Please review my startup: BuzzLabs

Hi Hacker News,

Always been a lurker, love what I learn on here. Would appreciate your thoughts (good, bad, ugly) on a startup I've been working on. The company is BuzzLabs, a six-person Seattle startup. We've received strategic seed funding from a large player in the local business space.

The goal is to save business owners (think restaurants, hotels, spas) the hassle of checking dozens of sites to find out what people are saying about them online. They want to focus on improving their business instead of surfing the web and figuring out what's relevant and interesting to their business.

Our technology aggregates social media activity for a local business (i.e. reviews, tweets, blog posts, etc.) into one place, and supplements that activity with deeper analysis and trends. Behind the scenes, we're doing relevance filtering, scoring, classification, and natural language processing to make the report relevant and meaningful.

We've built two separate products on the same technology platform: Find My Buzz (http://www.findmybuzz.com), and an interactive dashboard (http://www.buzzlabs.com). Find My Buzz is intended to be a lightweight, stop-and-go version of the dashboard -- simple, less-frequent printed consumption by small business owners. The dashboard is for larger businesses/chains with lots of online activity, where daily, aggregate "real-time" brand monitoring is crucial.

Any feedback would be appreciated. I can also be reached at [jason at buzzlabs dot com]

Thanks in advance, Jason Tan, CTO

Looks interesting, trying it out now (waiting for the report). Just some quick thoughts: On the "please enjoy our animated story of social media love" page, the animation is choppy and rather hard to follow... I lost interest in it very quickly.

More to the point: it's not exactly clear that the user can navigate away from this page (the animation may imply to some users that something is still happening). The flow feels interrupted at this point and it seems you might better direct/capture the user to do/read something else. I'm not sure what that step might be, but it feels like a missed opportunity (for you).

Thanks for trying it out. Can you clarify on the choppy animation -- was it slow to load, or the animation speed itself wasn't smooth? Great point on sending the user on to something else.

Sure: the animation speed itself wasn't very smooth... probably more of an opinion, but the feeling was like "yeah yeah, this is going to require too much effort to watch/grok". It was a tl;dr moment, right when you had me ripe to learn more or be directed elsewhere.

And the circular tick marks above the house just scream "something's loading" as they are just too similar visually to every throbber/ajax wait symbol users are used to seeing. Hope that helps!

Have you checked out Postling? Sounds like they're a competitor.

Great start -- small biz definitely needs good tools like these.

haha, we actually met Postling's CEO at an event in LA. I believe that we're complementary services -- they're more focused on the "publishing" whereas we're focused on the "listening".

It's an interesting idea that I think local businesses would be interested in marketed properly. I have 2 remarks on the design.

1) Not all businesses have a single Zip Code. It is the right idea for a restaurant or bar for example, but only if there is only one location. For example, if I owned a small chain like 16 Handles for example I may be interested in how people like my business in general, not on one store. I can see how the feature could be useful, but it should be optional (and clearly marked so)

2) When I tried to click on the screenshots, I thought that the text was way too small to really understand what you were seeing. When I squinted I could figure it out, and it did seem really cool, but I am only 20 and using Chrome on a MacBook Air, so I think you should make the font waaaay bigger for your target middle aged user on a 5 year old Dell using IE7.

We have a separate product that better serves multi-unit chains and "brands" (http://www.buzzlabs.com), but that is not as self-serve as Find My Buzz.

Thanks for the feedback on the screenshots, definitely a common theme here and we're fixing that now.

I agree with your points. Not all businesses even have a physical presence or particular location. I'd like to get a report for my business for example, but I'm selling to a global audience (online) and I'm not even in the US, so I can't use this service.

I like the idea. The front page gets you going right away. The three screenshot links on the bottom should have information that's more easily viewable before they are clicked, or maybe some title above them. For instance, Blog Activity, Official Reviews... something along those lines. Also, it takes too long for the overlay to pop up. It has to be a lot snappier. I'm not sure about this suggestion, but possibly a button or link somewhere to "find out more", however the tagline is very effective and succinct. Lastly, I would say, if you haven't already, to buy findmybiz.com, findmybizz.com and findmybuzz.biz. Could be useful for mistyped URLs.

I haven't actually tried out the report yet, but those're my initial thoughts on just the basic site. Hope that helps! Good luck.

I had a similar startup project which failed because for most businesses there is not enough information available for a service like this to make sense, definitely not enough for them to pay for it. This was not in the US though. Best of luck to you!

Just looked at the site. It seems very functional and the fonts are large enough to clearly direct the user on what to do next.

Other than the previous suggestions, one aspect I didn't like was the hover message on the 3 pictures at the bottom. They are a bit too long, and I quickly lost interest in reading them. They should be short and to the point so the user know what to expect before viewing the content of the picture.

I feel the user today always want instant satisfaction and reading a large hover over message is not expected and not wanted.

Otherwise everything looks great, requested a report.

Best of luck to you and your team.

Looks like a great idea. I think a lot of small local business will like it.

I agree with the others who say the screenshots are a little too small (fonts).

Also, while I think it's great that you are trying to capture emails right on the home page, it might be good if the focus shifted a little bit to the product and a little less to the sign up form. I would maybe recommend putting more weight of the design into the product (what problem does it solve for me) as opposed to "give me your email". More screenshots, etc.. would be good and still keep a nice signup form on the home page.

Again, great idea and good work!

Great idea! I actually like all of it so far, except one thing. The "social love animation," while cute, is misleading to my eyes; my brain is trained such that when it sees little objects moving into a larger object like that, I'm in a waiting period. It feels like a progress bar, if you will.

As a result, I sat there for 2 minutes or so (alternately reading elsewhere about the site), and was wondering if it was working or why it was taking so long. _Then_ I read the page. I'm just accustomed to not reading text while things are moving in that manner.

Let me know if I'm not making sense; I can attempt to clarify.

no, you absolutely make sense. other comments also point out this problem. previously, Find My Buzz was more like an "instant feedback" product, instead of a wait-for-your-emailed-report -- the animation sequence was displayed while they waited. we ditched the "instant" part, but thought the animation was too cute to let go... alas, we must do what's best for the user!

I bounced off findmybuzz immediately because you asked for an e-mail address before I had any idea what I was going to get in return. The screenshots help, but not enough -- I want to put in some business I care about, get sample results back, and then give you my e-mail address if I want to subscribe. Basically, show me your value proposition before you ask me to give you something of value in return.

we originally tried a "real-time" model and only asked for an email once the report was ready -- but this turned out to still be too slow and caused the user to wait too long. asking for the email upfront is our way of setting expectations on when they can receive the report.

Smart idea, and it's something that's going to be in demand.

A few issues:

Your images need captions I don't like having to give an email before I know what you do I want to see examples

You are going to face competition from all sides, mostly because this is something that's fairly easy to implement. You'll need something more to differentiate yourself.

Looks nice. You should make Zip code optional because you may get non-local businesses as well. For example, I couldn't try out the service because my business is not local.

Also, I am curious to know how Zip actually helps you. Do you use it to disambiguate similar sounding businesses?

It appears that we can do a better job of messaging that this product is intended for local businesses with a physical address. Yes, the zipcode is for disambiguation and ensuring that we only include mentions relevant to that business in that location.

* A sample report would be nifty - I had to pretend to be a business I'm not to get it

* An obvious feedback form with a callout would help. There are numerous start-ups providing these, or you can roll your own

we actually did have a sample report (http://www.findmybuzz.com/demo) through last week, but then thought the screenshots would be more accessible. based on the feedback here, we'll find a way to bring the sample back.

there's a UserVoice "feedback" button on the left side of the screen -- was that not obvious?

thanks for the feedback!

Please correct link to sample report on FAQ page - currently pointing to "http://http//www.findmybuzz.com/full_buzz_report.pdf

good catch, thanks! we've fixed it

Good stuff, man!

nice