Ask HN: Review my startup - Jaxified | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my startup - Jaxified

jaxified.com

30 pointsterryjsmith19 comments

Just a couple of design things: Black text on that blue background doesn't provide enough contrast for what's supposed to be your main headline. Also, I've come to expect buttons to have hover states, and yours don't.

As for the product itself, I'd like to see a better explanation of why I should pay $10 a month to see some basic stats about my posts' tweets/shares. Facebook Insights, for example, gives all that information to me for free.

Thanks for the feedback. I've been constantly tweaking the black/blue and will obviously need to keep tweaking to find a better fit. And I will definitely add some hover states!

I have definitely struggled with the product's core value prop. Our biggest advantage over insights is that it's near real time, and is provided over time by post. We also allow you to track other blogs that are not your own for comparison. I will go back and make sure that that point is made more of a focus. Thanks again for your feedback!

Try

  #splash {color:#CEF}
  #splash h2{color:#CF9}

You'll get a better idea, then start tweaking hex colors to get the perfect one.

Apparently Facebook is working on a real-time analytics platform.

http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/gigaom/big-tech/cloud_ho...

+1 re the black-on-blue text. I found myself reading the "How It Works" before the "Build and measure your blog".

# When I click "Try it for Free" on home page - get me to sign-up page already. Why are you showing plans? Make the 2nd CTA button "See Plans". When you have a chance to get me sign-up then do that, do the selling after I've seen your product.

(If I am already sold, I'd click on pricing & plans).

# Your 14-day free thing on every account is confusing. Either add it as another plan or just take me sign-up already.

# When I add my blog I understand that the data is loading, but for how long? After 10 mins, all it has done is get my blog posts listed. No other data at all. How long do I need to wait? Show me a progress bar or tell me that you are processing it?

# You might wanna check your date selector in Chrome in Windows 7. It just doesn't work for me.

# When I select span of 2-3 months (did it using tabs since your calender thing was not responsive) the scale of days become messy. use smaller data points there?

# Not sure if I'd wanna pay that much to see these stats which even tweet button and like button on my blog can show me. Guess you guys will be adding more stuff? Like overall ranking, what audience liked it or what?

I know you guys are going to get down to these points and might already know these points but then again.

If I were in your shoes, after reading my own feedback I'd think I hated the service. So let me give the other side of the coin, what I liked:

Though there are some design flaws but site is not falling apart and is good enough in terms of design. Again there are some basic flaws like black-on-blue but much better than what I am seeing nowadays.

After I figure out where to click to sign-up. I hardly remember the process of singing-up which is good! Means it was painless.

It's a nice concept, can take off if you build upon it. Perhaps till beta you wanna keep it free and once you know what they are really looking for - offer it for paid or something?

Keep at it

Wow, thanks for the full review! Since we do offer the 14-day free trial on all plans, I could probably delay choosing a plan until you want to upgrade. Then it would just be a one-step sign-up.

We do only track new data; unfortunately there's no easy way to go back and links to your site from Twitter historically so we decided to be consistent with Facebook data. As a result you'll only see social interactions from the time you sign up going forward. Twitter data is real-time, and Facebook is polled on the hour. I will see if I can make that more clear.

We're definitely working hard to find what our biggest value prop will be. I think the features are there and we can iterate on them, but I definitely agree that we might not have nailed it yet.

I'll take a look at the Chrome calendar issue; on the other hand I'm glad that the sign-up was painless and that you like the design (blue on black aside).

Thanks again for the very thorough review!

> unfortunately there's no easy way to go back and links to your site from Twitter historically

Maybe you can. I am no dev but once you have the url of my blog post. There must be a way to query this sort of thing via API? http://twitter.com/#search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.64notes.com%2F... THis is search result for single blog post URL that tweet button displays as # of RTs.

I guess you can get all the tweets via API, which will have date of tweet and things like that?

Not sure if we are on the same lines but maybe it can be done.

Keep moving forward :)

My biggest complain is there is no free plan. Acctually I saw later there is 14day free trial and if you can convert big enough % of users to paying customers you rock!

Can't tell you much of data value right now as everything is empty so far, but I could agree with rradu's post. Perhaps that can be a nice tool to track competition.

Thanks! We've thought about offering a free plan and might still do so in the future, but for now we're laser focused on making it as easy to try it out yourself and possible. No verification, no e-mail confirmation, etc.

As you noted, you can also add other blogs that aren't specifically your own to compare. We've tried a number of things to make sure it's active up front but it's certainly something we're still working to improve. Thanks for checking it out!

Looks like a really useful service. I run The Startup Foundry and would love to chat with you. Fill out this info and we will be in touch http://thestartupfoundry.com/tip-us/. Keep up the great work, I think it has real potential.

Thanks for your input! I'm loving what you're doing with The Startup Foundry and have had your profile page open in Firefox for a week so I would remember to reach out. I was planning to send you an e-mail on Monday; I'll fill out the form so we can chat! Thanks again.

Who are you currently targeting as customer? It seems that your clients would be digital advertising and marketing studios who often manage a lot of social media channels for their clients. For them it would be a great service to see all these channels in one coherent interface.

We're definitely hopeful that will be a big part of it. We look to be a value-add to services like Sysomos or Radian6 who offer much more comprehensive brand management solutions at $500+/month. We're also targeting bloggers who want to aggregate their social metrics, learn a little bit more about their audience, and check out the same data for their competitors. While I don't have an exact visitor or social metric cutoff, we are actively targeting what I would call professional bloggers or would-be professionals.

Thanks for taking a look! I'll be posting a post on Monday on our blog about how it went from a weekend project to 7 months of work, but I'm really excited to show this off. I'm here to answer any questions or concerns you might have.

Curious: For firm, blogs = N/A, Do you mean unlimited, or that it isn't offered? Just curious as that came off unclear to me.

Agreed about the hover states, even if the button just has a light gradient change.

Sure; while we haven't launched them yet, our Firm accounts won't actually billed by the blog, they will be billed by campaign. So a campaign might include a Twitter account, a Facebook page, a landing page and a group of blogs who you have hired to promote your content. That combination is billed at $100 per month, so the pricing structure is a little different. I will look at finding a different way of wording it, but there will be more information on the page when that plan is ready to go.

Working on the hover states now! Thanks for checking it out.

In that case put "Get in touch" N/A sounds obscure

Hey Terry. Congrats on the launch. Some feedback:

1) The demo link needs to stand out a bit. I found myself looking for some kind of a demo and almost missed the link.

2) The demo page is stuck on loading in IE.

3) The boxes that appear on the right throughout the site needs some design tweak, though I can't put my finger on exactly what.

Best of luck with your startup!

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