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Ask YC: Need feedback on my startup

mobtropolis.com

20 pointsiamwil35 comments

I think the site has real potential for fun, but it needs more focus. It's too vague right now. I couldn't really understand what it was for by looking at the front page or the help page, and that's bad.

Consider this tag line:

"Mobtropolis helps you find interesting life experiences, document them, and show them." [1]

Life experiences is a fuzzy and abstract phrase -- "challenges" or "unusual experiences" would be better, and a specific mental image like "strange foods" or "something you've never done before" would be better still. Document is an abstract phrase -- what you really want to say is "describe" or "photograph".

The help page... is not much help, I'm afraid:

"Mobtropolis is a tool to find, map, and share interesting experiences in the local world around you through peer pressure and simple game mechanics."

Peer pressure and game mechanics? This sounds like an abstract from an academic sociology paper. People who aren't game designers don't want to hear about game mechanics, they want to play games!

Compare this to a (hypothetical) Flickr tag line: "Take a bunch of pictures and share them with the world." Or the Twitter tag line: "What are you doing?"

Your own introduction right here on news.yc is a vast improvement over the site itself: "An easy way to think of it is as a photo scavenger hunt or photo dare site." Yes, that's absolutely true, and your site should say that. Just sticking the words "photo scavenger hunt" on the home page would improve it tremendously.

Or something like this: "Challenge yourself. Take photos. Then challenge others." (Your "help" page, or the "about this site" box on one side of the home page, can go on to expand this tag line into a three-step numbered list -- kind of like the help page does now with its three sections, except that I would explicitly number the steps. You want to teach people that doing all three steps in order is what the game is all about.)

[1] Note: I fixed this English up a bit. :)

Here's a simple tagline: "Mobtropolis - try something new today".

Oops, that seems to be the tagline of a big grocery chain in the UK. Maybe I should be in advertising:-) Maybe you can work from it and create something similar that creates that idea. I think what I like about the site is it encourages you to try things that are readily available (well, to some people in some places at least), but you might not have considered before. I could see looking at that from time to time.

Huzzah! I'm glad that part came across (albeit with difficulty). This originally came about because I felt like I was stuck in the office chair all day, and all any of my friends ever could think of to do after work was eat at a restaurant, watch a movie, or go to a bar.

There's lots of interesting things to do in the world, from the extravagant to the everyday that you might pass over. But it's hard to be spontaneous on the fly, so having something like this would help.

Huh, yes, you all should work in advertising. The taglines that you came up with are vastly better than mine.

it is probably longer than a tagline, but it would have got the point across to me if near the top of the home page it had said, "The purpose of this web site is to coax you to have new experiences, and perhaps to take pictures as proof."

Thanks for the feedback. :) Yes, I had a lot of trouble coming up with the tagline. I suppose in a moment of weakness, I conceded to academic paper speak. You're right about things needing to be concrete.

I like your last one about challenging oneself and others. Mind if I roll with it?

Yes, I offer it to you royalty-free! :)

Really, it's just a distillation of your own news.yc post. It's already clear, just by comparing the site's description of itself with your description here, that your marketing skills are improving with practice...

Hi all, I've been working on my startup, Mobtropolis. It's a service that helps you find, record, and share interesting experiences in the local world around you. An easy way to think of it is as a photo scavenger hunt or photo dare site.

It uses social news and game mechanics to help coax you to experience the world and take pictures as proof. Photos can be submitted through your camera phone or through the web from your digital camera.

It's at a point where I would like some feedback from YCers, so any feedback or insight (positive or negative) is welcome, so I can keep improving it. And if you know of other specific groups of people that would find it useful or fun, please let me know. Thanks. :)

womper.com?

thanks for the heads up. It's some validation, at least.

I would put something else in place of the first two, "make out with a celebrity" and "pick your friends nose". They aren't very compelling in terms of the site's content if you're trying to attract users.

It's kind of a cool idea though.

Thanks. As with any community orientated site, while I can reject submissions, I can't change what they submit. I've had submissions for "hug a policeman" and "watch nancy drew in the theaters alone" Despite that, there are interesting ones, like "fire a weapon", "eat ootoro sushi", "drink an obscure soft drink"

What kinds of things would you consider more compelling?

You should get the interesting ones to be prominent on the home page, and subtly deemphasize the others. The nose-picking thing has got to go. :)

One idea is to have a box which introduces the site, at the top or to one side. Include a very brief explanation, and a few handpicked examples in the Introduction box. Then have the "latest submissions" be a different list of teasers, below or on the opposite side from the Introduction.

Yeah, "interesting" should be where the voting comes in, but I suppose at this stage, hand picking some can only help.

Your suggestion wasn't a bad one so I put it on live, though that makes the sidebar a little bit busy. I'll have to keep on tweaking it. Thanks!

Of course the obvious solution here is to sort them differently. You don't have to reject anything. Just sort the front page by popularity instead of "hotness" and give a link to recently popular. (on a side note, picking someone else's nose is listed 3 different times in the first two pages with the same photo). Or, you could make the top of the page a "Most Popular of All Time" box and the start listing the "hot" ones under that.

Your first thought may be that many of the social news sites sort by recent activity by default. And this is true, but they also have users that check back several times a day. Your site, while interesting and promising, probably will not have that kind of user. Maybe once a week or even once a day.

Or another possibility is what I did on my site (ratemystudentrental.com). Sort by what is most useful to first time visitors, but then once the user logs in, make the home page sort by recent activity.

Also, while I do think this is a pretty cool idea, I have two other criticisms.

1) The design leaves much to be desired. I thought I had been redirected to some static placeholder page, or maybe some subdomain of your blog when I first clicked the link. This is also partially due to the fact that your homepage redirects to mobtropolis.com/scenes/hot, instead of just giving me mobtropolis.com.

2) This would be way more freakin' sweet if it integrated with Facebook. You could have an app that pull my "adventure/dare" pictures into my Facebook profile. You could also allow users to determine the difficulty of each challenge and give awards to users who compile the most difficulty/popularity points by proving they've accomplished those challenges with photos.

I had originally thought that as volume grew, it would catch up to update the front page more often, even if a single individual checked it less often than social news. But when you put it that way, you're right that the frequency of visits changes what should be on the front page.

1) I'll fix that. 2) Dutifully noted. You'll be the first to know.

verdict. the idea is good, but i think you can improve your description and make it more interesting. the second improvement is the layout. just by having another digg layout you are putting yourself in a "us-too" category. an interesting layout would be to have stories placed randownly as squares (like modules) and instead of having them placed from top to bottom you could be creative and increase/dedrease the font size of the letters as it gets more/less votes. don't require registration (maybe you don't) .

I had briefly entertained the notion of organizing it spatially, rather than linearly, but threw it out as being a bell and whistle. I'll think about it some more. I've tried to keep as much out in the open as possible, but it's generally tough to tie an action to no one if you want to do something with it later. Maybe OpenID will help in this regard. Have to look into it.

I like the idea. It's very similar to 43things, except for it's not goal oriented. However, you might get some ideas from checking out 43things. I think they've been pretty successful...

Thanks.

Yes, I was a user for a while, but I found it a bit lacking in some regards. While it has a good community to encourage you and cheer you on, there isn't a sense of urgency to do things nor an easy way to share with people where to go about doing it.

Mobtropolis can geolocate photos and scenes, so once someone has done something and posted it, you can see where most people have done it. Gives a good clue as to where to go do it.

I've always thought there was something lacking in 43things, and I think Mobtropolis is and will be better.

I think it is interesting good luck with the site. I think having tags so you could filter to experience you are interested in would be good. Like sports, travel, relationships or whatever. Then if I know I don't care about say sports, I could more easily find things I am looking for.

I'm confused by the distinction between "scenes" and "safaris". Personally I'd like it if everything were called a safari, cuz going on a safari sounds like much more fun than... making a scene.

Oh, and how about a "random challenge" link?

That is partially historic. The name scenes comes from the phrase "mob scene" (I didn't know what else to call it) When I was first working it out in my head, I wanted something where people can do the same thing at the same time in the same place (like a mob). But as it evolved, each scene didn't have to be time and place specific.

A safari came later. I wanted to group scenes together like a list, or trail that I can check off as I completed it, or that others can complete as a walking tour since scenes can be location specific. As you can see, safaris are still less mature than other parts of the site. I'll have to do more work to make the two more distinguishable.

What's a "random challenge link"? You click on it, and every time, you see a different scene?

Random challenge -- yes, exactly. I'm thinking it would be good for people who are really bored. Also, it's good for new users who are trying to get an idea of what kind of things are on the site.

Terminology probably does need work, I think the history is holding it back a bit... as you can see I'm calling your things "challenges" or "things" because "scenes" just doesn't work for me.

I like it. It encourages people to participate in something active, or at least fulfilling.

I'd definitely organise stuff geographically. I can bake a cake anywhere but I can only visit an attraction if I'm in that part of the world.

A little too random. My first reaction (without realizing what it was) -- went to the site, read a few of the "interesting" things that people recommended...and left. Hmm.

What would make it gel more for you without the benefit of this forum? Themes? A blurb? Testimonials?

no I think its just the overall design. Perhaps the opening page shouldn't be a blatant "here are some cool things you can do" -- rather if you see flickr or twitter or facebook's front page, its usually an "About" sort of thing or login, y'know?

make it look more like iminlikewithyou, less like my physics303k homepage

definitly needs more flash, bigger pictures, better graphics, make people want to stay around and browse people and their dares and whatnot. I didn't really look around enough but if u dont have flickr and twitter integration, get it done

Yeah, I have to admit graphic design is lacking, though I've just been doing what's passable.

I can see how flickr integration would be a boon. How does twitter figure into it? As far as I can tell, you can't post pictures in a twit.

I thought the graphics were fine, but I was confused about the purpose at first. Seed it with a wide range of interesting stuff, I almost found something interesting (not the armpit licking) and the map mashup was good, but wrong city for tonight. I'd work on seeding, filtering and showing connections before I'd worry about the 'sheen'.

Hmm, a points system for new things, how cool/hard/prestigous and and points for doing one. But then be careful to moderate dangerous options. Hmmm, yea, lost an arm, but whoa I got a lot of points... Don't wanna see that comment in your forum, eh?

Yes, I worried about that at first. Someone's going to post something like "steal a cop car", and some fool's going to try to do it.

I'll do more work on the things you suggested, especially something more local for everyone. Thanks.

Hey, I like it! Creative, wacky, something different. Good luck! Don't get how the name is related though...

Originally, it came from the idea that people were doing the same things at the same time, like a mob scene. So, "mobs in the city" became mobtropolis.

I didn't get what the vote thing does. At least it didn't have any effect for me.

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