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Comment by rabbyte | Hacker News Reader

watching that promo video the value proposition is you get to hear about all the dick moves your friends are pulling on each other.

edit- read the comic, I'm even more confused.

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Well, there's one comic that is his motivations for building the app, which while admirable, but I'm not sure if appealing to my pathos makes me want to use the app any more than I would have otherwise. The other comic is better directed at why I/you might want to use it.

So in your opinion, I should make the "What is Currently" the front one, and the "Why I Built It" one as the background/secondary?

Does anyone else have thoughts on this?

Absolutely. I really enjoyed the "Why I Built Currently" but it's a bit heavy and overwhelming for someone's first impression of a social network. For some it might even give the wrong impression about the app -- I initially thought there was going to be some tie-in in the app itself to help report sexual abuse.

I think the most appropriate place for this kind of story would be your first blog post because it's more about humanizing you and the developers more than it's about the product itself. However, since it's important to you I don't think there's anything wrong with keeping it on the home page so more people can see it.

Nah it has flair. I find it charming, and the comic about sexual trafficking really got me. Keep it up!

I'm thinking I'm going to change it, because some others have pointed out that, if you come at the comic thinking you're going to get the reason behind the app itself, it's misleading. But I'll keep it as the secondary one you can click on :)

Thanks for the great feedback guys! You all rock! As I've said before, tshirts all around! (to those who want them and use the app) ;)

Correctomundo.

ya my feedback isn't about the app itself so much as how the site undermines itself at every turn.

the more relatable comic is buried under a tab. it derides the mess that is social media but then says "Does your best story have what it takes?" with a share link to Facebook.

it boxes you into a minute with the reason being that otherwise it would turn into a "snooze fest" while also saying the point of the app is to have a more personal connection to distant friends (was that comic of two friends leisurely chatting over a fence meant to imply these are rapid conversations? I got the opposite impression). based on that the phone dialer is what you should be reaching for to stop making excuses and stay intimate with the people you care about.

that said I don't mean to be negative just to point out that there is a flurry of mixed messages here in regard to use cases for the app. I get the impression they're not settled on the problem their solving. my feedback is only meant to point that out, not discourage.

> that said I don't mean to be negative just to point out that there is a flurry of mixed messages here in regard to use cases for the app. I get the impression they're not settled on the problem their solving.

I think this is the biggest takeaway. It's really difficult to nail messaging down as founders. You're just too damn close to the product and you have all these stories you want to tell, so the default is to tell all of them, usually getting "too cute" along the way. I'd push these guys to really focus on concise, clear explanation of what this product is (how it works, why you should try it). Everything else - like the motivations behind building it - should be secondary. Within 3-5 seconds of visiting the homepage I should know what this thing does.

Yes, I was also confused by what that video was meant to tell me, the viewer. It seemed like you guys got in a room, watched the Dollar Shave Club video, and tried to figure out how to "do something like that" while also trying out any plausible way to get a girl in a tank top on there. All of that distracted me from whatever benefits / values the video might have intended to promote. Right from the get-go I felt lost at the stapler-in-jello thing. I'd actually make an argument that 90% of the time a regular (non-comedian) person tells me a story about something funny/interesting/"crazy" that happened it falls wildly short because "you had to be there."

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