Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

66 pointsmikegreenberg171 comments

Hello!

Every once in a while, I like to offer my time to help other passionate people be a little more successful with their goals. If there's anything I can help you with, just ask here. No strings whatsoever.

If you'd like my help: Be specific about what you're trying to fix/solve/accomplish...your goal. The more details you provide, the better I can help you out.

I've done this before a few times now, and it's worked out well for everyone. Check out some of the previous "No strings" sessions I've done to get an idea of how I can help. (http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=mikegreenberg)

Cheers

PS: If you'd rather give than receive: Go find someone else to do something nice for...like give them a back rub. Those are fantastic! Or spend two minutes helping me validate a market. http://bit.ly/pmhS0U (Thank you!)

PPS: I will try to help all requests made before tomorrow afternoon or so and will attempt to complete by the end of Sunday. Be patient and check back. Also, I thought it was rude to mention before so I removed it, but I please keep requests to tasks I can do in ~15 minutes. I'll spend more time willingly, but smaller requests lets me help more people! Thanks. :)

PPPS: You guys are totally welcome to help each other out, too! (Request-maker, be sure to tip helpful replies!)

View on HN

I'd love if you could try a quick install of http://www.heroframework.com (open source) and tell us (a) how did the install go and (b) do you know what to do next to build your website with the product? :)

Unusual problem for me... I installed it on a MAMP instance and I don't seem to be able to do an initial authentication. At first I thought just didn't remember my username/password correctly. So I dropped my tables and started again. But the same thing happened. I stepped back a few screens and noted what I thought to be just weird typo... but it showed:

Your Account Credentials You can login to the control panel, and throughout the site, with:

Username: or Password:

This is unmodified output from the page. It looks like the username and password should be present here. It was not. So maybe something usual with my installation of MAMP that could be creating this side effect.

The user record definitely exists. I don't see errors in the server logs. Want to help me figure out where I went wrong?

Cool framework. I have a project coming up next week that it might work well for -- I was going to go Wordpress, but I really do like the idea of using a CodeIgnitor-based system.

BTW, here's my bit of helpful -- I noticed this page wasn't rendering quite right: http://www.heroframework.com/user_guide/developers/reference...

Thanks Mike! Would you be able to give me some feedback on a product idea I'm working on?

Its a platform for video tutorials where the student gives their response for a lesson via video also. The first use case that comes to mind is guitar teachers. Students can post video responses to lessons and be corrected/ advised. The teacher would pay for the platform and perhaps charge th students through the site, or even off site.

Do you feel this has legs? Any thoughts or ideas welcome. Thanks! Stuart

I think it's a really good idea if you made it easy enough to record and reply. The majority of your value will be based around those specific interactions. (Video hosting is pretty much solved.) I would focus a lot of your effort on the UI/UX end of it. If you're green on UI/UX, read: http://designingfortheweb.co.uk/book/. Alternatively, hire someone who rocks.

Additionally, I'm not certain online music teachers would be willing to pay for such a product. Have you talked to any yet? Make some interactive mockups (Balsamiq or Keynotopia) and visit a few schools. Try to find people who are already sharing tutorials online and ask them.

Thanks Mike, that's helped me see where I need to focus my attention.

I was looking at direct webcam recording, but was going to add that later. But given your comments I think that is a must now, to enable quick and seamless video comments and feedback.

Regarding music teachers paying, I mentioned in the other thread to Matt that I may be thinking more towards making it free for teachers, charging students per course, and taking a percentage.

Re mockups, I am creating html mocks, but I'll look at the quick prototyping mockups so I can pitch to various music schools.

Thanks for the advice, you are a true gent!

My pleasure! ;)

I would use this...especially if you can get some talented teachers interested in it. Good UX and interaction features will be key to convince people to move past Youtube.

Also, the idea reminds me a bit of guitarmasterclass, but that is more a repository of videos than a back-and-forth learning place.

Thanks for the comments Matt. Having at least one person say 'I would use this' is a nice boost!

I wasn't going to have it exclusively for guitar, but musical instrument lessons are an ideal fit for video feedback. I'm sure there are other niches too where video is the ideal medium for this.

I've had the domain lessonboss.com for a while, and I was going to use that for this.

Perhaps I could have the feedback videos viewable by all, and allow peer review/feedback. It would take the pressure off the teacher to feedback, especially in larger class sizes.

And I'm still undecided about the revenue model, whether to charge the teacher, students or both. Moving more towards free for teacher, charge the students, take a percentage. It would be difficult to have a free option due to the cost of hosting video.

Think hard about making peer review work well. My piano teacher (bless her) sometimes has to show me two or three ways to think about something and then BAM it clicks. Some sort of reward system to fight the natural urge to show off and be the 'best' student.

If you can trick people into being helpful via gamification, it almost redeems that concept. :)

Can you think of a way to improve my game's[1] interface, taking into account that it has to work on both mobile devices and PCs?

Also, if you find any bugs I'd love to hear about it!

[1] http://cardinalquest.com/free_edition/

+ The intro instantly made me want to play. (I love RPGs.) I'm certain you've seen enough Square titles to see how they make epic introductions to their games. I'm not sure what you built this with, but an epic intro is CERTAIN to get people to try your game out.

As far as game interfaces are concerned, I need to understand the mechanics behind your game and spend more time with it than I'm willing to now. I'll spend time one evening going through it and will give a more thoughtful response over the weekend. :)

Alright, I made it most of the way through the 4th floor, and then the monsters became a bit overwhelming... I'll try again later but I feel I have good handle on the game.

- Harest part for me was the learning the hotkeys. Most game designers will layout the slots to mimic the location of the hotkeys on the keyboard. I note that the right-side spells start from hotkey 1 and the bottom quick-items continue where the right side left off. You might find it more intuitive if you laid them all across the bottom and put less space in between the icons. To make it easy to visually determine which hotkey each button is, you could group them in sets for 5. For example: [1][2][3][4][5]__[6][7][8][9][10]

- Consider reducing the size of the buttons for the INV, MAP, and CHAR. These are usually mapped to [I]NV, [M]AP, and [C]HAR as you have them so seasoned players will not have trouble opening them. Hotkeys will be displayed on mouse over anyway for newbies and you'll regain more of your play area.

- With the MAP, INV, and CHAR buttons reduced, you can remove the left bar and leave the portrait of your character as a floating box in the top right, if you like.

- The level of your character can be simply a number in the top corner of the portrait. Players understand this is the level of the character. And you can make this more obvious on level up, this number could GLOW briefly.

- Health is probably the most important stat. I'd probably emphasize it by making it thicker, or longer (or both?).

- Sometimes, I see items disappear (I'm assuming because there are two of them and you just drop them). Maybe you give the player a few points of XP or a gold piece for the trouble. It sucks to find some treasure and it's of no use to you at all. At least you can get a consolation prize. :)

What do you think?

Good points all around!

About your last point, that's already the case - you get gold when an item is destroyed, but maybe it could be conveyed better.

Thanks! Looking forward to it :)

Quickly, on OpenSuSE 11.4 (x86_64) running Chrome 14, the game interface doesn't hide my system's mouse pointer, but also displays its own. Slightly visually distracting.

While playing, I would move the spell bar to the left, as that seems to be both more natural and more common. For whatever reason, having it on the right distracted me a lot more from the gameplay, I felt as though I always had to keep looking over at it and back (seeing as I hadn't memorized the hotkeys). The info about my current health (which is currently in the top left corner) is displayed under my avatar, which makes it non-essential info, so it can be moved to the right.

Take all of this feedback with a grain of salt, I'm not a UI person :)

Thanks! The mouse cursor is definitely a bug (doesn't happen on windows, mac os x or ubuntu).

About the left vs. right - I didn't think of that. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that my mother tongue is Hebrew (written from right to left)?

It sounds far fetched but I've noticed other such "directional" issues since moving to Europe a few years ago.

Seems neat! Is there a mailing list to get contacted once you finish the game?

I like how lazy it is to move and attack :p At the beginning, I was searching the attack key everywhere only to find out that there's none. Maybe there're could be a way to explain that. I.e. A simple tutorial where you move, get your sword, and attack a frog or whatever ;)

I like the retro look with the modern nifty details. Good job overall!

Thanks! I released 1.0 already, there is a link on that page for getting the desktop version :)

I was thinking of adding a tutorial mode, need to figure out a way to do it without triggering the tl;dr filter.

I'm planning on soon getting the Deluxe-edition out (which will be free for people who bought the current full version), at which point the current version will become the free demo.

I really enjoyed running around and thwacking things for 20 minutes. Your game looks great!

It wasn't immediately clear to me when I was leveling up - I wish there was a little more positive feedback. I also found it slightly annoying that I had to open up the inventory screen to read what the potions/spells/actions in my HUD do. I wish there were tooltips for those items.

Keep up the good work!

Here's what annoyed me while playing for a minute or two:

- Ask for a confirmation before letting a spellcaster cast a fireball on himself (mistakes).

- When casting an offensive spell, place the target cursor automatically on enemies, allowing for a faster pace. (For keyboard users like me!)

Duly noted, thanks!

Nice game overall, looks promising! You probably play (have played) other rogue-likes - have you tried dungeon crawl recently? It's getting pretty awesome, look it up : http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/

You can play by ssh anytime at joshua@crawl.akrasiac.org (pw: joshua).

I have! BTW you can also play a web-based js version these days, easier than ssh :)

The messages when you get items flash by much too quick.

Agreed.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for your time and generosity! I just entered the beta phase for my side-project OtherMind, a fast way to take notes and make lists (http://othermind.me). I'd really appreciate it if you could try it out and let me know whether you think it's useful and marketable. Any feedback in general would also be great.

Thank you so much!

I don't do well with digital notes. I don't know why. Despite numerous attempts, I can't manage my thoughts on a digital sheet. It's not convenient enough...yet. A physical notebook feels better to me... So digital notes and task lists aren't something I typically use.

Additionally, I think there are too many barriers between me and my task list with services like this. I'm launching a similar product which helps individual keep track of people they know within their browser. My burning question is wondering whether the browser is the place where people are asking "Where did I know this guy from?"

In a similar vein, I wonder if people will want to require an internet connection, browser, and however much time it takes for the user to access their account. Reducing the time gap between epiphany and recording seems like a noble goal for your product to tackle. I think if you get this part right, you'll have something that's marketable. (I believe it's usefulness is obvious and without question.) Other companies in this space have reduced this gap significantly by deploying a mobile version of their service.

Regardless of a viable business model, this is really cool. :)

This is my kind of app; I really like it. Particularly how you can do everything from the big textbox and how can send stuff by sms.

Things I'd make better: - Provide a rest API; I'd love to be able to use it from my console - [Tab] would be really useful (To complete tags or date) - When I click "out" of the textbox when editing a todo, I don't want the [cancel] [save].. just save it. - I've tried to twitter it but it said something went wrong; It might be twitter or me though.. but still worth telling you - I'd like a quick keyboard shortcut a-la workflowy. I.e. If I have multiple tags and I want to remove one of them can I do -#tags? Or something similar.

I could suggest lot of other things that "could be nice but would make it more complicated"; but instead, I'll use it for a while and stay you informed on what I really find missing.

Also, little bug:

When you add your account info (Email, phone), there's a textbox on the main page but we see html tags in it.. i.e. a href=mailto instead of a link.

Keep the good work :)

Thanks for all those suggestions! Those things are definitely in the pipeline.

About clicking out of the textbox to save an item, I actually had it like that, but I found that if I wanted to edit a long item and switch away to a different tab to refer to something and come back, it would have automatically saved it, and I would have to edit it again. So I consciously chose to have the current behavior (note that you can press Shift + Enter to save changes). But if enough people suggest to change it back, I will.

I'm not sure I understand what the little bug you're referring to is. Do you mind posting a screenshot?

Thanks for the encouragement :)

For the bug:

Create a new account, play a little with it. Then go in your account page and add your phone number and email.

Then, click back in the main screen. There should be a textbox added explaining that you can send an email to automatically add a task. Inside this textbox, there are some a href=mailto escaped.. I think it might not be supposed to be in a textbox at all.

This is a lot like what I tried with http://www.mindwallet.com. Here is a video if you don't want to sign up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNpAH7AGhIk

I like the hash tag syntax quite a bit. I love these types of apps and seeing how different people approach it. The one box entry is also a really nice touch.

Hi, just wanted to let you know your application is vulnerable to XSS. I can impersonate users, steal login credientials, and more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting for more inofrmation.

But since anything you input to the system will only be displayed back to you, how are you able to perform XSS attacks to steal other users' data? Did you mean database code injection?

Aw man, I should have checked for that. Thanks so much for bringing this to my attention. I'll work on it ASAP.

You should definitely call it Overmind! (From Starcraft, it's the zerg master; or zerg brain if you will)

Haha, I didn't think of that. It would probably be a major brand name conflict if I did that :)

Do you think there's still a market for feed readers? I've built one (not public yet) with two somewhat distinct features: 1. you get a river of news with the ability to perform complex search queries against your feeds; and 2. it provides relevance sorting of articles based on your reading history. I've found that search, when accompanied by tagging, provides a reasonable alternative to the folder-based feed management approach while relevance sorting helps cut down the time I have to spend wading through the never-ending stream of articles. Should I consider opening it for the public? I don't want to spend money on hosting and bandwidth unless there's a reasonable chance to recover some of the associated costs.

If _money_ is the issue, http://aws.amazon.com/free/ could get you started without spending money on hosting or bandwidth.

But the difference between free and $20/month for a linode should be dwarfed by the other costs, namely your time. But then again, time is only as expensive as your next best alternative usage: if you're learning enough by "wasting" time, it's probably a win!

FWIW, I want this. I want it bad enough that I've had fits and starts going at it myself, but nowhere near even an mvp. My work-around for dealing with feeds right now is to only obsessively check a few that I can't stand the thought of missing, and once in a while poking at all the others. I think I would be much happier with what you describe.

Emphatically, yes!

What are you waiting for? It's not going to upload itself!

Seriously though, (don't take this personally, but) being concerned about the hosting fees is probably one of the single worst reasons I've heard to NOT launch something. As mentioned, there are HUGE swaths of services which will host you for less than a dollar a month. Clearly, you won't be relying on them to give you five 9's of uptime but will certainly give you enough of an indication if your product satisfied enough paying customers to make it worth your while.

Hell, if you want, I will put you up on my reseller server and not charge you a red cent until you hit your 100th paying customer. And I'll even help you migrate to better hosting when you're ready. No, you won't get 24/7 technical support, but you'll get a control panel to handle 95% of what you'll need. Let me know if you're interested.

Anyway, yes. If you feel like this is something you want to invest more time into and want to offer it to the market, then by all means give it go. Worst case scenario, you'll experience the sweet stench of failure. (At which point you'll dust yourself off and try again.) :D

I have a process for using Dropbox to upload a large number of photos. My goal is to find out (1) is it easy, (2) does it feel easy as you go along, and (3) what unknowns might make users uneasy during the process. (Feedback that doesn't serve this goal is welcome too.)

Pretend you want to try a site that automatically organizes your photos into a blog-like format.

Share a new Dropbox folder with box@ourdoings.com

Think aloud during this process as follows:

  time question when-answered

Mostly just "time question", but sometimes you'll go back to note when you got your answer, e.g.

  10:30 Shared the folder...what next?  10:45

Much appreciated!

P.S. I filled out your survey and left my email address.

10:06p Shared dropbox folder... seriously, what next? haha 10:07p

10:07p Got email describing next steps. I suppose I wait for human intervention to arrive. (PS: So far, none of this is easy. If it weren't for it feeling like a treasure hunt, I'd have probably given up already.)

10:12p Decided to register while I wait...

10:15p Got the welcome email...

10:17p Fell into a rabbit hole.

Sorry, but this is much too complicated. I realize this is a VERY early prototype (I hope) but there is no way a user will open an uploaded html doc to follow a url in order to link my account to my shared folder. Surely there is some other way of doing this via Dropbox's APIs?

Thanks for the valuable feedback on this process. 57 users have gone all the way through it, or an even more complicated previous setup, but 19 abandoned it in the middle (including you). I've looked at the Dropbox API before, and at the time it didn't seem as good as the shared-folder method. I'll have another look, keeping in mind what a big UX difference it could make.

I really feel this is important to invest significant time into. The onboarding is probably the biggest touch point with your customers and their first experience. Further, just because users have completed the process, it's important to ask if they are happy after completing it. Satisfaction is a much more worthy goal.

I agree onboarding is key, especially at this point. Most users will start from the web site, not from sharing a folder, but some will start from sharing a folder, and I want that process smooth. I've got post-setup satisfaction among the (mostly early-adopter) users who've tried it, but that's because they only have to do it once. The "amazingly sweet solution" quote on http://ourdoings.com/ is from someone who went through the previous, even more complicated setup. But I definitely do need to make it smoother if I want to attract even more early adopters, much less mainstream users.

I'm happy to try it again when you have an update. I've left my account active.

I'm trying to expand my online LaTeX editor into a viable business. My cofounder and I think there is potential for a great enterprise product where we could really improve the workflow in publishing houses and teaching, where LaTeX is used a lot. We've had enough feedback from individual users to think this, but we're struggling to get our foot in the door with the people we'd need to talk to about selling to them on a larger scale.

Basically we're new to this game and are struggling to get started. I don't know if you or anyone can help, but it's worth a shot. Thank you very much for lending your time like this, I hope the karma comes back to you!

I've written any paper I've worked on in the last 7 years in LaTeX as soon as it gets over 5 pages or has any math of any kind in it.

I'm currently writing a book with a publish house that uses Word templates (dear god!) and it really sucks. =)

Here are a few pain points you need to solve (esp. for academics):

- All the formats: If you can offer all journal/conference formats (especially those that don't have LaTeX formats), you would be a godsend. - WYSIWYG -> LaTeX editing: Sometimes you don't want to handle all the boiler plate. - Integration with reference software.

Pain point for book houses: - Converting their carefully designed styles into LaTeX templates and back again. Can someone design up a doc template in Word or whatnot, then bring it to your site and make a LaTeX template from it?

A few questions: - How does your collaborative editing work? Can multiple people work the same file at the same time? Also, it is pretty rare that this happens in my experience - most papers are written by one person with some help from others. - In the end, without formatting or the other things mentioned above, you've got a place to store/share LaTeX docs. Given that, your pricing is a bit odd. However, with the features listed, I think it'd be a great product (at an awesome price).

Thanks for the feedback, it's really useful. I think you're right that a big problem is the lack of compatibility between word and latex, particularly since few people know both well. We've been concentrating on just the latex side since it's what we know, but taking a wider view might help.

We're currently adding in templates and formats, as well as looking at how we can better integrate with other referencing tools.

Collaborative editing is not real time but warns and merges if you are editing a document at the same. I think the ease of use for collaborating is our main selling point at the moment, but I agree our pricing needs refinement. First we need to fix our focus and main features.

Thank for your time in replying.

I think you forgot to include the link. By Googling "jpallen online latex editor", I found jpallen.net and ScribTex.

To make our volunteer's efforts more expedient, I'll note that the url is at -> http://www.scribtex.com/ <- Click that.

Thanks, I didn't think the actual site was too important and didn't want to appear spammy. But you're right, actually what ScribTeX is can only help matters!

I'd be happy to play around with it a little bit over the weekend. I know a few people in academia and will ask their opinion as well. Maybe that will provide some help...

Thanks, any feedback is really helpful, but don't worry if it's not an area you're familiar with.

If you didn't get my email, kindly get in touch with me via (my initials) (at) nobulb.com. Thanks!

Hi Mike, I'm new to coding, and I'm building a site (using php) that I'm going to try to launch as a paid product in a couple of weeks: http://www.gmatboost.com

I'd really appreciate any feedback you have on what I should add, remove, change, be aware of, etc.

Also, I'm not sure how I am going to accept payment yet, so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on how I (i.e. someone with the bare minimum amount of coding ability) could most easily and securely accept payment.

Thanks a lot, it's very generous of you to offer.

If you're new to coding, it doesn't show in the least. At a second's glance, this is a polished site. Very clean layout and presentation. Clear communication of value-add. And I assume the images of the colleges gives semblance of social-proof for your product. Excellent!

(I don't understand why but cooler colors tend to do much better producing academic products. I have nothing but subjectivity to back this up, but I notice this over and over again.)

As far as accepting payment, I recently came across Stripe. It's completely free to implement and play with. PCI-compliant. You pay when you get paid. The discount rate is a bit higher as a result of not having a monthly fee (which is still reasonable). With their javascript library, your servers never see a CC# and you remove a LOAD of liability from your business. I intend to use it for my next project. They have a RESTful API with plenty of examples. And most importantly for you, they have examples in PHP: https://stripe.com/docs/api

http://stripe.com

Hi Mike,

Thanks a lot for the prompt reply. The polish is largely thanks to a purchase from ThemeForest, I did very little on that front. The image slider was part of that layout, and frankly I couldn't think of anything to throw in there besides the images of the schools.

I will definitely check out Stripe, thanks. I saw their post on HN, my biggest concern was whether or not I'll be able to figure out how to set it up, since I've never really used an API and I don't know much at all about JavaScript. I guess we'll see.

Thanks again. In the unlikely event that you know someone who could use some pointers on any math or test prep, feel free to let me know.

Of course. Just realize that many universities have services like this provided by the local honor society and chatpers. (I know this to be the case at my current university, where I ran the program there.)

Would you mind clarifying what specifically you were referring to as "services like this"? I am curious what type of service you had in mind.

Our engineering society at school provided tutoring and workshops for test prep on major exams. PE, GRE, and some industry specific certifications. I would imagine there are other organizations who provide tutoring and workshops for other tests as well. This is primarily what I'm talking about and will likely be competition for you.

Hey thanks! Would love your feedback on http://www.workforpie.com/. It's a resume of sorts, built specifically for software developers, and based primarily on open source contributions to Github and Bitbucket.

I'll leave it wide open, but would especially like to know what feature/features you think might make it useful to you. (survey completed, btw :) )

You are attempting to create an authority on a programmer's reputation/clout. A good way to spread this, and a feature I'd like to see, would be a simple API that gets the key stats (maybe not all) from your service. Maybe something that could generate a badge the programmer could include on their site. You're doing the work of pulling in data from SO, Github, Bitbucket, but don't offer much back to the user (aside from some self-affirmations that they can only access on your site). Exposing this data for others to use in interesting ways might be a good way to generate the authority you're attempting to create. (Not to mention the instant social-proof of programmers advertising their generated score on other sites.)

That said, I don't personally find that these services give very accurate depictions of a user's value. An arbitrary score means little without a control or reference point. (What would Linus Torvalds score?) Further, services like these typically rely on some secret-sauce to generate their numbers... and obfuscating this process lends itself to further skepticism of that value of your score. This is not an attack on your product specifically. I feel this equally about Klout, which I've ranted about elsewhere.

The problem services like yours should attempt to solve (IMHO) is indicating what qualities your score represents. This needs to be as clear and simple as possible. The best utility your service could offer will be in the following use case: A stranger, who is completely unaware of your scoring system, requests and consumes a report you generated for a user quickly; and to walk away with a strong sense of how that programmer relates to the metrics they care most about. Agreed, this is no small feat. But it's what services like BBB, Consumer Reports, and the like have spent years establishing their authority and clarifying their signals.

Hope this was food for thought. (Take it with a grain of salt. What the hell do I know anyway.)

As a user, it would be nice to know exactly how the score is calculated. I can see what part comes from which site, but for instance, my github profile only contributed 2 points to my WFP profile. Is this because I only have 2 repo's? Or because my repository isn't watched/forked? Or is it based on updates, etc?

I really enjoy the site, however. If I could add one feature, it would probably be a short landing page that I could edit to maybe include a short description and maybe a link to a blog/resume.

Thanks for the feedback. I think we can do a better job of telling folks what makes up their score. The exact algorithm does change, but general guidelines about what percentage comes from code, what from Stack Overflow, etc., and maybe what weighs most heavily in the code equation would be a good thing. Working on some tweaks to the "about" section of the site this weekend, so we'll try to incorporate a few of these things.

FYI - Code is king. Most of the score comes from code contributions, and forks and watchers are much more important than followers. :)

This would be a huge help to me: I make 40k a year as a web developer, and it provides for my family, but we definitely have to cut corners to make things work sometimes. I feel like, given my work history, skill-set and ability to learn, I am worth more than this. But when I apply for tech jobs, it seems like my lack of a degree prevents me from even being considered.

Can you look at my LinkedIn profile(which is basically my resume), and tell me how I can better show people that I can be a great asset to their team?

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/joe-cortopassi/24/76b/5b9

(more info in my profile as well)

I very much agree with tarekayna about your verbose descriptions. Your resume needs to be scannable so individuals can quickly assess whether you are worth exploring further. Think of the resume as getting your foot in the door. You don't want them to know everything about you, but they should get a good idea of your highlights and best moments. You'll have a lot of opportunity to elaborate further during your follow-up interview.

Personally, I'm not a fan of the way Linkedin lays out your experience. I understand what a great tool it can be and that many people use it. But for presenting an online resume for myself, I've been using StackOverflow Careers. Take a look at how I've laid out my resume there. (http://careers.stackoverflow.com/mikegreenberg) Note how I bring attention to the important parts with appropriate formatting, give very short descriptions which demonstrate action (begin with verbs!), show metrics where possible to show how I improved the company I worked for, and tried to identify the best ways I could be beneficial to them.

I can see the lacking degree working against you in some respects, but I really don't feel this is going to prevent you from getting a job if you're qualified to perform it. But I'm also not saying jobs will land in your lap. You need to compensate for that "hole" in your resume with a significant showing of your own. A portfolio, if you will. Do side projects whenever possible. (I know this can be difficult with a family. I have two kids myself, but I tend to be married to a project when I'm not spending time with them.)

If you have any specific questions, I'd be happy to answer. Or email me in private, if you prefer. (my initials at nobulb.com)

Joe - one thing I would point out to help you out here. Every listing under your experience section is written like a story. People, especially recruiters, don't have time to read all this. My advice would be to remove the story format and have just bullet points that highlight accomplishments and business results. For example "designed and developed xx project using php/mysql"... "led the technical vision of xx".

You think I should ditch the summary part altogether, or just put some bullet points above it?

I would ditch the summary altogether. You would mention this stuff when recruiters ask you in details.

Here is what I base this on: "Research has shown that your impression of someone is generally based on the average of available information, not the sum. So telling people one great thing about yourself will leave them with a better impression of you than telling one great thing and one pretty good one". Pitch Anything - Oren Klaff http://books.google.com/books?id=P3EFa-WuMMkC&pg=PA98...

So just provide bullet points of the highlights, the accomplishments and the business results.

Sure:

Go to https://app.profitably.com/plan_ahead and model out a business. Would love to hear your thoughts on 1) how we can streamline that process 2) where you felt most confused or lost

Thanks! Graham

Customer Acquisition Stages

In modeling customer acquisition, the metaphor of a funnel is often.

I think you mean "often used". :-)

I was a little taken aback by the gold/platinum/silver categories of customers in services; there was no explanation of why these three are given. (In my case, categorization of users ... hmm, actually it does pertain, now that I think about it.)

Good catch, thanks!

Think of those suggestions as v1...coming soon we'll have "business templates" that will flesh these out more.

Business templates is a good idea, damn you. (One I've been thinking about for a while now.)

Thoughts as I go through:

- Interface is quite busy. There is no clear call to action so I have to wade through the elements to see what I'm suppose to do first. (I highly recommend you play around with Wufoo's onboarding process to get an idea of a clearly defined path.)

- I like how you broke up the steps to the left, but it's not clear they are steps until I click NEXT. Conventionally, links to the left of a page are used for navigation. Placing numbers to the left and bring more attention to the current step to clarify that there is a flow here.

- I really appreciate the supporting material. (Video, articles...) The video would probably be very beneficial to introduce the step to the user and what they will do. Find a way to shorten the video to a 30 second overview and then offer a longer 3 minute version if the user is interested in hearing more. The 30 second clip might start when the screen first loads. (The auto load should probably be limited to new users only... saved users will have already seen this and will annoy them after some repetition.)

- Find a lecture hall with carpeted walls and re-record those videos (or invest in a clip mic). The echo is horrible in the video.... (still, major points for having the video in the first place).

- When you're segmenting customers, make the left area your "workspace" and the right area your committed data. Allow the suggested segments to be expanded. The first time the user does this in each step, give them tooltip explanations of each field and what it means in the big picture. Just a few lines are sufficient.

- A progress bar would probably help for long processes like this. I'm now noticing that the left side expands as additional steps are covered. So maybe the numbering scheme above might not work. But some combination between numbers actions and a progress bar should indicate to the user how far along the process they are. I currently feel like I'm falling down a rabbit hole so far...

- I should be able to reorder each (Customer Acquisition) Stage ever after they're added. Having to remove them after realizing it needs to be entered in order is forcing the user to do work twice.

This process is drawing out. Had you not specifically asked me to look through it, I probably would've given up a step or so back. I'm not sure what your on-boarding process is like, but the user should be prepared to invest 30-60 minutes if that's what it will take. (And PLEASE make sure you justify why it takes so long! Let the user decide if they want to make that investment with full knowledge of benefits and value they'll get.) I'm going to stop for now but I can continue on it later if you'd like. Hope these initial thoughts help a bit for now.

Mike:

This is great, and helps us confirm and prioritize areas we'd like to improve. Would you mind if I emailed you with a few updates we're working on?

That's no (my initials) at nobulb.com will get an email to my inbox.

That's no problem.* (ha)

PS: And you should consider accepting "+" characters in the email address. It's valid. (i.e.: user+name@domain.com)

Hmm -- I thought we did (our CTO is a huge fan of that)

If you happen to have an Android phone it would be cool if you could try my new app Trollaroid https://market.android.com/details?id=com.sprobertson.trolla... and let me know if you think it's fun, if it's easy to figure out, and if there is one feature I could add that would instantly improve the user experience. If you don't have an Android maybe just check out the homepage http://trollaroid.com and see if there's one improvement I could make there.

This is pretty funny. If you could show the live image as it's being "trolled" that might be fun. Otherwise, I think the app is perfect. Simple, straightforward and funny. Awesome execution. (Killed a good 5 minutes with the app...) Might just be worth the dollar and change. :)

Hi Mike, thanks for your kind offer!

We have an old Windows XP machine that I would like to replace with a newer Windows 7 one. However, my wife is used to the old machine; in particular she has Internet Explorer manage all her auto-complete's and username/passwords for different sites she uses.

I looked around for tools to at least copy the passwords to the new machine but 1) Microsoft says it's not supported 2) the unofficial tools all look super-sketchy.

Any ideas of how to transplant the auto-completes and passwords to a new machine?

You could try the Files and Settings transfer wizard (In Start, Accessories, System...) and see if that works for you. I'm not aware of any tools off the top of my head, but (on principle) I would not rely on any auto-complete/password storage to ensure I could do my day-to-day computing.

There are plenty of tools which help in this area which are guaranteed to provide better support than Microsoft will. Things like KeePassX (for password management) and (while I don't use it, I've hear good things about) Roboform are supported by communities who are invested in a long-term solution. I would really try to migrate to a new solution. Anything else would be putting a band-aid over a festering wound.

Good luck! :)

Which version of IE?

Hi Mike! Thanks for displaying such unselfishness and support. It's really people like you who begin making a difference.

If you don't mind, I'd like to get some feedback for the landing page http://grooovy.me . If this is something that you might be interested in, signups would be appreciated. It would also help immensely if you can spread the word about us in any way you can!

Again, thank you for taking the time out to do this. You're amazing.

Sure thing.... thoughts on the homepage:

- Nitpick: The text left of the iPhone on Windows and Ubuntu is not vertically centered on the band. I realize the headings line up horizontally, but my OCD is still itching. (Chrome 14 on both.)

- Nitpick: The active (blue) circle under the text to the right of the iPhone is just a pixel or two too low. (Again on both Ubuntu and Windows w/ Chrome 14.)

- Further Nitpick: On sliding the homepage over a few times, I feel this color band across the back of the page is causing my OCD more problems than text alignment. Maybe find another way to put a splash of color on the page. Or make it more subtle.

- I almost missed that I could slide the homepage over with the arrow, BTW.

- I see the clever active email request form built into the iPhone demo on step 2, but it'll probably get missed by the majority. Especially when there's no reason to believe that anything is active in the demo area. (Even with arrows.)

- You mention a video in Step 4 but I see no video link anywhere.... ????

- Do you track to see how many people get through to the end? Putting your "RSVP" request only at the beginning and end (and hidden in step 2), you risk missing conversions in the intermediate steps. I'd find a way to ask for that RSVP on every screen.

Overall, the layout and walkthrough is nice and give users something to look at if they're really interested. Nice work and easy on the eyes. I'm not an iPhone guy so I can't help you there. Dropped a tweet for you because of the decent execution here!

We just recently launched our first application at http://teamloopapp.com. It's intended audience is to help manage the communication of any type of sports teams.

I'm most interested in feedback on the homepage and if it explains enough of what we do and the signup process through creating your first team. Any thoughts would be appreciated greatly!

I'll just reinforce some of the thoughts already left by others here (which I also agree with on pretty much every count).

- Your preview should really show it. Having something that small makes it practically useless to have there. As a programmer, you might consider something like SlideDeck (slidedeck.com) to make a really nice presentation of your apps various screens.

- In your price break down, it seems that your main differentiator between plans is the number of teams someone can manage. You say each is "designed for" a different purpose, but don't indicate in any way how. If there are truly design differences, you should highlight them.

- If there are NO differences, here's an idea: Completely remove the plans and pricing. You offer the free plan to manage one team. Give EVERYONE that plan automatically (since you force users down this path anyyway). Don't mention price or anything. Leave indications in your control panel that they can add additional teams to manage. When they're ready to add them, prompt them for payment then. You'll likely see an increase in conversions because interested parties won't be swayed by potential future prices (even if they'll never hit it). Typically, if they want to add more teams, it means they're very happy with the features and are more likely (probably) to give you their cash.

- See if you find a way to progressively reveal your interface. Your signup asks for the typical details right up front. I'm certain you could let people poke around in your interface for a bit before asking them to save their progress and register a new account. This would even indirectly solve the problem of your tiny screenshot. :)

Hope this helps a bit.

I might be able to offer some criticism, if I may:

* The screenshot on the right is possibly pointless as it doesn't actually show me anything (it's too small and texty).

* The blurbs are good; I get a good picture of what the app is about. Though I would scale up in size everything in the blue stripe.

* I would try to cut down the amount of text in the feature boxes.

As someone casually considering signing up for the free version, I would be interested in seeing a screenshot or two of what using the app looks like for the coach and for individual users.

Also, you just got feedback on a sports team management app for coaches from Phil Jackson!

Thanks for the feedback. I agree on the screenshot, just not entirely sure what to do with that space (I'm a programmer with very little design skills, but I'll try to remove it and works something out)!

Those are great points. I completely agree.

I'd like a "Quick tour" or "Try a demo" or a video. But it seems interesting; I'm sure lots of coach would use it. Something neat would be to show the direction of the place where the team play and maybe let parents contacts each others for lifts. (I.e. a parent could bring 2 kids).

We do store locations for all events and have easy links that send you to google map of that location.

We also allow all parents to send messages either to entire team or to individuals on the team (a frequent use of this has been for parents requesting rides for their kids!).

Hey mike!! Thanks for doing this again. If you have some time I was wondering if you would check out this political satire website I do some work for and let me know what you think of the design and if anything needs to be changed. Also any recommendations on marketing it would be appreciated!

http://thewashingtonfancy.com/

Hey there! Here are my thoughts...

I think the site could use more breathing room. The blocks are feel like they're on top of each other. Adding some padding will make the site look less busy (or potentially less full, a negative?) and easier for reading.

Honestly, I don't have much to complain about. The next thing I'd start playing with is tracking where user engagement is low and find ways to highlight long-tail content in higher-trafficked areas. Identify metrics that are important to the site's longevity and optimize them. You're probably beyond the point of tweaking the interface at this point short of trying random A/B tests with new ideas.

Hi Mike,

I have created a free service for app developers to connect with their user base through discussions, bug fixes and a static FAQs section.

I have some features I will be working on soon (closing bugs, assigning bugs, "private" apps, RSS feeds).

Is the idea just not good enough, or is there something I'm missing that I should be highlighting?

The site is http://www.dcmntr.com/

Thanks!

Hi Doug,

I have to echo much of the sentiment of other comments here. The project is so busy. It does so many great things, but does it do any of them really well? I would identify the primary features the people appreciate most from your project and mercilessly slash the rest off. (If anyone wants to keep it, you've open sourced it so tell them to fork off!) In all seriousness, if you focus your project and show how simple it is to use, you'll find your adoption will improve.

Once you have simplified your offering, start improving your messaging to the public. Walk-through or tours will help greatly with communicating your value. People are typically visual. Large blocks of text tend to scare people away from the page. (You've got approx 3-5 seconds to grab a visitor's interest before they hit the back/close button.)

Hope this is helpful. :)

Sounds good. Thanks for the input!

I think its not user-friendly. Its not really clear how it works. Maybe you can make it easier for people to browse latest discussions, etc. Also may be make it easier to post discussions and comments, since the point of the site is to connect and have community discussions.

The "apps" page was the homepage previously. I'll try to cut down on the faqs on the homepage, and try to make it more visual. What do you mean make it easier to post discussions and comments? Should I allow them to post comments, and on the next page have them sign-in/sign-up HN style?

When I see this page http://www.dcmntr.com/app-profile/dcmntr , it gave me the impression that the Discussions table is something like a forum, and people can comment. But i didn't see an editor box or something for people to post comments..

Good point. It won't show you the box to comment if you're not logged in.

hahah yeah i figured that afterwards

By looking at the splash screen, I have no idea what it does. It promises me wonderful things.. but I don't see how it'd integrate with my apps. Maybe an image workflow of the big use-cases? Or a video? Or a tour.

Great ideas! I will work on that this weekend.

Hi Mike! Thanks for offering to help.

I am pretty good at programming but I know almost nothing about hosting or servers or hardware. I would like to make a website with a Go/MySQL back end (I know it's weird, but I love it). Do you have any recommendations for hosting? Should I use a cloud host like EC2 or Rackspace's cloud or should I use some other hosting service?

I'm not very familiar with Go, unfortunately and not sure of it's runtime requirements. I'd go with kevinburke's recommendation. The provider seems pretty solid at quick glance. If you can get Go on EC2 or Rackspace Cloud, I'm certain your experience will be optimal. The only conerns you might have with cloud hosting are IP address which have been blacklisted for various reasons (used on boxes for spamming, running abusive bots, scraping, etc). Otherwise, you should be fine.

I've been using Webfaction, and I'm pretty happy with it. It's about $10 a month, you get SSH access into your box, and they have really good customer/technical support. http://webfaction.com

+1 For that. I really love webfaction and it was the best idea to go with that as I didn't know at first how to configure my server. It has great "default" configuration and practices. Also, as Mike said, the customer support is great if not the best I've seen.

And, as you'll become better at configuring your stuff and will want more control over all the nifty details, you could then switch to a vps.

Also, don't forget that Heroku now support more platform.. in fact, everything python is supported, but the platform is strong enough to support anything.. even if it's not as userfriendly as the ruby or python way.

Hi,thanks for your offer! Can you go to http://www.codemaps.org/e/Lucene and play around with the diagrams and explorations? Its the prototype for the system we are building to help open source developers explore the source code online. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback! :)

I can see this tool being very useful from a functional point of view. However, the UI is sluggish and there are some unexpected reactions that the SW makes to my interactions with it. I don't believe anything is wrong at this point because I'm certain there will be some training required to understand what the software is trying to relate to me. But from playing with it for 5-10 minutes, I feel that the learning curve is slightly steep, but not unexpected or unrealistic given the value this offers. (IMHO)

- Interactions like mouseover on objects (which, I assume, give an overview of the connections without activating it) creates a cluttered/confusing look. Maybe while showing this overview, you fade out all irrelevant objects and markup?

- Doubleclick on objects should indicate that it's thinking or doing something. There's no feedback to know I properly activated an object with my intended interaction.

- I'm not sure if it's my computer or the UI, but it's extremely sluggish. I'm not sure I'd be satisfied with this experience in a finished product. I know it's a prototype, but still want to mention this.

- I might not be the best test subject as I'm not a Java programmer.... or even much of a programmer for that matter. I know this is helpful for someone, but I don't understand how it can be helpful for me. This might be important to be aware of.

I hope some of these thoughts help. Overall, I get the impression it's cool. (I'm just not sure why.)

Thanks Mike! Your feedback and suggestions are really useful. And you raise the issue about you not being able to understand how it can be helpful.. Surely it is an important point that we should think more about. Thank you so much! :)

Hi Mike! In your first post you say "I've got great aesthetics and design sense". I could definitely use your advice on my personal website - http://nickknowlson.com

My skills are those of a developer much more than a designer, but I tried to make it fairly clean. Thanks for doing this!

This looks awesome! You did everything simply and with purpose. My only gripe is with your line-spacing under the "Latest" heading on the "Home" page. Increase the line-height and indent the paragraph content by a bit. Sample CSS to do this...

    div.blockylist {
      line-height: 2.5em;
    }

    div.blockylist div {
      margin-left: 1em;
    }

And I would add some tracking to the site. Metrics are important to know if people like what you're showing them or not. Even if you don't care now, it's nice to see how your site grew. Google Analytics or GetClicky (which I use) are perfectly fine and have free plans.

Great work!

Thanks! :)

I'll apply that change forthwith!

I do actually have Google Analytics already hooked up. I posted one article and it was pretty neat to see the big spike... followed by a return to (effectively) zero traffic. :)

It makes sense though, there's hardly any content on there yet. A year from now I'd like to have maybe 10-12 more blog posts and more projects as well. I guess we'll see how that goes!

Thanks again Mike!

My pleasure, Nick. :)

hello mike.. :D

i be quick, i made a powerful media player inside the browser(html5/js) the response is average (for now). i would like to know what do you think about the idea. i understand idea is not everything and execution matters but it would really help if the base idea is strong.. app in question: goo.gl/kS86a

i would like to know what should i focus on, user experience (fixing small bugs, polishing along as i develop) or development (adding big features), add support for more platforms (web, windows 8, pokki, etc), or try to raise capital, try for YC or startup-Chile for example (i don't really need capital, but i could really use everything else that things like YC do for startups [most importantly they would allow me to work full time which i can't do currently because of college])

Thanks

Hey there!

I really like the effort of this product, but it isn't usable for me as it currently is. Here are the things which are non-starter for me that I've found:

- Loading music is SLOW. I'm seeing a variable response of ~2-10 seconds PER song. This is when I dump a single track to the interface. It doesn't seem to matter which screen I drop the track into. This happens with MP3s and M4As.

- Doesn't automatically go to the next track after a track is done.

- No search field? It accepts my typing, but doesn't show it anywhere in the GUI.

+ The animations and the UI touches are admittedly nice and give it a nice polish. But it doesn't matter if the product underneath doesn't play music well.

You're asking me what you should do next with this, but it really depends on what you want to do. Do you want to build a business out of it? What would your business model look like? What is going to make people give you money for this?

You might have a hard time developing a business model out of this project as music players are a well-entrenched industry with many successful products already on the market. The only way you'll be able to break into this is by releasing a superior experience. And frankly, the other companies have a huge head start.

This is not a bad thing at all! It's okay for this to be a project without trying to make it into a business. The GUI skills from this will certainly help with future products you'll inevitably make!

Something that also concerns me is that you're willing to drop college to attend a startup program if they accept you. This should be a clear indicator to you that this is not a project worth dropping everything to work on (because you'd be working on this full-time and have dropped college already if you were that motivated). And even if an incubator sees something valuable in you to go through their program, I would ask yourself why you're even in school if you're willing to drop it for a 3-month program. Figure out what that answer is and see if there are ways to achieve that on your current path. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't drop school, or should/shouldn't apply for an incubator. It just sounds as if you're thrilled about the prospect of being a successful entrepreneur with all the recent buzz these last years. (This is great!) Just think pragmatically about what you REALLY want and find a way to get there within your means.

first, thanks for providing your thoughts, it is much appreciated :)

now for the minuses

- i am aware of that but security restrictions don't allow me to read songs from the OS itself, so i have to copy each song to the app's ow file system so it takes more time.

- it does not go to next track because it is in 'explorer' mode, a playlist does that work, explorer is for managing files, i thought that was the prospect. but i guess that the difference b/w explorer and a playlist is not clear hence the confusion, i will work on that thanks!

- there is a search field, it pops up on top left, maybe there is a bug but i haven't heard of search bar not popping up before but i will look into it :) thanks! here is a screen of how the popup comes (when user clicks on 'search' tab) https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/NPI_iOXSKRiMn8bjoZ-5rzhK8e...

and i really want to work for it but i need to convince my parents to get me to drop it, its India and we are not so 'independent' :P my parents are very understanding and cooperative but they would still need a very good reason to allow me to drop college. acceptance to YC would be enough i guess. :)

thanks alot for the detailed feedback, you have already helped me to decide what i need to work on (improve underlying app and UX)

Any ideas how to promote .NET WinForms control?

Our Better ListView is designed to replace the inbuilt crappy regular ListView control, and it rocks - we just don't know how to promote it.

Check it out: http://www.componentowl.com

- I would start out grassroots-style. Attend .NET meetups to talk about your work and your project while you network. Offer promotions to these groups if they'll have them.

- Sponsor .NET Hack-a-thons?

- Help feverishly in .NET forums and community sites like Stackoverflow. (Put the service in your profile...people really look!)

- Create programs that provide incentive for your customers to spread the word about a product they already love. Word of mouth is the best/cheapest/most-effective variety of advertising that I know of.

I'm not much of a marketing guy, but this is where I would start at first thought. :) BTW, the control really does look quite nice. If I were a .NET developer I'd be interested in using it.

Note: Tag line states "No Learning Needed", then in your advantages section you state "Minimum learning needed." Strive to be consistent.

Thanks for your advice Mike! We can't attend .NET meetings that much, because we are based in Czech Republic.

Hack-a-thon sponsorship is an excellent idea. Any idea how to find these?

Thanks for spotting the inconsistency, too!

You might not be able to find them, but you can always organize one yourself. It doesn't have to be huge, either. 20-30 people can be a lot of fun. I'd also check out Meetup. They offer ways for sponsorships. See if you can find any .NET groups on there and offer them sponsorships (as in free/discounted licenses). Even if you give away a few licenses, you'd likely get a lot of great word-of-mouth marketing.

And consider also sponsoring and attending conferences. Especially Microsoft/.NET related ones. The travel will obviously be expensive, but it could be a viable way to spend your marketing budget.

I was pretty excited about checking this out, then was disappointed there is no live demo. Screenshots are good, but nothing beats a live demo of your product on your website.

Hi, by live demo, do you mean video?

I meant live running code of the component you are selling. For example, here is a live demo of the jQuery Accordion UI plugin http://jqueryui.com/demos/accordion/. Hope this help.s

Is this easy to use? Your goal is to open a new savings account.

http://www.mybanktracker.com/savings

We just launched our new style of rate tables, but we need more testing. It would be great to have your opinion.

So, i agree that the page is a little busy. Maybe I'm dense, but the "Cash to Save" was ambiguous and couldn't decide if you meant "The end amount of cash I'd like to have after X months" or "How much I have now that I can move to this account".

On the "Learn More" page after clicking a bank, the slider occasionally mis-renders. (The handle will render under the textbox which requests my deposit amount.) This is usually if I max out the Cash slider on the first step. (OS X 10.6.8, Chrome 14)

This seems pretty straight-forward to me. And pretty helpful. I think you're moving in the right direction.

This is great feedback Mike. The "Learn More" page was built a long time ago, and I forgot that it uses the value from the slider from the previous page. I'll fix that today when I launch it on the CD rates page.

Thank you very much!

The first thought that hit me when I opened the link is that I don't know where to look. I was searching for the product. Then I found it after looking at the bottom half of my browser . Three different horizontal menus and one huge ad banner seem to be taking a lot of space. FYI Screen Resolution 1366x768

Once I actually scrolled down a bit and started using the sliders I got it directly. Very easy to use, great job on this.

Another note is the "In the news" section has news from 6 months ago. It's not a big deal but doesn't look that good.

Thanks for the feedback. I completely agree. The top part of the site is something we're trying to shrink. Especially since a good part of our audience have smaller resolution screens.

Clicked on link out of curiosity. Immediately lost interest upon discovering it's US-only.

Sorry about that. There's a good chance we'll never go outside of the US.

I'm really looking for anyone's feedback on HN, if you care to comment!

Hi Mike, this is awesome! I'd love it if you could make a post on our website, and critique the process.

Our site helps you find people to get stuff done. e.g. mow your lawn, build a fence. http://www.whocanhelp.com

Thanks!

Lance!

Great execution on this site. Very simple and straight-forward. I was not confused or lost at any step in the process. I'm pretty happy with the business model as well. I'm guessing you make a commission on the offer made by the service providers that bid on my jobs?

Your website is clean and straight forward. No distractions. It would seem you're having a hard time getting service providers to give offers. I'm seeing a lot of views but few offers being made. You didn't really ask, but I'm assuming you have a way to target these individuals.

My only observation was that your heuristics for determining an appropriate category were pretty off. I did pick a task that didn't seem to fit anything appropriate, so I'm not sure if my case was more an exception than the norm. Otherwise, I really like everything about this flow and onboarding. I think you ask for just the right amount of information when it's needed and don't force the user to commit to anything too early. IMHO, great job!

Thanks, Mike! We are definitely better guessing some categories than others. We're improving that all the time. The suggestions are a feature we just added last week.

It's actually free for services providers to make offers. We charge for ads, and may charge for some other premium features in the future.

Thanks again for take the time to check it out!

I was happy to do it.

Mike, this is an awesome gesture. I just filled out your survey.

If you have a few spare moments, I'd love UI feedback on http://flock.fm (no big deal if you're overwhelmed with requests and don't have time)

I've tried the app a couple of time in the last few weeks. I've been a bit disappointed by the music recommendation and what was suggested to me. I.e. I don't care about "What everyone is listening" as I don't like it. I have no friend on it. I understand that with friends and probably lots of like/dislike of music, it'll be easy to narrow down my taste. But, I think you need to find a way to get the user started with something he likes; and make it easy to skip music he doesn't like.

Thanks for the feedback!

I think you're right. Our recommendation system has seemed a bit weak, especially for new users - I think we're going to bury this somewhere as a Custom option rather than emphasizing it as one of the four major streams.

Orienting new users is probably our biggest challenge at the moment, and I think our product's biggest weakness. We have some solutions in the pipeline, but we still don't have an elegant solution to immediately connecting a new user to friends. Any ideas/suggestions?

Maybe. Ask the user for a couple artist/song he likes. And then, try to find an existing user who liked these songs. So, implicitly, the new user could follow that existing user and get his/her recommendations. Does it make any sens?

Makes sense. We've considered something like this. We also considered showing a cloud of tags, artists, and/or genres and asking the user to select a few. What do you think of something like that?

I think this is a great idea. A tag mix of artists/genre would be a great way to get started as you can quickly select different kind of style you like.. and also it works for artist that goes for a big range of style.

Sure!

- It's not immediately clear how this is suppose to work. I see a stream on the left and details on the right. I spent some time to realize this was my currently playing queue. The right side is suppose to show detail of the song playing. I wonder if there's a way to make this more obvious without beating a user over the head about it.

- This has a Twitter styling and was expecting to get details of another song when clicking on it. Surprised when it started playing instead.

- Clicking a tag seems to hide currently playing queue. I'm not sure how to get back to it at this point. Having an anchor back to your current queue might be helpful.

- Why are you hiding the Non-Facebook login at the bottom of the page? This comes across as sneaky.

- I think the interface is not so obvious until playing around with it for a few minutes. Maybe give a new user a "Quick Start Guide" overlay that they can later hide.

Overall, this is pretty cool! Streaming is solid. The playlists are relevant. The selection seems broad. A+ :)

I have been using flock.fm for the past week, and I really like it.

You should consider moving the search box from the "custom" stream tab to be prominently be featured on the homepage. Additionally, it should be more clear that tags are actually streams.

As a feature request, it would be great if I could add songs to a queue, instead of having to listen to them immediately.

We'll build proper search functionality (and display it prominently) soon.

As for the tags/streams metaphors...it's good to know that this is the problem we've suspected it is. We have some ideas on how to fix it. Just need to make more hours in the day. :-)

I've heard the queue feature request a few times, and we're mocking up some ideas to scratch that itch.

Thanks for the feedback! Glad you're enjoying the site!

Hi Mike,

I love the initiative and using the opportunity... what is your opinion about my recently launched project http://www.mindthebook.com and what would you change to make it a better user experience?

Cheers

I think it's a good idea. Books are an appropriate answer to questions, but sometimes I might not want to read an entire book to get to the part that's relevant to me. Maybe you could find ways to cross-reference certain parts of books with questions. (I see issues with getting content rights, or having to build a referencing system that might be more effort than the value is worth.)

Questions beg for conversations to start around them. I'm not certain if this would be clouding the simplicity of your offering...but I think there isn't currently much to make your site "sticky" so the user wants to return. They come for a recommendation, maybe they ask a question, but there's no reason for them to participate further. They got their book. Discussion seems like a perfect compliment.

The other thing that could probably improve is the search experience. This might be a little harder, but you don't only want people to find their burning questions, you want them to stumble on questions they didn't know they wanted an answer to as well. This could be in the form of related questions in search, n-th degree of questions to another question, or other interesting discovery mechanisms.

Does this make sense?

Hi Mike. You are making this thread really interesting. Can you give us some feedback on http://www.tringify.com? we are still in beta phase, but would love to have some feedback.

I think sounds like a great service. But the million dollar question is, "Why isn't there a live demo?" :)

Everything else seems really good. (But you might want to tighten up your other slide images on the home page. Center them and put a white background behind it so it's consistent with the prior screen.

It looks nicely designed, professional, and persuasive to me.

Hi mg!

Just completed http://bit.ly/pmhS0U. :)

I really appreciate you. Thanks! (And if you left your email, you'll hear this twice.)

This shouldn't take more than 5min:

I would love it if you could go to boardgamecalendar.com and tell me one thing I could do to make the product or my description/presentation of the product more appealing.

Thanks.

Keep the following text:

This calendar features creative photographs uploaded by the community at BoardGameGeek.com.

54 pages. One for each week.

Remove everything else. People understand calendars. They know how they work. Instead, put a BIG INTERACTIVE demo letting users flip through the calendar to look at pictures. Under the text, place a large PURCHASE button. Add the newsletter signup underneath if you must. But it really should offered after they make their purchase. Make it exclusive! ;)

Bonus points: Insert easter egg appointments in the calendar for ridiculous things like "Catanadians Anonymous @ 8pm (BRING BEER)".

Just an idea.

UPDATE: So it looks like this is a test and the product has not been produced yet. And from the looks of your blog, you've spent a decent amount of time to get to this point. So I didn't mean to cut what you created to shreds. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this page, especially if it's generating cash. However, something needs to be said for conveying a simple message. "I have a calendar. The pictures might be of interest to you. Come and buy it from me." Adding all of the additional text is a distraction from what you want your visitors to do. If they want to buy it, they will. Additional pictures may entice them to dwell on the thought a bit longer. Additional text might do the same thing. But I believe that people prefer visual candy to reading more often than not. That's the main reason behind my suggestion. Hope the explanation helps.

Mike, I'd appreciate some feedback on my sales page for Status2K http://status2k.com.

Does it look professional ? Would you change anything about it ?

Thanks.

I think the sales page isn't bad. But it feels bland.

- Your value add is probably not the elegant interface you're showing us. Sure, eye-candy is great, but the features you outline below talk about "Anywhere Monitoring" and "Multi-Server Listening Support", etc. Maybe an image of a guy staring at his phone (anywhere) with lines going from his phone to your logo to his servers. Give people an "at-a-glance" of how your product works.

- I'd draw more attention to your "Call to action". It let's me know immediately what you want me to do. Should I view the demo? Should I give you my cash? Maybe you want me to look at features? (You probably want my cash above all else. Why not show it?)

- (This is super nit-picky, but...) Your copy reads in blocks. (Imagine Ben Stein doing a voice over for your website.) There's no visual rhythm on the page. Spend a few hours looking at other sales pages (Here's a good spot: http://startupli.st/startups) and look for patterns (ignoring, of course, all the cookie-cutter landing pages).

-- The important parts of description text LEAP off the page at you.

-- Very focused call-to-action.

-- Strong images which relate their message.

+ This is a great start! You have the important parts of the page down. Now you just have to tweak it. (Even the best do this: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3007-37signalscom-homepage-ev...)

Thanks, I really appreciate your time.

My pleasure! :)

Hello Mike,

Who would you target this product at? http://goo.gl/Oue0b (the top one)

How would you reach that audience?

All feedback is welcome. Thanks :-)

This page is far too busy. Filter your primary value proposition into a few lines, tops. "Add a simple-to-manage wiki to your Google Apps domain!" Drop everything else. You can add the "Why" and the "Coming Soon" to other parts of the page that you can offer to the visitor. Give them the value proposition and the call-to-action first. Then, politely to the side, offer alternative ways for them to learn more while still driving them toward your primary call-to-action.

Marketing isn't my forte, but this sort of thing lends itself to large organizations. (The ones who typically use Google Apps.) I was try to optimize the channels that Google provides for App deployment. Attend Google related events and talk to as many people as possible. Your audience will likely be quite diverse in their needs. But there should be a few features that would add value in a way that satisfies many of them. (i.e.: Simple setup, simple code base, easy customizability, etc.) Try to identify what that feature is and work toward it.

Thanks!

I like your ideas for the website. I am not very good with design, but with this feedback I should be able to tweak it some more.

So far, most of my active customers (currently about 20 over any given week) appear to be small and medium businesses (3-50 accounts). I do need to work on my marketplace listing page (the "try it now" button goes there). They sorted things around recently and it looks even worse for my content.

Thanks again for your time. I appreciate it. :-)

My pleasure. :)

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the offer!

If you wouldn't mind checking out some of the businesses I'm working on and letting me know what you think that would rock!

www.digitalqcards.com www.myclouds.com

Sorry to reply so late, but could you ask for some specific feedback you're interested in?

Maybe you could help me with an iOS API build question?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3110572

I offered some thoughts, but not sure if it'll be helpful. Gave it a good swing though!

Give me a great idea for a startup

Reply on news.ycombinator.com