Digg. If it's largely occupied by the hapless, you might want to elevate a few users (beyond the concept of points, etc) to some sort of style-leader designation. And maybe add Gravatars - it really lacked personalities and imagery.

After reading the piece, however, my interest was in seeing the pitch that went out to blogs. How easy was it for them to give you coverage? Did you provide stats, incentives, quotes, ready-to-go screen caps, etc?

yeah the design is going to be changed, basically it was a choice between launching now, or spending more time tinkering with it. At a certain point, you just have to launch, and leave the fixes for the next version. At this point, I have a list about a mile wide of things I want to do, and you know how it is, every time you finish something you get a dozen new ideas you want to implement.

Gravatars already exist, you just have to enter the actual question to see them. No gravatars on the homepage, so that it loads faster.

And I'll make another post about the pitch email and the press page tomorrow.

thanks Jason.

I'm not really down, we are doing pretty well, all things considered. And I'll make sure to shoot you an email the next time something interesting happens(new feature or a milestone)

I know what you mean about the layout, to tell the truth we had a very nice web 2.0 look when we entered private beta, and the early users absolutely hated it. So we kept throwing redesigns at them, until they settled on the current one.

We'll probably try switching to a web 2.0 look, 5-6 months from now, to make it look a little bit more modern. And by then we should be able to get at least some decent numbers coming in.

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