Comment by HelloNurse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HelloNurse | Hacker News Reader

Let's try to visit your site, step by step.

First screen

- A gratuitous 3D animation shows sample pages from your site. Why didn't you spend that effort to make the pages look better?

- There's a profile cover page featuring a portrait of a white hipster with a sad expression, "Nelson Bighetti" from "Silicon Valley". It looks like LinkedIn, but more importantly it is strangely prominent. Moreover, who is he? A mock profile? Someone in the company? A clumsily leaked actual customer? Uncertainty is bad.

- Another skewed but readable sample page in the 3D splash is titled "Projects" and it looks very simple and sparse. Is it the limit of what you can do? Being used to ERP and CRM tools with tables of tables and rabbit holes of lookups and details and popups and cross references, I'm not impressed.

Scrolling: features list

- Personal web site? Better than what I already have? What does it look like? I can't tell by the generic self-praise words in your text-only item.

- Client onboarding: I can definitely write down contact and payment information in other ways that make sense to me. What about the "onboarding" of making them well-behaved customers?

- Client NDA? Either I don't need it or my lawyer and I designed and drafted it a long time ago before I started freelancing. Why should I use a standard form without discussing it with a lawyer? Risky at any price.

- Personal assistant? Expensive and hard to train. I'll do without, as much as possible.

One of the first things I thought was: "do they have rights to those Silicon Valley assets?". Considering that this is a small setup (which it feels like), the answer is probably "no" which makes me wonder, as a prospective client, what else they're doing that may end up with legal trouble. Sure, HBO are very unlikely to find out, or even care, but it's a silly risk, and if they're taking silly risks now, why would I trust them with any part of my business?

Now, all that's a knee jerk reaction. The guys who made the service may well have licensed the assets, or the assets may not need to be licensed. And who cares? They're just a few assets! But that's the first thing I thought about when I got to their front page. Not a good start. Then I see a bunch of bad copy as false promises (seriously, you are not going to get a professional UX expert to "engineer" my personal website). Then, assuming I'm not that pedantic or I can get over the copy, I click on signup and get a TypeForm modal popup. I assume that the whole credit card bit has been removed, as I can't see it on the form, but really, I'm not going to submit that form. A company who can't create a simple form for their own SaaS website is not one I'm going to look at in a good light. How are they going to deliver a good service if they can't even be bothered with that part?

Again, knee jerk reactions all they way down, but that's my honest feedback. And I don't even get to the product, since I've already fallen off the radar.

I completely missed that "Nelson Bighetti" was a TV character, not a real or mock user, and "Silicon Valley" his show, not his address.

http://silicon-valley.wikia.com/wiki/Big_Head

https://www.hbo.com/silicon-valley/cast-and-crew/big-head

Messing with HBO intellectual property just to make a joke? It isn't only a "silly risk", it is, or it appears to be, the expression of a completely unprofessional set of values. I cannot avoid imagining many things I don't like about the personality, culture and ethics of people who would do that.

Back to the features after taking a break. In a few hours the sample pages in the 3D splash have disappeared, leaving more space for Nelson Bighetti (could it be a Silicon Valley publicity stunt rather than an earnest startup?) and a video has been added.

- Call scheduling: the calendar is another thing that perspective customers are likely to be already managing on their own in probably better ways. For example, without a critical dependency on a startup and with sophisticated software supporting some useful forms of integration and collaboration.

- Complete client process: this must be the part with a link to more details. Oh, wait, no link. No further explanation. A fairly ineffective strategy if you want to convince prospects that you sell something worth buying: basic professional services need to be dependable, not to titillate curiosity.

Further scrolling: pricing

$29 per month for what, exactly? A simple pricing plan usually facilitates customer acquisition, but how can the service be so one-size-fits-all?

How many people would think they are light users for which $29 is a high price?

On the other hand, a very busy personal assistant alone should approach and exceed the cost of a full time employee: is there a risk of being dismissed, as a money-losing customer, at the delicate time when my freelancing activity is blooming and many clients call?

I also tried the "sign up" button. I expected a form, instead there is a "start" button and a screenshot of what appears to be a LinkedIn-like public profile page of Miranda Betts. I am not Miranda Betts, why am I seeing that?

The "start" button opens an ugly form (maybe it looks better on a smartphone) demanding name, email and (surprise!) LinkedIn URL. No other details, like for example location, company type, businees needs. "We'll get back soon". This means they'll harvest information from LinkedIn and, at best, guess something wrong.

Evidently, the difference of attitude between communicating with customers and investigating them isn't clear to everybody.

We've stopped making interim edits, it was when only a few people commented, now it's like waves of feedback :) I'll go through all the comments and work on this, will update you in a few days.

Thanks for all the feedback, will definitely take a deeper look. About the personal assistant, the assistant is supposed to answer basic questions and nothing in details, it's a real person btw.

Why does the race of the hipster matter? That’s in poor taste.

Being a photograph/character the company chose to illustrate their services, it is part of their communication strategy. Not all Silicon Valley characters are white, and not all are male.

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