I tried DomainPolish. Here are the results | Hacker News Reader

I tried DomainPolish. Here are the results

iainmcqueen.posterous.com

50 pointsimcqueen30 comments

I'm the creator of DomainPolish which I threw together over the weekend. Aside from thanking the community in general, and Iain in particular I just want to let all of you know that if you have any questions about the service just email me at dan@danshipper.com and I will be glad to answer them. Thanks again!

Fantastic idea. I just talked it over with my co-founder and we will definitely be using this service in the future.

Can you discuss a little how you source the focus groups? Are they free volunteers? Folks at a mall? It might be helpful to understand a bit about how web-savvy they might be.

All of the reviewers are from http://mturk.amazon.com. My thought process is that because your site is online for ANYONE to access your message must be clear for anyone that looks at it. A big problem that I've had getting feedback is that anyone I get it from is either a friend of mine, or knows a lot about websites. It can be really difficult to reach the "average user" which, I think, is the value of a service like this.

Absolutely agreed. You can't imagine the groans we get from friends and relatives when we ask them to go to a page and give us some feedback. And of course they try and be nice and we don't get very good feedback as a result.

I'm afraid that our actual users also don't give very good feedback either, but for opposite reasons, they're invested in the site and usually all we hear are technical support questions.

Having some objective third parties look over the site has been a problem of ours that I think this solves.

Very cool service you've got there. My advice is to get your order page going over SSL asap. Stripe's API is neat, but users don't care -- lack of encryption on a page asking me for a CC# gives off a shady vibe. Good luck!

Thanks I'll get that taken care of as quickly as possible. Appreciate the feedback!

Since Dan mentioned that Amazon Mechanical Turk is being used to do the reviews, as a founder it may be useful to know what the demographics of such users are:

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-demog...

Hey thanks a lot for this that's actually really helpful for me. I'll probably end up posting some of that somewhere on the site. Good stuff man.

Since you're using mturk, do you currently offer your customers the ability to decide which countries/languages they wish to receive reviews from? It'd be nice to only receive pertinent results if you have a very targeted market or can't sell internationally.

I've actually created human intelligence tasks (HITs) for websites on mturk myself, which can be quite a cost savings if you're willing to do the gruntwork yourself. You can create templates for reusability if you've got a set of questions you'd like answered about your site.

If anybody is interested, I'll create templates for you and sell them for a tiny fee... Hell, I'll make it a dynamic page and let you pick what you want on it and generate the output. Fully customized, reusable at any time, and you can name your own price on mturk.

You should probably scratch the beta label in your site, too many things launch in beta lately and its an increasingly annoying trend.

Since you haven't launched yet the beta makes even less sense.

Re the UI of the landing page, looks awesome, a video of kids using the thing would be engaging and definitely a way to be notified with a simpler open ID sign in c.f. typing your email address would be better, that said, I understand you don't want to be working for too long on your coming soon page and focus on what you are building ;)

Yeah, agreed, a video or demo is definitely needed. I think we're going to deploy a sample game soon to try and give everyone a preview.

I really appreciate the feedback. Thanks for checking it out.

Beta is a good way to make users less annoyed when something goes wrong though. If you are Google sure I agree it's not really meaningful but if you are a small startup or one man operation just launching things are bound to go wrong early on.

How do you propose getting early feedback if you don't do a beta launch?

I'm not against doing an early release, I'm just not fond of the permanent label, I mean, Bing is still in beta! Gmail was in beta for how long?

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch15_Better_Not_Beta.php

Is this different at all to feedback army? (http://www.feedbackarmy.com/)

It's very similar - I actually discovered feedback army right after I built this. I don't that site is being actively developed, but I could be wrong. Our prices are better ;)

I like the site idea, and was about to pull the trigger but your payment processing scared me away.

I can't tell if you use https, and the Stripe processing page is just an email landing page......Get that up with Paypal or the like and you will have at least one more customer.

Good luck with the launch.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll be adding SSL just as soon as I get through all of the orders this post has generated :). The payment is secure even without SSL server-side because Stripe uses a JavaScript form to process the payments which means that your credit card information never touches my server.

The point is that without SSL no one can know for sure the right, secure Javascript was served.

Where do you find the folks to do the review? Is this Amazon Turk arbitrage?

Yes indeed. Let me know if you have any more questions!

The page is pretty sparse on information, so I have to ask, can I only "upload a design" (as in a screenshot) or can I submit an actual website that testers then run through?

I had the same question too as it seems at first that we're only allowed to upload a screenshot. Once you go to the pay page it allows you to upload an image OR submit URL.

Anyway, I went with a URL and will receive results in ~ 1 hour.

Front page on HN yesterday and the prices are double today.

(At least for the basic offering -- I didn't pay attention to the others yesterday.)

They doubled the basic prices, but added two more people. I think something similar happened with the rest of the packages.

Still seems good, but a little less of an "impulse".

I have this a try last night, very nice. The process completed much quicker than I thought it would; and the concept is great. I think fleshing out the ways you can receive the data (PDF/Word etc) would be very helpful, other than that I was surprised at the ease of use.

From a design POV, I can't see what good will come from a focus group on steroids.

Very interesting to hear you say that. Why do you feel that way? I mean obviously users can't come up with a cohesive design, but they can certainly tell you when it's good or when it sucks...I mean I think...

You really needed to spend $5 and 5 people's time for that feedback? Anyone not involved with the project could have given you the same information.

Those five people got paid but I'm sure they appreciate your concern.

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