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Ask HN: What is wrong with our startup?

7 pointsjparicka10 comments

Seriously, what do you see that is wrong with our startup company?

The address is http://www.beepl.com

I highly appreciate any feedback I can get.

Thank you in advance,

Jan Paricka beepl founder

If I log in with Twitter then I give you access to post on my behalf. It's not clear to me why you need this and many people will not give access to their Twitter account without a very valid reason.

Second, when I declined to connect via twitter I ended up at an error page "Something wrong! Tokens do not match..."

The "About" link doesn't do anything.

When I go to a question then the footer at the bottom makes me think I'm logged in (given there is a log out link).

Bottom line: good idea but you should clean up some of the bugs.

Because "it's another fucking twitter site" and it's incomprehensible what you guys actually DO from the home page.

I suppose "Beepl is a Question and Answer platform powered by the social Web." is what you want/need to tell me, but that paragraph is REALLY hard to find on the page. Make it the attention grabber. And rewrite it to tell me how you're different from the 30 other "twitter Q/A" sites on the web. A quick illustrated 3-step guide to how a user interacts on this site would be good too.

There's no interesting content. If I were you, I would do a closed beta for a while, with some incentives for the chosen users to populate the site with interesting content, as well as getting lots of feedback and adjusting your site's design and functionality. Then, once you have lots of content, and lots of people beating down the door to participate in the beta, open it up.

Whilst you're at it: consider removing all the "test" posts. If you want to post test questions in a public environment, post actual questions, even if you're not at all interested in the answers.

* You can write short introduction how it works: Can I post directly from twitter? How can I answer? etc.

* On this Q&A sites: Directly after the question box there should be the answer boxes.

* All links should work (about, press, search(!))

I didn't have time to check out much of the actual functionality of the site, but here is some initial feedback:

- On the front page, it looks like the most recent activity is 2 weeks ago, this turns me off right away, consider faking it until you make it.

- What does the "What's Hot?" link do? It is just a page of random images.

I entered a term in the search bar, hit enter, and got an error message...

I am not sure what the site is about. Do a quick video explaining the concept of the site. Also make the homepage a landing page that educates me, gives me a preview, but enticed me to join.

Thank you, folks! Superb feedback!

clickable: http://www.beepl.com

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