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Comment by wheels | Hacker News Reader

Annoyance from the homepage: I don't want to have to watch a video to figure out what you do. Watching a video for me is one step of engagement after I've figured out if I have some basic interest. If I can't establish that immediately, I'll just close the window. Videos can be great for more in depth info, but why not use the space taken up by "A better way to think" (which says nothing) to give a one-line description of what it the product is?

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I guess on a similar note, I also don't want to sign-up with my e-mail to use and then consequently decide whether I do or do not like another GTD tool.

It would help to have a demo visitors can play around with in realtime.

I would respectfully say just the opposite. In a 45 second video, they showed the product, I saw someone using it who already knew how to use it and I had no more commitment than clicking "play".

In my book, they got it exactly right.

A video is great but many people aren't going to bother with it if they aren't otherwise interested.

"A Better Way to Think" means nothing to me and is the only other thing to grab my interest. I would have clicked away in about 2 seconds if I didn't come across this on HN.

EDIT: Why not something like "Your Brain. Organized. Everywhere." for a headline? It doesn't seem to be "a better way to think" but a way to "organize things the way you naturally think" [from the video].

I can definitely see myself using this and almost passed it up.

Oh, I like these suggestions. Yeah, tagline should change. Perhaps we'll use "Organize things the way you naturally think". Need to put more thought into this.

So, we decided on "Organize your brain." Simple but also seems to get the point across.

I live in a country with one of the slowest Internet connections out there, I'd really rather read a 2-line paragraph description than watch a 45-sec video.

Besides, YouTube is blocked in most offices - like mine.

Point most definitely taken. We're going to put up a few descriptive paragraphs.

Another option would be to just use vimeo instead of youtube. Or better yet, justin.tv, since they are also a yc recipient.

I would suggest, even better would be a really well thought out picture/diagram that tells the story. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, and it is far more likely it will be "read".

If you live in such a country do you expect free internet services to target you? At my startup a country with horrible internet is a country I do not care about, sorry but there's just too many other people to target and other things to worry about. The sense of entitlement to free services also bugs me.

I know there's stuff out there that I won't get, like Google Voice or anything with SMS notifications, but all I asked was a 2-line description.

I wonder where you got "entitlement to free services" from.

Having a video is a good option but shouldn't be the only one. See how dropbox is doing it.

Dropbox.com is pretty much a blank page with a video in the middle and a massive signup button. At the bottom there are links to the blog and whatnot. Is that what you mean?

We technically don't have a blog or any additional info yet, so we can't exactly link to that stuff. A few sentences of additional text we can and will do though.

I am pretty sure Dropbox used to have a link right under the video saying "If you'd rather read a text than watch a video, click here"

I rarely watch videos like this; if I'm in a shared office environment I don't want to distract others around me. If I'm at home I'm probably browsing while my family watch TV so again, the noise of the video will be distracting. Without anything on the page to make me think it's worth reaching for the headphones, I'll move on.

Agreed. I didn't get passed the homepage.

1. Why not have an anonymous demo page to play around with before asking us to sign up?

2. Why not have a big "Log in with OpenID" button so people can just link in with Google/whatever?

People use OpenID?

EDIT: I know people 'Login with Google' and 'Connect with Twitter', but I don't know anyone who dives at 'Login with OpenID'.

It's not like we are offered the option very often.

Google is an OpenID.

http://openid.net/get-an-openid/

I used it for signing up with stackoverflow and tend to use it when I begrudgingly sign up for something, if it's an option.

We'll set up Facebook Connect for those that don't want to register directly. Reason we don't have anonymous demo page yet is that it would take significant work to get the data to port to your actual account if you choose to sign up. It'd be a bad thing for someone to spend 10 minutes entering data into the demo and then lose it on signing up. We actually had that before and it was a problem.

We want to do this, but for purposes of launching more quickly we haven't done it yet.

One compromise would be to have the instructions/intro entered into a demo page that people could interact with but not save - it would encourage exploration of the interface without encouraging/requiring people to enter their own info. TaskPaper for Mac does something like this in an appealing way, and has almost the same interface as WorkFlowy.

Yeah, that's a good idea. We messed around with that, but didn't quite get it right. People got too engrossed in that and never really got around to creating their own stuff. The jury is out on it, though. We're definitely not happy with our onboarding process as it currently stands.

Why would anyone using a demo page be under the illusion that they would be able to save their data? To wit: It's a demo page.

I agree with the above sentiment that not offering a means of trying the product out before registering is a blocker for many, many people( myself included ).

One bit of data: seems like we've had a conversion rate approaching 50%, so we're definitely doing well.

Just to offer another data point: I almost never watch videos but was interested enough to do so in this case. It was brief and offered enough to convince me that this might be my go-to application for managing my projects and tasks.

After playing with it for a few minutes, I am excited by its simplicity and ease of use. I've bounced around from Google docs to omni outliner to paper and pencil with just about everything in between, but I'm glad to have this tool at my disposal.

Nice, thanks for the positive feedback! I hope it continues to be helpful.

Yeah, good point. We've found that conversions are pretty good with a super stripped down site, but we're probably going to add some descriptive text too.

On mobile, neither video nor signup are appealing. Pitch first, close later.

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