Rate my startup (3rd time's the charm)
The current (third) revision is a million times better than the first two... and I actually think the first was better than the second (less clutter but less information).
My first submission's feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2123579
And my second submission's feedback: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2206413
(The old site may be broken now... I haven't checked and I don't care to.)
So... here's what I did...
Someone said something along the lines of "the name is terrible" (and it really was)... so I ended up spending a couple of days trying to figure out a new name. It's seriously absurd how many .com domain names are taken for resell and not used whatsoever. Out of principle I didn't even bother contacting those nimrods for a quote. I put together a long list of potential, available domain names and finally got one... and registered it for $5.
Next I had to come up with a new design. I believe someone called my 2nd revision's design "appalling" (LOL) and it most definitely was. I had my reasons for doing it like I originally did but it just didn't work as I intended. I wanted to fit pretty much all of the information on one, concise page... but it ended up looking stupid and unprofessional.
I also got rid of the demo animations and video tutorial. Those were lame too!
As for the new design, I looked around the web a while for some inspiration and found a few sites of which I felt had a lot in common with my product. I combined the look and feel of one site with the structure of another and of course added my own touch to it. Some of you may be able to recognize which sites I used as inspiration.
It took me about a week to complete the entire new front end and recreate the sign up process to be much more user friendly and match the new look. And of course I had to tie up the old back end with the new front end and do a ton of testing.
Last... I added a walkthrough for first-time users. It should guide users through the entire app enough for them to know how to use it. This needs further real world testing, I'm sure.
I've also considered adding a demo button that has all the functionality of the free trial except for the networking aspects and no data is saved after they log out... so that people can click once to try it out rather than go through the sign-up process. Maybe I could give demo users the ability to switch over to the free trial mid-demo so their data stays intact. Anyone have thoughts on that?
Oh and today I added a small feature that should scale the text for various resolutions (since the app itself is based on percentages)... I still need to add an option for users to toggle this on and off and possibly specify their own font size.
And in case anyone mentions it (as was mentioned in revision 2)... I go straight to https because users can log in on any page.
There's definitely still some more work to be done but I think I'm finally at a point where I can officially release my product into the wild. And I couldn't have made it what it is today without the help of you fine folks... so thank you. HN is truly a valuable resource.
http://www.tourlogger.com