Ask HN: Review my startup, http://UpOut.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my startup, http://UpOut.com

85 pointsmartinshen93 comments

My room mate and I started on this website in mid February whenever we weren’t working on client stuff and/or school. For the past two weeks, we’ve really put our best effort to release a second/better version. It’s called UpOut and it’s a city guide built by users. We make it super easy to post awesome stuff pulling maps and pictures for you.

As an avid HN reader, I’d love to get some feedback! Please take a look at http://www.UpOut.com or to learn more http://www.UpOut.com/about

I’ll also be on Convore for as long as I can.

EDIT: Please try out the logged in portion. Either create your own acct (super easy) or use username:teststeve pass:testing999 We specifically want to see if the form is easy enough to use and that the profile editor is also easy.

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Great work! Though I have couple of suggestions from SEO perspective.

* Please, please, please change your URL from http://upout.com/a/YRlIYk to http://upout.com/new-york/candle-vegan-food (you can't imagine how important URLs are)

* Please include the city name in page title. So, your title "Candle Vegan Food | UpOut" becomes "Candle Vegan Food in New York"

* Add related activities tab and list activities there to build strong interlinking between various pages

* Give a small widget on the page so people can embed these activities on their blogs/websites so you get backlinks from there

Rest looks awesome! Good luck.

Thanks so much for the advice, this is really helpful. We are planning on SEOing our website sometime soon. We originally did the random short YR1YK for short URLs but we're realizing now how useless that is. Users can currently change the URLs too themselves!

http://UpOut.com

Downvoted by mistake. Sorry.

Serious question - how do you downvote? Do you mean flag?

Some features of HN are karma limited. You need to have several hundred points to down vote.

Ahh - thanks!

On the signup screen, I typed in my email address, then reflexively hit 'tab' before looking at the next field. That cleared the field and I didn't know what field I was in. I had to tab out and back in to figure out it was the password field.

Otherwise, it looks pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to having a Chicago version.

Thanks. We'll be doing more cities as soon as NYC is done right.

I love this!

How do you get the listed places? had a similar idea once (for a different market though) but we couldn't find a way to get them. Or you've got a person phoning all local businesses?

As for feedback:

* your urls are not SEO friendly

* so when I find an experience, where do I go from there? I think you should have a hard look at monetization. One easy way is to just let people click a big orange button "I am interested!" and then you can sell that qualified lead to the business. Lots of $$$ to be made there and you also get satisfied users.

That's funny because it's kind of the purpose of the orange like button below. We played around with a lot of different words for that... would "I'm interested" be a lot better.

As far as turning that into a qualified lead... we plan to do this soon especially when we enable sponsored listings.

"I'm interested" sounds a lot better than "Like this" to me. Like this suggests either: facebook, or that you would like to see more results like this.

in a facebook world, "like" is just approbation (click and forget) whereas "I am interested" means more such as you're going to find a way for me to book a first appointement or class

Definitely agree on the SEO friendly URLs, but I'm sure they'll implement that soon! :)

This is probably not what you are going after but consider solving the problem of... What can me, my wife and young kids do for fun this weekend.

That is something I would pay money for.

Everything on this site is user generated and tagged. Users can create their own tags like we have one called #family. You can consequently follow those tags to get a custom list of things to do for families. Alternatively, click #family then filter to this weekend (not many items yet but send me an email at martin at up out.com and ill send you stuff to myself)

I've been building something to scratch that itch for bit. http://impromptudo.com. It's still an early project and not very polished, but I use it probably every weekend to find something to do. I plan on adding filters for family friendly, etc stuff, but nothing like that for now. I'd love some feedback.

I hope this wasn't poor taste, I feel like my project and OPs project are aiming to solve different needs.

My site isn't nearly as slick as UpOut, but we do offer curated family-friendly events as our second area of focus:

http://www.parkgrades.com/blog/fun-things-do-dfw-weekend

http://www.parkgrades.com/events/dallas-fort-worth

Great idea + execution. I'm always looking for a simple answer for what there is to do. I have been surprised that the net really hasn't answered the question in a simple manner :)>

Small nits: - clicking on nyc pops up a pop up that it isn't easy to get rid of - I would suggest defaulting all views to today, rather than forcing a person to based upon date on the left hand side

Large nit: I see in your about page: "Deal/coupon aggregation and maps. Integration with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla.Local Questions/Answers. Mobile application." - I would suggest to do one thing and do it well. I think just answering the question what is going on in town is a tough one to answer but answering it will make you a useful service. Trying to do everything at this stage will probably mean you don't do any of them that well...

Thanks... I appreciate the advice. QandA is a big thing for us because (if you register) you can see a question at the top of your profile page that asks "What's awesome to do in NYC?". In the upcoming weeks, we'll pose questions ourselves/directly to users in that space like "What's your fave sushi place?". Eventually, other users can ask questions too.

Deal aggregation can get us some affiliate revenues to help pay for food and we've almost completed it. Integration with the social networks is just to help increase user sign ups and shouldn't be too difficult (at least for FB).

I found the small nit above myself very quickly. Clicked "New York City" and couldn't exit out of the popup that asked to be notified of a new city.

Speaking about the UI/UX only...great job. The site is very slick and easy enough to use. There's some cleaning up you have to do but mostly it works very well.

Thanks. Any specifics as far as clean up?

Lovely site, the UI is very easy on the eyes and I love the filter style.

My only complaint is with content really; it seems like a large percentage of the activities are already just business listings (mostly restaurants). How do you intend to weed out the hundreds of simple business listings that will crop up and make the site look like the Yellow Pages?

The main idea is that things should get sorted by tags. So for example #random http://upout.com/at?v=g&st=t&s=Random has more things to do rather than just restaurants. You can consequently follow #random or users who post your type of events and you'll get a stream of those related ones.

Great, I can see that working; thanks for the reply!

I tried to submit my city, but it didn't do anything. I checked for JS errors, but surprisingly there were none.

@martinshen Great job on the site. Congrats. It looks very slick. Here's a few things that could probably help make it even more awesome:

1. Rich text editing capability for description--at least with <p> tag so it can be more readable than just a big block of text. 2. http://upout.com/auth/s_profile and http://upout.com/auth/s_customize don't seem to add the "active" class correctly 3. http://blog.upout.com/ make the logo go back to upout.com rather than the blog root

What are the technologies behind this? Again, good luck!

Wow, this looks great! I love the concept, as well as the design/UI/layout. I didn't login, but I can tell that you put lots of thought into every inch of the user interface. The entire site is pleasant to use and easy to navigate. Best of luck with this!

Thanks! If you logged in, you'd see our killer form that doesn't even make you upload an image (we pull them from Flickr)

No, this site does not use any frameworks. We only use jQuery I suppose...

Only use jQuery? Would love to hear more about the tech stack.

Really cool. Is this in Django?

Hey looks very nice! Do you have/will you provide RSS or an API to get at this data? I would love to include it in a small side project (mobile app for kid-friendly activities and restaurants in NYC), of course with proper crediting/linking, etc.

This is more of a question, but how do you know which state a city that a user submits is for? I guess you don't really care about the limited city submissions for small cities as much as the metro areas, e.g. Phoenix vs. Tempe.

We just added the city picker last night and honestly could have put more effort into it (like making it work). We're fixing it now and will probably make it more functional.

No problem, working correctly is overrated :)

We're pushing city request now so that it works.

Interesting idea, do you have a mobile application? This seems perfect for the mobile market.

I can imagine sitting in a pub after a meal with friends wondering whats next and perhaps using an application similar to this one.

A mobile application is under development (aka starting tomorrow). The best we have right now is a map view.

Ditto. A simple mobile interface (ala Groupon's mobile app) would make this very useful.

I've been working on a similar project in my spare time. I have a different mentality to it, but similar concept. I wish you the best of luck, while secretly hoping for your demise. Muahahaha! But seriously, good job!

Thanks! There are a lot (like a lot) of people in this space.. It still hasn't been conquered yet!

Get the hipsters on your side and you're all set.

I'm serious.

Nice domain.

I don't instantly get that it is user-powered, although that is clear on the /about page.

Perhaps consider using social sign-in rather than standard account creation.

That's exactly what's next. We figured that most users would just want to browse than post but we provide a small call to action for every user at the bottom of the page to sign up (or learn more). Please try posting something... we tried to make it easy to post incorporating the Flickr and Gmaps APIs

Cool! You guys don't have Toronto yet, but your signup form for other cities doesn't seem to be working.

Let me know when it works, or when you have Toronto! :)

Thanks. As a Toronto born kid.. it was my #1 choice but we settled on NYC

Traitor!

Kidding. What's this written in?

Also, not sure if you noticed, but the signup for city form is broken. Not sure why.

It should work now...

Martin, if you do end up launching for Toronto and want some launch stuff I'd be more than happy to throw a bunch in. I've got a pretty good database of stuff to do in the area already written down from planning events/outings

This is awesome!! Killer idea!! Going to be big! concentrate on what you good at! Enabling people to discover (things to do). Less on social aspects!..

We want to be more city guide than ANOTHER FACEBOOK. That being said.. I want people to be able to send each other their top things to do in a city. As in if you were coming to NYC, go to UpOut.com/ini (ini is my username) to get my stuff to do.

As well as listing events, I suggest you allow people to collaboratively write articles about things to do with the city in question, Wikipedia-style.

This is a good idea but has issues as people have huge variance in opinions about different places.. We're trying to find an elegant solution to duplicates.

Awesome. Love the name/domain. Beautiful UI that will clearly keep getting more so. Couple of thoughts re design: 'Love sharing great things to do?' box should line up on the right side with the right side of the boxes above (using Safari.) I'd also try making the width of the sign up bar at the bottom the same as the footer bar (Home | What is This?, etc.) Keep up the sharp work.

Your UI looks good. I would change those black icons at the top, though. It's not immediately apparent that the marker icon = map view.

Thanks. I'm debating between words or tooltips. What do you suggest?

Wow. Well done -- the Filtering UI is awesome. Two minor things:

The "map view"/"tile view"/"large screen view" were not intuitive to me.

How tough would it be to make the selections persistent, so that if I've selected "Thursday Morning, Family" and then want to see what a different category offers on Thursday Morning, the filter didn't re-set?

That's a great idea! I was thinking about implementing something along the lines of http://www.equipster.com/ to have saved or common searches.

Signing up to be notified of "my city" doesn't seem to work in Opera 11 or Chrome latest on Windows.

Thanks for letting us know. We're fixing this as we speak.

This is great, I want to get in there and add my small town (it's raining and snowing here, so I can't really do it now) but when it gets nicer, I'm all over it.

Where's your FEEDBACK button???? I would like to send in some typos I found in your tutorial images.

The feedback button is to the right side (on nearly every page other than About which we'll add). We use UserVoice for Feedback

Thanks, I see it now on the left side, but it blends right in with the background. Was it there on the homepage the whole time? I'm using FF4.

Why UserVoice instead of GetSatisfaction or Ideaffect?

UV is cheaper than Get Satisfaction and is nicer than Ideaffect.

EDIT: Just checked GetSatisfaction again... that's not necessarily true.

Interesting side-note: UserVoice just rolled out per-admin pricing on all plans, so premium features that were $589/month now start at $95/admin (lower plans start from free to $5/admin).

http://uservoice.com/plans

We made a quick demo video for the accelerators we applied to. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izo08tV45cI

There is no way to close the "Currently available cities". You should add an X or allow it to disappear when the user presses Esc or clicks outside

Really great site though!

Yeah.. we need to fix that part up. We'll make it a lot better esp. when we have more cities. Thanks for the feedback though!

This is an excellent idea! I have been wishing for something like this for LA. Let people post cool spots in real-time (maybe you do), so I know whats going down! :-)

This is exactly what we're doing for UpOut. We'll hopefully push LA by mid-summer (I have a few friends who want it there). You can follow the specific tags/users (like #indieconcerts or #sushi) that you're interested in to get a stream of the best stuff to do.

You need it more in LA than any place else, why: sprawl = time and effort invested in getting anywhere around the city is the highest. NYC, you get up and move 2 blocks, on foot, LA you gotta drive, pay for parking everywhere, deal with traffic and cops if you drink, and then find out the spot sucks. I travel b/w NYC and LA a lot, and in NYC its a nice-to-have (don't like this spot go necxt door, or next or next... or take a $10 cab and go across town), in LA its a must-have (no walkable areas except 2 blocks and we just have 3 or 4 of those in a city that is HUGE).

Its 11 pm here and the Homepage asks me to Get up, Go out!

???? Sorry. We aren't compatible with IE yet. ????

Sorry... minimum viable product. We didn't have the time to do IE compatibility. We will probably work on this in a few days.

Odd you would completely block all IE users (not just IE6) instead of letting them see a site that may have some issues but still mostly works.

you make that sound like ie6 is the only browser that ever had compatibility issues.

Follow UpOut's profile on StartupList! http://startupli.st/up_out

Great execution! I did immediately look at your domain name and think "you pout". Was I the only one?

I agree that the name does have its faults. We tried to focus on UpOut by capitalizing the U and O as well as distinguishing Up from out in our logo. We liked the name because it kind of explained what we did and was short/easy to spell even as upout (you pout)

Looking good, hope it takes off!!

Great job! I will use it when I am in NY for blogworld expo:)

OK, and how do you make money with this?

They could go along the same path as Foursquare and get as many users as possible and worry about monetization later. Although I think ianl is right, adding an intuitive mobile app with a killer UI is essential for your success/adoption. I would be down to use an app that had the activity list of TripAdvisor (with more unique user provided up to date options) integrated with the geo/social characteristics of Foursquare. I feel like you can’t underestimate people’s narcissism. If I am doing cool stuff all the time it would be great for people to be able to recognize it and make me, or someone cool (sticking with the Foursquare reference) "mayor" of awesome stuff to do. You could also look at the whole coupon based concept once you go mobile. Something like: "Awesomeness going on at location x come within the next hour and get ½ off amazingness!" I will keep an eye out for an app.

We'll build in the typical deal site affiliate stuff, do sponsored listings (make them float to the top) and let people sell experiences a la vayable.com or skyara.com.

yelp clone?

We're trying to focus more on "What's fun to do?" (aka a city guide). We hope to integrate Yelp and other review sites as part of the tabs where comments are (if they'll let us). We're more trying to compete with TimeOut and other city guides.

I like it. The only problem is getting people to submit content. You may want to focus on one tech savvy city, troll Craiglist for events, go to REI to get events, go to StubHub for events, etc.

This is an issue we're trying to address. We figured we need about 5% of our users to post stuff. We've also made it absurdly easy to post where we get the images, tags and maps for you. Try it!

Your page is too wide. At least with the scribbled text on the left hand side that distracted me.

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