Ask HN: Review My Startup (Zazu)

I was a huge fan of the idea but the execution is really awful. An alarm clock that wakes you up with a horrendous siren (in the production version can you at last change the tone?) and then reads RSS feeds in a really bad TTS voice just makes me want to put a pillow over my head (or throw the phone at the wall). Besides this, though, the biggest problem I had was that it is completely unintelligent in deciding which headlines are important. I tried setting it up to read HN to my, or NYT, and since it just reads through the feed from top to bottom it gets frustrating very quickly. In order for this to be useful you need to do a lot of backend work to figure out 1) what the user cares about, and 2) reformulate text into short headlines. You also have the issue of content providers making stupid decisions about what to include on their sites. For example, if I chose CNN (god help me), I might want to know what Israel is doing in the West Bank but I sure as heck don't care about the latest celeb to enter rehab, and since this is the first thing I hear in the morning I'd be really peeved. This same basic criticism can be applied to my email inbox, too. If you start reading spam to me, or mailing list messages, I'm not a happy camper.

Calendar integration is critical and should be free. You should also add some "smart" alarm functionality so you can gradually wake your users over a course of several minutes with increasing light and sound. People want to wake up gently first, and only care about content secondarily.

If you add ads, you'll scare away users... unless maybe you partner with guys like Groupon or Ticketmaster so you can present deals, coupons, and events.

Regarding your Edit, I'd be interested to hear why you think anyone is looking to make important decisions at the "moment of alert", especially when that moment is when they wake.

To conclude, maybe I'm just not your target audience. I like my morning routine to be tranquil and calm, and I learned after trying Zazu that I prefer to be the one to engage my brain rather to have it forcibly engaged by my alarm clock.

Thanks for the input. It's really good to hear.

On the production app, you can now change the tone of the alarm (it was a later alpha-phase function).

I do agree that the TTS engine on the phone is horrific, we're working on a deal with Nuance to use their TTS engine. Their engine sounds amazing.

We're also working on calculating what the novelty of a piece of information is to a specific user. The User Experience of the application will be something like "here is a list of information sources that I want to hear from" then we'll let you know what we think you find the most important (novel).

As for the reformulation of text into short headlines, are you more interested in the general concept of the headline or a general summary of the article?

I'm going to try to convince some people that the calendar should be free, because it's a major "I need to know this stuff, this is why I'll start to use you" feature.

We'll try to never present Plain Old Ads, we're trying to engage users with brands. We believe there could be a real connection between a user and their material world. Radio-style shout-outs are just too irritating.

The "moment of alert," at the moment (pun not intended), is really more of a future thing. We're envisioning that if your wife emails you, Zazu will chime in and let you know that there is something you should check on; or if a meeting gets canceled, Zazu will let you know that you now have time to head home (there's traffic on your normal route, so you should take the backroads) and catch a movie with your family. As cheesy as that sounds, we really believe that people could find some utility in being up to date without having to explicitly look for whatever information you need to know. The current manifestation of that idea is a glorified alarm clock -- with the moment of alert being when the alarm goes off. Yes, I do realize that we are creating a moment of alert for our users, but what better time is there to plan your day than at the beginning of it? --, but we're just testing out the waters.

This feedback is great, I really appreciate it. Thanks!

Marc, that's a really long explanation (iron man? microstore? a new form of marketing?) for something that's basically a somewhat improved alarm clock?

Feedback: the homepage doesn't really explain what it is clearly. The wording can be better ("wakes you up verbally"?). You should show screenshots of the app, and try to communicate its value/why it's cool (with quotes from users perhaps). I couldn't even find a screenshot in the blog.

I didn't mention in the description of the post what the next general step for the company is. We're going to be leaving the morning space fairly soon, meaning we'll integrate with your calendar to let you know what you need to regarding where you are and where you need to be (both physically and metaphorically). We're trying to transform the moment of alert into a moment of informed decision making. We'll be looking at emails and other areas that involve alerting and decision making, too.

We're aware of the lack of information conveyed on the website. That's on the backlog, but it's just recently been pushed closer to the top of the stack.

ok :) To understand this better: are you asking for feedback on the plan/strategy, or on the current site and app?

The idea itself, as it currently stands, is an amazingly strong one that is relevant to almost everyone. Are you sure it's necessary to get so complicated so fast? I worry that perhaps you'll lose potential customers and mindshare by being too quick to "web2.0 it." For instance, I almost stopped reading this post after the first couple sentences - the information was in the wrong order. Tell us the simple version first, then tell us how it will grow.

I hope this doesn't sound rude - I don't mean it to be. I really like your idea.

Hey, some quick thoughts on the home page.

- There's a lot of odd looking empty space around the logo. In general the homepage just looks like you've placed the elements in random locations. Maybe move the Blog/Team/Press/Contact links to a horizontal list to fill the space at the top and lose "The Perch" for starters.

- The text on the rotating set of images is hard to read due to downsampling and jpeg compression. You probably shouldn't have paragraphs of text displayed in this way - I want to read it at my own pace. I don't want to rush because the image is about to change.

- The logo's colour at the top is far too similar to the background. The green would work much better.

- Have an informative page title. Currently it just says "Zazu". Others may know about SEO implications, but imaging I'd looked at your site earlier and couldn't remember the name - the first thing I would try is typing "Android" or "Alarm" into my Chrome/Firefox bar.

Currently installing the app itself...

- The first screen said something like "Use existing login or enter an email address and password to create and account". Does that mean if I misspell my email address I'll actually just create a new account? You should have a quick "New account? Yea/nay" dialog.

- As yet no email confirmation saying "Welcome to Zazu!"

- I'm not sure about the AM/PM option on the "new alarm" screen. It's not consistent with the default Android alarm screen, and incrementing the time over the AM/PM boundary isn't optimal this way.

- IMPORTANT: A bug. Create several alarms. Deleting one deletes them all.

That's all I have time for. Basically I like the idea. You need to tighten up the execution. {olish up the interface and the website for the real thing, try and integrate with Google Reader or similar (I don't want to set up my feeds all over again), change the word "infostreams" to feeds or something.

Good luck!

Really awesome app idea, here are my suggestions:

1) The green color scheme clashes with the red and orange banner.

2)The duck doesn't stand out because there's little contrast between it and the banner. I suggest changing the banner colors to something that blends in better with the rest of the site.

3) The barcode takes up a lot of the screen, but isn't valuable. With a short name like Zuzu, people can easily search for it on their phones. The goal is to excite them enough to search for it.

4) Get rid of the "Perch" menu bar. All those links can be horizontally listed under the banner giving you more space to show off the product.

5) Make the box of scrolling pictures MUCH bigger, stretching across the entire screen (horizontally). The words in the pics are too small to read.

6) Get rid of the "Wake up and win with Zazu" image and keep the tagline "Zuzu wakes you up verbally..." on a single line.

I hope this helps. If any of this is unclear and you'd like me to make annotations on a screenshot, let me know.

Goodluck!

You want this:

"Zazu wakes you up verbally to your calendar, weather, and news!"

To be above the fold. Right now it's going under it.

to be honest that page feels way too similar to those spam pages thrown up by domain squatters.

clicky: http://getzazu.com

Sorry, but you will need to get another name.

I liked the implicit pun in this bit "but we will not rest until it's done" for an alarm clock related start-up that's really funny. It basically says you will not be eating your own dogfood :)

Promoting 'zazu' as a brand when you do not have 'zazu.com' is working for someone else without getting paid for it.

You yourself refer to it all over the site as 'zazu', not 'getzazu'.

Hey, Dropbox got away with only having getdropbox.com for a long time.

Zazu.com is apparently not for sale.

see: http://www.zazu.com/

Maybe he's just playing hard to get but it could also simply be the truth.

The guy is called 'Glenn Zazulia'.

Almost everything is for sale - although they may not be able to agree on a price.

I completely agree, I'd like to get zazu.com but we're now actively thinking of another name just in case that doesn't pan out.

37Signals' product URLs are not app_name.com and they're doing just fine. Millions of dollars fine.

Their domain is 37signals.com

These guys call themselves 'zazu'. Not 'appname'.

Just like 37signals calls themselves '37signals'. Not 'appname'.

Zazu is an Android application that replaces the built-in alarm clock with an alarm clock that we believe to be more intelligent: it pulls whatever information you find important -- like your RSS feeds, your calendar, your email, your twitter stream -- and reads that information to you using a Text-To-Speech engine.

You say that really well. Your site doesn't. Is there some reason you can't just say exactly that on your website?

It seems to me like you're about to compete with a much more polished product, Qwiki, that just won the TechCrunch disrupt event last week.

See http://vimeo.com/15444551, around 4:20.