Comment by arjunvpaul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjunvpaul | Hacker News Reader

Emperor Akbar, on a whim, once asked his minister Birbal to find him ten fools. You can get the gist here (Source: http://folklore.usc.edu/?p=24202).

Birbal stumbled across the third fool while the latter was looking for something at night. The guy was looking under a streetlamp and couldn't seem to find whatever he was looking for. Birbal asked him what he was looking for so frantically. He explained that he lost his wedding ring in a dark alley a short ways away.

Birbal is confused and asks him why he wasn’t looking in the alley, and in the street instead. Get this. The guy replies that he’s looking under the streetlamp because there’s more light there.

Moral of the story: dont ask on HN, go ask the folks who dropped off.

Here's a suggestion on how you could do it. Take a look at Tumblr or Intercom and see how they collect an email first and then ask for a password and eventually more information. Collect an email address just before anyone clicks get started. So that you have a way to reach them in case they dropped off and helps you figure out at what point folks are dropping of

(My thesis: Your shady credit card collection process is the culprit. Typeform doesn't seem to fit your story of helping folks be more professional. If you are a professional trying to help freelancers be more professional, you should be using something more professional)

Sorry, if you felt, I called you a fool. Perhaps reading the story and learning who the 10th fool is would make you feel better. :-)

I'm not a freelancer, but I'd assume the biggest problem getting started with freelancing isn't the NDAs etc. It's getting clients. Maybe your marketing should be geared to people who are already freelancing and who want to upsell/become more professional?

Thanks for the feedback, I think I've been hearing this a lot now, will think about this deeply and do something :) We actually had a lead generation too inside the platform, but its still in the process, ideally picking up all the leads around internet form slack groups, LinkedIn etc and qualifying the leads.

That would likely be a better stand alone product.

Thanks for the story, in fact, looking back, I feel quite foolish to ask too much information in one go :D The gist of the story is very interesting, but in our current scenario I don' really have a way to reach the folks who dropped off, that's why I came to HN. I'll be exploring the other points you noted, and work on them.

The forty people who signed up surely put in some contact information?

how many people signed up so far? and is this Elite 100 program still valid? even with the new subscription structure?

We've pulled the program at the moment.

First of all, asking for help everywhere is awesome, as humility is the key to take the right steps to fix a problem.

If you cannot talk to those who did not sign up or like the offers, then you need to take to people who have extreme pains in using sites like freelance.com or upworks.com these sites have crazy traffic but until today they have not resolved key issues for freeelancers or seekers of freelance talents.I must add, they are SUPER hubs for Freelancers as they are the status quo but key values are missing.

I saw your site and I love your approach but you must refine the big uppercut punches that will make any free lancer on your site standout and choose your platform.

I suffered a big deal of problems when sourcing freelancers from freelance.com, upworks.com and many more. I found many others suffer the same thing.

I love to help you to share my stories and help you refine where is the real true value lies for a customer that wants top talent. If you like to plan a short power call soon let me know. I will drop my email in your Freshchat with attention to cod3boy!

Thanks, got it! will get back to you soon.

If you don't mind me asku, what sort of problems were you having with sourcing from freelance superhubs?

Can you please explain this a little bit more? I don't exactly get what you are asking!

Yes, but tons of other people dropped without any information.

Have you contacted them?

> looking back, I feel quite foolish to ask too much information in one go

To the contrary -- you are wise to learn from your mistakes : )

the intent was not to make you feel foolish.

Maybe its a good thing you feel embarrassed. It probably means that you haven't released late. Listen to Episode 4 of Reid Hoffman's Podcast Masters of Scale. "So don’t fear imperfections; they won’t make or break your company". Forge Ahead!

That might be your problem too. The absolute next thing I build, after features, is a feedback pipeline. I do this before even integrating the payment gateway. Often it's in the form of some support forum or in app public chatroom.

Take a close look at any comments wherever you advertise. I'd even recommend against FB/Google advertising at first because it's difficult to get feedback.

Analytics might help too and you can see where people are dropping off. But they're quite inefficient.

Sometimes you just have email people who signed up in person to ask them. People are usually very open to giving brief feedback; just don't drag them into some focus group or 10 minute talk.

Being able to iterate based on feedback is usually the make or break point of an early stage entrepreneur.

Thanks, I think I have tons of feedback from HN now, honestly, I did not expect this much! :) I am currently sorting out each feedback and converting to actionable items, will probably come with a blog post or something soon about the actions :)

> Collect an email address just before anyone clicks get started.

That's a sure way to collect a bunch of mailinator.com addresses.

Is this common on a SaaS site? My experience with landing pages is that people will cheerfully enter their work email address without a second thought.

Cheerfully enter my work email!? I am way more reserved with that than my personal address!!

Me, too! I may have been as surprised as you.

Don’t you have a second -t testing email? Actually having one, I can say that there is nothing wrong happening inside it, despite it was used for lots of “seems legit” evaluation registrations.

(Not that I’ll check it often, answer questions or connect to audio notifier; this somewhat defeats the purpose we’re discussing.)

Can't speak for everyone, but it is common on any site.

The assumption is that they _will_ spam, sell the data or do something comparably exciting, so it's nearly always a disposable address first, changing it to a real address later if needed.

And if the end goal was to get everybody's real email addresses, this would be a calamitous failure.

This guy just needs some feedback. Even just a fraction of real emails would be better than none.

I never want to giveaway my email address either, unless it's really important.

I'm hundreds of times more likely to sign up via Google Account, sometimes Facebook.

So much easier and no activation emails etc...

I hesitated to provide my linkedin, which is a must for registration

I love this story because it is a new angle from the usual drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp.

The first version of it I ever saw was in a Baby Huey comic book in about 1967, a single page comic, and it struck my infant self as wise and unusually funny. I wonder how old the joke is.

Not sure if the real source can be traced. Birbal lived in the 1500's and I have heard another version atributed to another court jester called Tenali Raman who lived in the same century.

The first I heard of it was a translation of a 13th Century Sufi tale. So,... older than Baby Huey.

What's the beef with Typeform? It is a slick service, award winning, very well thought out and designed. With Zapier it integrates to over 500+ apps downstream including Invoice Ninja (another amazing service integrated with 40 payment vendors). A happy customer for one year. Would appreciate your take on it.

As a user, if I see typeform I expect a long questionnaire (e.g. from someone explicitly asking me to give them some time to help them research something) or it to be an e-mail list signup. Neither are things I want when trying to sign up to a service - it looks like you are just fishing to collect user data and don't actually have anything yet. I have no idea if they are prepared to actually handle financial data properly (unlike I'd be with a conventional payment gateway I've heard of). The entire presentation with "pages", asking question after question (I think OP updated the signup already, now it asks 3 questions and doesn't manage to fit the 3 form fields on a Full-HD screen!), progress bar looks like "this is complicated". The keyboard hints it gives me don't actually work.

It's a massive contrast to the relatively polished (if content-less, which again makes one question if there is an actual product) landing page, which makes it look even more like you prioritize looks over quality. These guys supposedly help me sign up customers, is their solution to that going to be "set up a typeform"?!

It might be slick (I'd argue that, but my tastes don't necessarily align with people creating such labels) and award-winning, but primarily it sends the wrong message.

We actually had many more questions, we were asking all the questions that required to make their personal website like this https://bighead.sievehq.com/, then scrapped all the questions when users started dropping off.

Sounds like frankensteining third party tools together.

Just on the home page and onboarding, I realize it was a mistake :) Here is the actual product in the show. Can you please take a look? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7wAeenBe-c

1) It should not be used to collect credit card details.

2) If you claim to cater to professionals, you should not be using typeform for the signup process.

3) I am clearly not in the target audience, but I'll share my concerns : I would never use a service that hacks together a bunch of third party tools. It's great from the founders point of view (MVP, fail fast, early validation, hustle and whatever else), but it does not inspire confidence. Why? Security and privacy. God knows what poorly configured database, webserver or access control mechanism will leak user data since the product was built with the aim of getting something out of the door without much thought given to security and privacy.

Got this feedback about the onboarding process. Working on this :) While we are hacking together a bunch of tools to onboard and a home page, we really had worked on the product. Here is a quick video if you are intrigued https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7wAeenBe-c

What's wrong with collecting credit card details with Typeform?

Not being PCI compliant, for one.

Agree on all points there - slick service, award winning, very well thought out and designed. They even tout Typeform on their website for payment purposes. But to me personally (and my thesis is, to most folks), it does not "appear" secure.

The beef is not technical, its just appearances. Using Typeform to get Credit Card information is like casting Kevin Spacey in Denzel's place in John Q. Both great actors. Spacey might even integrate with over 500+ apps soon. But who would you trust with your kid?

The way typeform has been employed here does not give the impression of security. In fact, the current impression is that your credit card numbers are been given the same level of security as your 10 was given when you answered "How would you rate our Pizza on a scale of 1 to 10?" at your local Italian joints website.

And that little sign "Secured by Stripe" is like displaying a footnote, in each scene of the Spacey version of John Q, saying "Trust this guy".

I haven’t got the faintest idea why people like Typeform. I loathe its design for forms. (I am using the word loathe seriously.) Please just show me regular fields, don’t try to get smart about it. Things that try to be clever almost always make a mess of it. Typeform is right up there with scrolljacking. (I have never seen a perfect scrolljacking implementation, though I have come across one or two that were oh so all-but and been duly impressed.)

> It is a slick service, award winning, very well thought out and designed.

You sound like a seller of the product, not a customer.

"Award winning". Most awards are bullshit so when people use it as a plus it just indicates they have nothing more than bullshit to sell.

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