Ask HN: Please review my start-up - planergize.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review my start-up - planergize.com

planergize.com

14 pointsdshingarev38 comments

It's took me over 30 seconds to figure out what the site does and I'm still not 100 percent. If I were a normal user, I would have bounced by now.

Improve the landing page? Pictures and some points on what it does could be helpful.

Good luck!

Thanks! We are working on improving a landing page with some graphics and better explanation.

The "Wedding Planning" button made me think that's what it did. I thought "cool idea, they should show that in more places". Then when I clicked the Categories tab I found out that that's just an example. Or I could be wrong about that too, but that just highlights the point further.

I'd suggest putting a tagline beneath your logo that describes what you do. Don't make it too marketesy, make it explanatory. "Helpful instructions to common tasks" or whatever is better than something like "Plan. Do. Share.".

Totally agree with you, we'll have it fixed by tomorrow! Very helpful comment, thank you. Yes, wedding planning is one of the examples what kind of plans you can create with planergize. If you like a plan you can then "run" it and get SMS/email reminders before steps.

same here. I spent 30 seconds and have no idea what it does or why I want it.

Geez... with all the negativity on here (I realize he's asking for criticism, but would it hurt to throw in a tad of positive feedback as well?!) I feel obligated to tell you that I think what you've created, while it still needs a bit of polish and refinement, is quite impressive and useful (especially made me think of it's application for all those DIY sites). Granted I know jack about Flash, but your plan player wowed the pants off me and performed without issue in Firefox.

As for suggestions, I agree with most of the others that the landing page could use some work in order to be more engaging and clear as to exactly what the site does. Also, I think it really might help to change the background image to something less cartoonish that comes across as more practical, useful, and more visually representative of the site function... perhaps a design incorporating various planning-related graphics such as arrows, bullets, step numbers (1., 2., 3., etc.), times, clocks, check boxes, percentages, etc.

Good luck and I look forward to seeing its progression!

Thanks a lot for your POSITIVE feedback! :-) And, of course, I agree with regards to the landing page - it'll be ready by Monday next week. It takes some time to prepare nice image that (we hope) will help to explain the purpose of the website.

I agree with the other comments saying that your home page doesn't describe your product clearly enough. I disagree that showing a video is the best solution. As a user, I don't want to waste my time watching a video until I'm convinced that I want to investigate further. Instead, I would put a Top 5 showcase of some great looking plans on the home page. This also gives an incentive for the users to create something that is really cool, so they can be featured on the home page.

I think relying on Facebook Connect only might be a bit iffy, unless you absolutely require it for core functionality. In your case, Facebook adds some social elements but the core competency of your website is building plans. I might want to sign up to play with your site without using my Facebook account. If I like it enough to recommend it to my friends, I might be willing to link it to my Facebook account later.

Thanks for your comment!

The reason we decided to use FB only auth is that we felt that in order to provide the same feature set with FB and without it would require quite a lot of duplication on our site. And the more social features we add - the more duplication it requires.

For example, for a plan you can specify "friends only" visibility - and for this to work we need to support friends lists in our app. We also use FB to send SMS reminders (if allowed by a user) - and that's not the easiest and cheapest thing to implement from scratch.

I'm not suggesting you duplicate the feature set that Facebook provides. If a user wants to have those features, it makes sense to have them link their Facebook account.

But I would probably offer a more basic version that doesn't have friend lists, SMS reminders, etc, and let the user opt in to the additional features only if they wanted to. Otherwise I think you might end up artificially restricting the amount/type of users that use your site (e.g. people without Facebook accounts or people that want to keep their Facebook data private).

Maybe you're right... We have to think about it more carefully. Thanks for your feedback!

Like others have said it's a bit confusing to figure out what it does right away. I think a demo video might be in your best interest. I read this and it was kinda helpful: http://blog.procasts.co.uk/2009/03/why-screencast-if-a-pictu...

You could use Camtasia: http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp I tried out ScreenToaster as it was free and it works pretty good: http://www.screentoaster.com/

I see you don't have an FAQ page. May I humbly suggest my FAQ script side project: http://breezyfaq.com

You sure can! :-) I'll have a look at it. We have a screencast, there is a link on the how to page: http://assets.planergize.com/planergize_demo.swf

I thought the name was a take-off on "plagiarize". I was expecting it to be a system where you enter a student's homework and it would do a search and tell you if it was plagiarized. Sorry, I didn't actually try the service, but I just thought I'd share my confusion with the name.

You need to rip out your front page and add the following:

1) One tagline - "Easy simple way to create repeatable processes"

2) A video going through a use case

3) Example plans (the end product), featured on the page

4) Giant sign up button

Thanks for your comment, we are going to do this!

I agree, with all of that - I just want to emphasize the need to clear up the front page. With all the text the same size I have a really difficult time finding what I need, I had to click on the why page to figure that out (the first line would be better on the front page : "Step-by-step instructions along with videos and images Cook a meal as if guided by a famous chef personally, get instructions when and what should be done with a recipe plan" - A link to an example page would be great to - or some sort of slideshow.

I had a really difficult time just getting the gist of what you are doing there but was really put off by the large block of over sized text on the front page.

Thanks, I agree, we'll have it fixed by tomorrow.

I agree with all this, but most important is get rid of that 'important information' message. As a start-up, you probably don't have enough users to have that as the main thing we see when arriving on the home page.

You could probably add a little message or something near a 'login area' with a link to 'changes to user accounts' or something to that effect.

I still have no idea what you do and why.

Very nice, I like it. I agree with the others that you could improve the first impression- Have a nice big tagline that captures what you do in one sentence. I can see this as being very useful in lots of domains (think disaster recovery etc). You could pitch it to businesses even (thought the current look is too casual for businesses) to use this as part of their risk management process.

I stress the point of businesses because you have more money-making potential there as opposed to individual plans.

I'm working on this side as well. Applicability in business environment was the reason I got funded a year ago by Enterprise Ireland (Irish state agency working to support commercialization of research, among other things)

Why did you decide to use Facebook authentication? Do you have plans for symbiosis with Facebook? Why have the user create a Facebook account instead of account in your startup?

We actually had our own authentication initially, but later decided to use Facebook Connect. We are using some part of data and features available on FB to provide core functionality, e.g. we use friends list for access control, we send SMS and email reminders through FB. We publish short stories on your activity on your wall (if allowed). And we have plans to put more social features, utilizing FB infrastructure. Many people already have FB accounts, so we decided not to ask people to fill in all these fields one more time.

Interesting idea.

I think the copy on your landing page needs some work. In particular, the intro paragraph ("Planergize is an online service that ..") seems a bit muddled. I wasn't sure at first whether your site was about plans, or about wedding planning (given the badge in the top left). I think you should easily be able to summarize what your service does without getting into the details of how you construct plans.

Good luck with the site!

Thanks for your comment - we are working on some nice graphics explaining what we do at the moment. And I agree - it is boring and doesn't work well...

This might not a big issue, but I think the phonetics of the name are a bit off. I didn't quite know how to pronounce it, and realized when I clicked through that it's probably meant to be read as planner-gize. This could be a problem for word-of-mouth marketing as people would probably assume it's spelled with two n's. Plannergize.com seems to be taken already, but something like PlannerMake.com is available.

I thought of a name as a plan + energize, so it is plan - ergize. And it wasn't easy to come with this one - it seems everything is taken :-)

I had the same reaction. Instead of a common word misspelled on purpose (e.g., "tumblr"), it looks more like a typo in the product name. Also, at first glance I want to say "plagiarize" because it's the closest real word my brain associates with those letters.

Other issues: - You have categories with no samples. - There is no back button support. - There is no mouse wheel support within scrollable panes. - In detail view, I couldn't figure out how to get back out to higher level views.

I like the design of the landing page and the main graphic. I am getting tired of seeing the standard "browser screenshot" graphic on landing pages. As for the copy on the landing page I also couldn't discern quickly what the application was about.

Thanks, we are working on the better version of landing page - with better explanations and some graphics.

The plan viewer was a little flaky for me as I scrolled along the timeline. All the bouncing around seemed to detract a little bit (at least for me), but than that's just a first impression, I might get used to it if I used to service a lot.

Thanks a lot for your comment! We will improve it. I just thought it would be nice to have something moving on the screen :-)

Well, I'm guessing you put some work into getting things to bounce around like that, so don't take anything out just on account of me :-) My own work is noticeably lacking in flare, but I certainly have an appreciation for the work you've put into this.

:-) Thanks for that!

I just tried connecting via FB and starting a plan - the system seems to hang after I create the plan and won't let me get out of the message to click on the timeline to start. Any thoughts?

Try reloading the page. Can you tell me what browser do you use?

Ok, it's working now :) I'm using Google Chrome 4.0.249.89 unknown (38071)

I'm curious, once you publish it, why can't you go back and edit it again? (I know of almost no plans that don't get revised during the process)

We are trying to build a system with reusable plans - where a plan is essentially a step-by-step instructions plus timing data. So the idea is - somebody creates a good plan - like a recipe, or first 10 weeks of life of a child - and then many people should be able use it. So master plan should remain the same, in our opinion. On the other hand, you can change positions of steps, add/remove reminders and if you are not satisfied with the plan completely, you can duplicate it and create a new one based on existing. We are not trying to create yet another project management tool - it is more of tutorial with timeline, reminders, images, videos and reusability is the main focus for us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com