Looking to Prototype Without Wire? Introducing the Meta Board
metaboard.space
metaboard.space
- No idea what product actually is useful for.
- Video only shows a corner of the board and doesn't make clear its use case.
- No contact info except an email address that appears to be a generic placeholder for the template, because 'freesearch' isn't obviously the name of your company, though I see upon deep inspection it's the name of your youtube channel which has no published content (only the one unlisted video).
- email host is free service but not well known one.
- very new hacker news account.
- very new reddit group dedicated to project hosted by 4 day old reddit account.
- business web domain with unusual tld that appears unrelated to company and product concept.
- web domain first created only a few days ago.
- web domain is registered to anonymizing agent in Panama.
- No record of business contact email address anywhere on internet.
- No company info.
- No payment options other than paypal.
Honestly it looks like you are trying to hide and the whole thing is some kind of scam.
To fix this, improve demos, describe better what board is and what it does and why it's worth the price, completely de-anonymize yourself by presenting verifiable business credentials including business addresses that are not mail drops or such, and name and photos of team members on your site, change to a site domain that makes more sense, and use a different email address, your normal one.
Just a few more things: the claims you make sound 'too good to be true' and the video you show is not clear. What are you showcasing? Where is your product in the video?
It's also not clear who the target audience is. You give an example, but I have never encountered a broken harddrive. The situation doesn't appeal to a lot of people. You might want to sketch more scenario's where your product would be helpful. You can even just aim the text directly to your target audience: "Are you an electronics hobbyist or engineer often struggling with X? Look no further!". You get the picture.
Also, you might want to consider contacting some techbloggers and sending them free prototypes (this can actually backfire if they don't like it).
(to ysteiner)
The items the parent of this comment list deal with are mostly about trust: why should I trust you? Why should I trust your product, that you will deliver after payment, etc.? If I can't know who you are or what your business is about why on Earth would I trust you... unless of course your customer base is primarily made of the kind of suckers that fund the Nigerian 419 scammers. A technical audience is more likely to be weary of online snake-oil: take the building of trust seriously.
Second, communicating with your audience matters. Many of us tend to be pretty cynical about marketing (as we should be), but that shouldn't be construed to mean that marketing is an irrelevant nice to have. When I visit your site, it looks like a template that's you didn't care enough to fully fill out, that you kinda slopped in whatever text hit your fancy that second of time, and that you think only those already in-the-know are really your customers (clearly, not me). Sound harsh? That was the actual first impression you left with me. I also make the leap that if you don't care about communicating with your customers... something even companies with bad products know to get right... you probably don't care about the quality of your product, either. No, given the trust issues in and this, I wouldn't buy it even if I had a need.
Thirdly, as mentioned by others, what does this product even do? Why do I need it? What does it replace? What does it not do? I really not your market, but I do have a little bit of hobbyist interest here and I couldn't tell if this was geared for someone like me or if it filled some professional niche.
Fourth, 366 unique views I probably wouldn't expect a sale. I would expect conversion for this sort of product to be pretty low; especially given that you've posted here. I think you really need to calibrate your expectation, especially given the nature of the product. Until people know who you are, what you're about, and are visiting to shop rather than idle curiosity, your conversion will be very, very low. 1 sale in 1000? In 10,000? There are certainly others more expert in online sales than I am, but even with good marketing, your result wouldn't surprise me at all.
I strongly recommend you think about building trust (in you and your product), think about getting a friend (or two, or three) that is good with writing and communication to help you design and write copy for the site, and then ask another friend not involved with the site to visit and offer feedback. Finally, be sure that you're honest with yourself about what to expect and even if your efforts are worth it.
I've read your page and watched your video and I still don't really understand what the metaboard is meant to be - I think you have a communication issue here. :-)
The pitch primarily seems to be around simplifying the process of building circuits on a breadboard but it doesn't explain in detail how it does that.
I was also really hunting for a picture of the product itself, but that isn't visible anywhere (perhaps it's one of the broken image links?).
Since this page is a pre-order (for delivery in March 2017!) I think you'll struggle to get good conversion rate unless you already have an audience who trust you. I agree with guico that presenting the price in AUD will limit your market as well.
Feel free to contact me (e-mail in profile) if you want some help to highlight your key features and identify your market.
1) Looking at the description:
"The Meta Board is a physical programmable circuit board that allows you to build physical circuits on a breadboard without wire or specific value resistors and capacitors using a host microcontroller, such as the Arduino Nano."
This is rather uninformative to say the least. In what way does it replace resistors / capacitors? How many does it replace? How is it programmed?
2) On watching the video, it seems as if this device lets a person turn on or off some pins under the control of a computer. That would make this device a digital I/O board, minus the I part, or a relay board, perhaps? (Both of which are readily available online already.) However, the description suggests that it does more than this?
3) The "Why use the Meta Board?" reasons are either not very compelling or have common solutions. For example, re: #2, resistors and capacitors costs a negligible amount and re: #7, it's not particularly clear what that means.
3) There is no description of the electrical characteristics of the inputs/output pins or anything else.
4) The image links on the metaboard.space page are broken, at least when viewed from North America. Manually opening the links returns an access denied message from the CDN.
What is your target audience.. I'm not entirely sure if I even could be interested in this.. the scenario displayed is clinical with no context around why i might want to buy one and say stick it into my Rpi...
Others have already mentioned the images are broken.
You've got a product priced in a currency that isn't my native one.
Your product isn't shipping for months. At least if this was on Kickstarter I'd know what I'm getting myself into.
And ultimately, I came away not understanding what the product is. So I'm not remotely interested in buying it, even though I generally throw money at funny dev kits and things possibly related in this space.
Many have pointed out all the problems with the page as it is. I'd like to make some concrete suggestions that might help.
Firstly, you have invented this thing. You know more about it than anyone on the planet. So dumb it down more. Your video doesn't really show what the product is. How about wiring up a 555 timer with your board with no passives to an LED, and then demonstrate varying flash rate by changes in code that are changing resistor values (bonus points for writing a function to set resistors and cap for you based on frequency desired and duty cycle). That would seem like a real demo of what the board does.
I'd also cut the 8 stream of consciousness "why use metaboard" sentences into 3 concrete use cases of increasing but understandable complexity.
Then, and here I am making this up, if this thing is genuinely useful, make some prototypes and send them to electronics bloggers with a note like "I like your stuff. I made this cool thing and I think it could have helped you with $PROJECT_X. Try it out and see what you think. If you think others might find it useful, I'm starting a kickstarter on 15th November (or whenever)."
Use something like kickstarter because it helps create credibility – if I send you 20 AUD, and then just wait 6 months, I don't know what I'm going to get, but if I know 100 people have sent 20 AUD you at least have a chance of producing something.
Ship something that is minimal but works to your early backers, and build from there. Not shipping, or delaying shipping to overcomplicate your product is a bad plan.
Good luck!
I personally don't like it when such information is dumbed down, in particular if the audience of the product is "smart people" (as hackers or makers like to be).
Just my 2 cents
The best way to get my attention is to write some rather intelligent information. I often switch off when I feel that I get "dumbed down". That's how I am.
Hacker News might answer some questions about marketing, but your customers are on Hackaday. Why not ask your customers directly?
Edit: And as others already mentions: your images are missing. Fix that first.
Edit2: If I understand what this board is about, you might have a killer product here by the way! Am I right that this board is directly communicating with software so you can 'see' what is going on?
and
https://d28w3xgz5vkvvm.cloudfront.net/images/000/157/695/ori...
also a bad pointer to http://www.metaboard.space/%22https://d28w3xgz5vkvvm.cloudfr... Failed to load resource: the server responded with a
I guess that might kill confidence in buyers a bit.
Also, depending on where traffic comes from 300 visitors might have close to 0 interest in buying this.
This also means you have not defined your audience. Who should I be so that I would be interested in your product? An Arduino hacker? Building... what?
There are devices which let you wire up digital and analog circuits under software control. Field Programmable Gate Arrays do this for logic, of course. There are also Field Programmable Analog Arrays. Those are not widely available, but might be fun to play with. Is this a board with an FPAA on it?
Or is the whole thing a hoax? What's with the line "Diagnose a hard drive issue by copying code from Stack Overflow"?
But you can't just make a good site and expect for the "if you build it they will come" theory to play out. You need press. Post it in some forums to get started. Reach out to some sites that post electronics news and reviews and ask them if you can send them a free sample. Get on Twitter. Most of your overall job may be ahead of you.
Please enlighten us then. What does this board do?
But my impression was that it's like a digital breadboard emulator, but in hardware. So you essentially have a digitally programmable hardware breadboard. So as one example, normally if you would need a resistor in a circuit, instead of physically putting a resistor there of the correct strength, you can do so digitally, and you dont have to physically mess around with a resistor.
Where your visitors are coming from is extremely relevant to why you have or haven't sold anything, I think.
Not to say the thing can't be optimised (put 'Ships Internationally' under the button perhaps) but the idea that availability of something on a web shop would necessarily be tied to the currency its sold in is just really strange to me.
The only things I don't expect to be able to buy from overseas are certain big brand items (where they have a distribution agreement with a local company) and media streaming services (which are often geoblocked)...
But the reason I haven't done it is that if I actually charge in USD, but quote the price converted to EUR, since it's a subscription it might change over time. So you might sign up at 26.38 EUR / month but maybe in the future end up paying more than 30 EUR / month if the currency fluctuates.
For two currencies I could just charge in the original currency and take the risk myself, but only for those my gateway would support. It would also might bookkeeping more complicated.
I guess even for one-time payments the price advertised might differ a bit from what actually gets charged, since currency rates fluctuate quickly. Might be off-putting to see the price quoted as 29.95 EUR but then actually get a charge of 30.02 EUR.
Presumably the AUD 20 pre-order woudl be paid up front but there's no way to see who you are - the address in the copyright tag doesn't even tie to the domain name - or what the roadmap is or how progress is going. Which makes me wonder why this isn't using one of the established starter platforms.
The whole page looks disposable.
Which is a shame, as I spent a few hours recently rerouting wiring to get a prototype out of a breadboard and feel like I should be in your target audience.
And a really elegant esoteric language called Funciton: http://esolangs.org/wiki/Funciton
Clearly yours is currently lower than that.
You know the product, and you will write differently about it then a person that is unfamiliar with the product.
Other then that, all the items droithomme pointed out :)
But without narration I don't understand well enough what's going on here or why your way is better.
Agree on the AU price thing. Immediately makes me think I can't order it anyway.
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