Ask HN: Review my startup - Reputely (Game Mechanics Platform) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my startup - Reputely (Game Mechanics Platform)

reputely.com

58 pointsdwynings43 comments

First off congrats, and well done on a nice looking and fairly clear site.

Unfortunately, your documentation link doesn't go anywhere, and that is one of the first thing i look at when looking into API's. What does it look like, and how do they do it.

I'm in the process of building a site where most of the interactions are based around game mechanics. I'm just getting into it, and hadn't really thought about using an outside API, but you've at least given me pause to think about it.

However, going after already existing sites which want to add an element of game interaction is a good market I think.

A few things on your site specifically.

I found that the cycle on the home page rotates way to quickly to absorb any of the information. I know it stops once you click on one of the buttons below, but I found the initial speed to be a bit distracting.

The screenshot in the cycle goes below the dividing line/bar and looks wrong to me.

The light blue font used in each cycle title on the light grey gradient background except the first is difficult to read. Going a bit darker would help, or just stick with white. It isn't a problem in the cycle controls though, and looks quite nice.

You have a prominent link to your blog, but no blog posts. How about something about why you decided to build the company, how you got into it, something interesting. A blank blog just doesn't say 'dedication' to me.

You quote 'Jim Miller', but don't say what his site is. If he is in fact a real person, and they're using your api, I think it would be nice to send people to his site, and if somebody can see your api in action, it helps cross the barrier of having people be the first to deploy.

A live demo would really be great, but if that is too much to ask, a video demo would be a good idea. Though people may understand something about game mechanics, actually showing what you do is very important (to me at least).

Also, your sign-up and get the whitepaper forms don't look nearly as polished as the rest of the site. I'd clean those up a bit.

my 2 cents. Best of luck

Here's what I would really like to see:

- actual api/code examples.

- annotated screenshots, and lots of them (on your analytics, customization forms, how it integrates in sites, etc)

Without enough detail, I'm bound to just skip the site and never go back. With detail, I'll investigate because I'm curious, and then I will keep it in mind for my current/next project. Developers need detail.

Thanks for the advice Peter.

I completely agree. The site in it's current form is a simple MVP.

My aim is to shoot for docs that have the same level of detail as Twilio's (http://www.twilio.com/docs/)

This is obviously an MVP, but there are some key things that I deem necessary to be the prominent player in this space. You can read more about what I've written about this idea here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1263984

The key thing is that if a site's points/badges are left in their own island then they have a fraction of the value than if they were part of a universal system (e.g. Xbox Live's GamerScore). You may claim that this will come in time, but the problem with that is your offering is less than half as compelling without a universal system and such initial traction will be hampered. Furthermore, if you don't plan for a universal system initially you won't have the necessary policies and normalizations in place to make for a 'fair' system.

Alongside that if you have everything done through an api it's a bit too onerous for developers. An entire system may take 2 months to code, and you're taking off maybe one month. The goal should take integration down to a couple of days (javascript libraries are quite useful for this).

Either way, best of luck! Someone is going to take this concept and run away with it and become rich. You're just as likely as the other entrants so congrats on launching!

I do think the aggregated profile is important, but I don't think a universal reputation system type of score will work. Primarily because reputation is earned within a context. The web is just too big to provide that context. This is a point that is really hammered home in the new O'Reilly book Building Web Reputation Systems. Reputations (which this basically would be) are very powerful within context, but almost meaningless outside of it. It would also have to be quite bureaucratic to control how points are awarded, which I imagine many people would find onerous.

I don't know that I completely agree that the web is too big to provide context. Maybe the vastness of the web suggests that a reputation system is necessary. The fact that people want to display their wealth of knowledge, friends, followers, etc. to THEIR social graph provides enough context in my opinion.

Doing it via javascript but without allowing the system to be gameable is a challenge. Maybe impossible.

Thanks Omar. There definitely is a tremendous amount of value in a universal system.

I have a few ideas for overcoming some of the obvious hurdles (I learned quite a bit of nonobvious solutions about this while I was at Heyzap where we distributed games to 200,000 websites), but I'd love to chat more with you about it if you have the time.

Would love to chat more about this. It's something I've been thinking of for more than a year. My email is omar@productwiki.com

The first thing I did when I went to your site was to start reading the description of your product. The first thing your site did was take that description away from me.

Yeah the slider delay could use an additional 60 seconds. But as far as explaining what the product does very straight forward and I could tell what it is after reading the first slide, something that has been missing on most of the recent startup review posted here on HN.

Good point, Scott. Thanks!

I've changed the timeout to 6 seconds—hopefully that does the trick.

It was always a nonissue for me, because when I load a page, I have a tendency of clicking around quickly.

How is it going to be economical for you to offer this for free? Is it ad supported? Is there a limit for the type of site that can add this? You might want to specify pageview limits or something.

Also, more screenshots showing badges, demo site, etc..

Hey Daniel,

I'm leaning towards a freemium model— I don't have enough data yet to even make an accurate estimate of what makes sense.

(apologies for the slight brain-dumpiness of this comment)

As a game researcher, I'd like some more idea about what the supported games are, why they increase engagement, why I need Reputely rather than doing it myself. What do you know about games that I (as a visitor) don't? "Hey, those StackOverflow guys did it, right? It's easy, just slap images on people's accounts, right?"

The other thing that pings with me is that it is not clear to visitors that your idea doesn't put the cart before the horse. If I was fresh to the idea, I might say "But wouldn't I need a community for those numbers to matter?" I personally think it's a relationship where it helps communities build (not on it's own, mind you!), and that should be pushed somewhere.

Your copy uses the word "addicting." Be careful with this word, I know it's more common in the US, but it's fairly alien to other English speakers, for whom it looks like you have misspelt "addictive." [1]

Why do I need to give you my email address so I can see your games mechanics white paper? Why is it in PDF format? Why is this not a prominent, accessible web page?

EDIT: Also agreed with everyone saying the cycling is way too fast.

[1] http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/addictive-versus-addict...

"Hey, those StackOverflow guys did it, right? It's easy, just slap images on people's accounts, right?"

-- The fact that it is no where near as simple as slapping some images or badges on someone's account is what makes Reputely worthwhile.

While you, as a game researcher, are well aware of the intricacies of game design, most web developers and especially consumers, are clueless. Reputely is here to provide a standard to guide them in the right direction.

This is what I was trying to get at with my quote. The quotes were supposed to be naïve visitors, perhaps I did not make that as clear as I should. Sorry! ;)

"Thanks for requesting Reputely's whitepaper: Best Practices: Game Mechanics.

I'll be sure to email it to you when it's ready! Thanks for your patience.

Cheers,

Dru"

That felt a little bait and switch IMO. I had the perception that I'm dropping an email address to get a white paper and now I feel tricked into get my email address

Yeah, I'm sure you're doing this to gauge the interest before writing the paper but you really need to improve the wording of the email. I clicked a link with a PDF icon saying "Download the PDF file", if there is no PDF file you should explain why and not just drop a generic "thanks for your patience".

Gauging interest was the intent. I've added some clarification to the description of the form. Sorry about that!

Wow, it seems we've had quite a few submissions lately revolving around Game Mechanics as a service. Glad to see others jump into this space.

I'm really curious to check out the API and learn how users will configure the requirements to award the points and badges. As a founder of a company who is working in this same space, I share and fully understand many of the complexities and difficulties of offering a service like this. Its oddly refreshing to see competition validate an idea and market we've been trying to develop (what seemed like alone) for so long.

I saw that on your site you wanted to Skype with people to get feedback. I'd love to talk sometime about where we see this market headed.

Best of luck! - Are you guys funded?

I missed some of the other links for Game Mechanics as a service... could you list any you remember? Thanks!

These are the few that I could find again. I found others but they were blog articles talking about Game Mechanics.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1479966

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1482380

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1413784

The companies I'm aware of that offer these kinds of services are:

http://www.IActionable.com - mine :) Coming Soon

http://www.BunchBall.com - rajatrocks is the founder and posted on HN years ago

http://www.BigDoor.com - Just received more funding I believe

http://www.BadgeVille.com - Coming Soon

http://www.Reputely.com - Coming Soon

Good list Jason! I'm still here, and have been watching all the newcomers to the space with interest.

We've been providing our Nitro game mechanics platform to companies like NBC, Comcast, Hasbro, Warner Bros., etc. since 2007. We also have several startup customers and even a non-profit (Hope Lab - check out the cool work they're doing to combat tween obesity: http://www.uncommonprojects.com/uplog/2010/06/08/introducing...).

We've had 3 years of development, customer feedback, and on-the-job learning, so our platform's gotten pretty good, as has our team. And we have some cool stuff planned for the rest of this year and next.

Check out our website, and if you're interested in learning more, drop me a line. - rajat

"Nitro is the Participation Engine. It's also Patent Pending." (from the footer at http://www.bunchball.com/)

Hmm.

Is anyone here using any of these? I just signed up for BigDoor. To me, I think Reputely has the best website - I like how they use the phrase "game mechanics" since I already know what they are, and what the value is.

If you haven't already, consider making the user-facing portions of the service easily localized and translated. I can see myself pitching this service to a client but the UI for end users can't be in English only.

Thanks for the heads up—I hadn't accounted for that. Great point.

Seems like a nice idea, makes sense, just curious as a site owner, how and where I can see examples of how it would be integrated into my site.

I'd like to see more screenshots and demos please! Thanks

Homepage has quite a bit that should be reworked, but I think pedalpete covered anything I would've mentioned. Some Nielson might also be helpful: http://www.useit.com/homepageusability/guidelines.html

Random thoughts:

-You didn't close the anchor tag on the "Reputely's Whitepaper" link in the footer

-Contact, Feedback, and Partnership in footer all link to contact, which is redundant.

-FAQ and Documentation in footer don't actually link to anything

-"Take the tour" page could benefit from having a video, or some more screenshots.

-Footer is much bigger than it needs to be

-Tabbed navigation on left of Take The Tour page really doesn't seem to have a purpose.

-Sign up page could be the same style as the contact page.

-Pricing in navigation could be called Plans & Pricing, like the button on the homepage.

-Links to homepage and blog on contact page are unnecessary, that's what main navigation is for.

Hope that helps.

I'm wondering if you would be willing how offering a white paper influenced your signups? What's the conversion there?

It honestly performed much, much better than I expected. I'm going to do a detailed blog post with more info about that.

You need a one sentence tagline, as not too many people are familiar with this market.

Agreed—would love to people's suggestions on this.

I still have a hard time understanding what this does. I suggest providing more screenshots of each feature you have. Without an idea of what this looks like, its hard for me to sign up for this

just want to stress that api , and documentation, is the only way I would even consider signing up or using this. Sorry if I wasted another comment to reiterate this.

Totally understandable, especially this being HN.

API & Docs are definitely in the plans.

thanks for the comment, please do let us know when you release documentation, because currently I am building out my own solution, and if its easy enough , I would switch.

But if it was, would you pay? THAT's the important question :)

until I can see what you're offering I can't answer that question.

I tried to sign up, and after submitting my information I was thrown back to the home page. Then I tried to "sign in" and that also just threw me back to home page.

The first thing I clicked was 'pricing'.

I do understand that you don't know how to price it right now, but having no idea of what it _might_ cost is tough.

This space is hot. Someone should fund you.

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