Please rate my Startup: Kroud - Q&A Community Building Tool | Hacker News Reader

Please rate my Startup: Kroud - Q&A Community Building Tool

kroud.co

28 pointsstulogy20 comments

I just checked out startup.kroud.com and it seems super fast.

* This might just be me, but I'd suggest you improve your home page, perhaps add "Why use Kroud" or "Features" and such. To be honest, no one really cares unless you're some hotshot(don't mean to rad). Instead of that put what people say about Q&A. Here's an example: "63% of communities lose their members because of engagement. — WSJ" and then some button below that says something like: "Rewin those members with kroud"

* You're "selling" your product not yourself - remove the "Hey I'm Stu." Replace it with something regarding WHY JOIN

* Your headline is a bit vague("Questions and answers for your community"). When I first saw the headline I thought, oh this is probably some week open source project. I checked out your product and I think something like "Get your free hosted Q&A community up in minuets" or something.

* Good work on building some sort of comfortability with social proof.

I'm curious, how is this different than already-existing services like Sponge(getsponge.com) or

Oh, and, start charging for it.

Best of luck to you

That's really good feedback thanks, I'll take it on board. This is actually just the kind of thing I was looking for because I really struggle with "The Irresistible Offer" type slogans that catch people. I'll work on it.

Stu

No problem. I suggest you check out the lean startup principles if you already haven't. Perhaps you might need to pivot. Eric is really balling hard there.

Keep it lean.

I've updated the strapline just now.

Here's the wiki link to "lean startup"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Startup

Consider the advice on conversion rate optimization:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1860130

I'll second the suggestion about losing the "Hey I'm Stu". By all means introduce yourself on a secondary page about the company (it was via your Twitter account I saw you'd put together some other pretty neat looking webapps which might be worth drawing attention to) but the home page should be all about answering the "why would I want a Kroud?" question.

I've revised the home page with "Why use Kroud". I think a personal touch to a home page really helps, and I've been advised a lot in the past to do this more often with my products. So I've kept my face, but asked a very valid question. Why use Kroud!?

Just signed up.

Holy balls, is this fast! Mind sharing some details of your tech stack?

Secondly, can guests actually ask things? They have a text box, but no "Post" button, and if you hit enter, the text goes away, but the question doesn't seem to be asked. This is important to me, because I don't want my users signing up for Yet Another Service just to ask a question...

At the moment you have to be signed up. I'll set it up so you can optionally enable anonymous posting or not. Personally I like people in my community to sign up so I know their name and their bio, and you dont get that from Guest posts. But yes, it should be at the disgression of the person running the community whether this is allowed. So I'll build this functionality over the weekend probably.

It's built on CodeIgniter, using jQuery. I wrote all the code except for that.

Cool. I agree, it'd be better to know who they are, but I like to stay as friction free as possible...

That's cool. I've heard good things about CI, but haven't used it. Back in my PHP days, it was always Zend... ugh.

Looks great. The homepage is dead on: simple explanation of what it does, a live example, and a prominent signup button.

One issue to think through: companies would likely want to integrate the user management with their existing apps. That is, if a user is signed up for my web app, I'd like for them to have the same identity when on kroud. Sort of a federated authentication scheme. Likely not easy to do, but that'd be the major point preventing me from adopting kroud instead of hosting something ourselves.

Who did the design? I really like the simple and clean look.

Stu, thus far I have been really pleased. For us, Kroud is a Quora + Uservoice for our customers. The goal is to create a community around best practices and FAQs.

Nice and clean, with a catchy name.

Good to see more startups using .co domains since I am launching one with it.

Btw, as soon as you have more krouds, try showing 'newest' and 'most active' krouds on the front page.

Yeah I was thinking of doing that until I looked on the database and saw a Kroud called "vagina" and "whatthefk"

:-)

There is room for more than one Q&A building tool. You can be the low-cost or you can be targeted on one specific industry.

You may need to pivot, but only if you don't get any traction.

I like it. Good design too. One thing you might want to look into is your Kudos points. It looks as if someone's already gamed the system.

I'm still a little confused about what the value prop is. Is this like quora for your business? Or more of UserVoice type service?

Yup you got it - brandable Quora. Can't say that though on the home page or we could get in trouble

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