Ask HN: Review my startup - Archfinch | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my startup - Archfinch

13 pointsdrx18 comments

I've finally joined the ranks of single founders. It has been a very fun ride so far.

Archfinch lets you rate the things you like (books, films, tv shows, etc.) and then get recommendations based on your ratings. The URL is http://archfinch.com/

I know there are some film and book buffs on HN -- if you are one, check it out. I'm sure many of you have thought 'I don't even remember if I watched this movie or not'. One of the reasons I made the site is so I could catalogue what I watched.

I launched a private beta a few weeks ago and there are already some users on the site, so the recommendations already work quite nicely (they should only improve with time). I've had some really great reviews so far, but we'll see what the public has to say.

There are more features coming, but I didn't want to be in feature creep limbo forever.

Feedback is very welcome, either here or at luke@archfinch.com. It doesn't matter if it's positive or negative, don't worry, I can take it.

Obviously, you've done a good job on keeping your landing page clear, and done a very good and simple description of the service.

However, even here on HN, you'd find that most people are consumers and not contributors. Therefore, getting a sign-up on the homepage and not providing access to the content is likely going to hurt your growth.

I love arrested development, which I saw on your page. So I clicked on it, expecting to get rankings, reviews, or recommendations of other things i might like.

Unfortunately, I didn't get that. So I don't get to try out your technology. I can only see what you liked.

also, why have the type way off on the right hand side (tv show, film)? I had no idea what Angel was, and with the light grey AND the positioning, it took a bit to figure it out. I like the idea that they type isn't blaring out, but I think better placement would improve it.

I assume others have recommended that you provide filters by media type?

> I assume others have recommended that you provide filters by media type?

What do you mean provide filters by media type? If you mean books or tv shows, that's already in place, though filters usually only show up when they make sense (i.e. you won't see 'filter by books, tv shows or anime' if your search only returned books.)

> However, even here on HN, you'd find that most people are consumers and not contributors

Yeah, I plan to add things like 'if you liked X, you'll like Y', etc. I fully support not making people sign up if they don't want to.

You bounced me right after the signup page, when you asked me to search for things to rate. Sorry, recommendations are something I get for free from Amazon and iTMS; this is too much work.

Instead of a search, you need to present me with a shotgun blast of examples of things to like; getting the initial data out of me that you need to be useful needs to be twitch-simple, and ideally game-mechanic (have some kind of scoring, level-up system, and leaderboard for how many and what kinds of things I've reviewed).

(Ooops, I just re-read downthread, found out about GetGlue, and guess what: that's exactly what they do).

I'm kind of mystified by both these services though. Why do you think there's a company to be build on media recommendations?

> Instead of a search, you need to present me with a shotgun blast of examples of things to like; getting the initial data out of me that you need to be useful needs to be twitch-simple, and ideally game-mechanic (have some kind of scoring, level-up system, and leaderboard for how many and what kinds of things I've reviewed).

Yeah, this is something I probably need to do. Once you rate one or two things, rating anything else is a blaze, but I need to work on convincing people to rate that first thing.

No amount of features will get me to use this; there's too big of an initial hurdle to making the system aware of what I like, and I don't have a pressing need for more recommendations of things like films and books.

This needs to get tied into something like Facebook or Yelp, where I can just give you my password and it suddenly knows everything I like already.

That's why Mint.com worked for budgeting - unlike everything that came before it, I just gave up my account numbers and suddenly it knew how I spent my money. No more manual entering of stuff.

I notice that there are sometimes duplicate items; they might not have the exact same title, but refer to the same item. For example, searching for "wheel of time in:books" shows multiple entries for the same books. Will there be some kind of mechanism to deal with that?

Also, a possible issue with accents, or maybe Unicode characters in general. Searching for "pokemon" gets you a bunch of books, but zero video games. Searching for "Pokémon" does bring up the games.

Yes, I noticed this issue with books in particular. I plan to make it so you can mark duplicates.

Good job with the site. The question I'm trying to answer is why would I use this site? Like what's the purpose of the site?

I rate stuff so the app knows what I like and makes recommendations based on it. That's just about what I got. Correct me if I'm wrong?

Also, the bummer is that I need to create an account and login before I can do anything. I'd love to be able to see it in action so I can get some sense of what the product is.

The first page is very ugly. I understand the minimalism, but who is your audience and how do you plan on monetizing this?

People take recommendations from Amazon where they actually buy things.

Clickables:

http://archfinch.com/

http://archfinch.com/user/drx - my profile

I'm not signing up when all I've seen of the service is a two-line description. Where is the sample content I can look at? Where are the pretty screenshots or the demo video?

Seems very similar to GetGlue. What is differentiator ?

This is the first I've heard of GetGlue. Wow, talk about a sinking feeling. I've had Archfinch in my mind for about two years now, wish I launched earlier.

Well, my site is much simpler to use, as far as I can tell.

I plan to launch features which will differentiate Archfinch from GetGlue, I would have done them earlier if I knew about it.

Oh well, competing can be fun too. At least I'll have someone to kick my butt to deliver awesome features and service. GetGlue seems to have been around for about 1.5 months now, we'll see yet.

Edit: on a second look, it seems they only allow you to 'like' something. On Archfinch you can rate things from 1 to 5. The recommendation algorithm is much more accurate this way.

Well, my site is much simpler to use, as far as I can tell.

I just tried both. Your site seems a lot harder, to me. On your site, I searched for a couple of authors; nothing came up, so I logged out. On GetGlue I was presented with a bunch of choices, clicked the ones that I liked, got another list of choices, clicked the ones that I like, got another . . .

Do take a look at Hunch as well: http://hunch.com/

Most importantly, congratulations on getting your product up and running, it takes dedication and work. But I also agree with some of the other comments, in that I am not personally inclined to spend time rating things.

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