Show HN: A non-VC backed content creation and social media platform | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A non-VC backed content creation and social media platform

33 pointsfredwu56 comments

Hey HN, I'm soft launching my MVP today and would love to hear your honest feedback. For the past few months I've been working extremely hard on this side hustle in my spare time (I have a day job as a CTO).

I'm building a platform for writers, bloggers and content creators that's built for them rather than for investors and advertisers like most similar products and social media platforms backed by VCs.

I wrote about why I built it here: https://persumi.com/c/persumi/u/fredwu/p/welcome-to-persumi-...

And the landing page is here: https://persumi.com/

I would really love your honest feedback, if you care to share them with me. :)

In the next week or two I'll write about how I built this MVP in three months - the tech, the architecture, the experiments and the missteps... If you are curious, stay tuned!

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There doesn’t seem to be any easily findable screenshots or demos.

That’s a big red flag for me. I know this isn’t one, but that’s a typical strategy for ERP/CRM systems that look and feel like something out of 2002.

The more I look at this the more it feels like this is some kind of scam. I wouldnt trust my info to the sign up form.

Hi OP here! I'm sorry you feel this way.

Given it's a content platform, I struggled to capture the essence with one or two screenshots.

May I ask what made you think "this is some kind of scam"? I'm genuinely curious. Would love to fix that impression if possible.

Then add 3 or 4 screenshots or a video or a self-resetting demo.

Not sure why it's hard to capture the essence. Show us the backend and frontend. Use lorem ipsum filler

Yeah this. Don’t overthink this.

Say I want to use it to post my cat videos, I don’t necessarily need a demo of that to understand that I can do it.

You have reviews and users. Just use a legit user for the demo with permission of course.

There's nothing here to show that there's an actual product. or even part of a product.

Hi OP here. Thank you so much for everyone who's taking the time to give feedback. You have all given me lots of things to think about, and to improve on, I can't thank you all enough!

It's getting late here in Australia so I'm going to have to call it a night. I'll respond to the comments I haven't responded to over the weekend.

And I will for sure add some screenshots to the landing page, as many of you have suggested.

EDIT: Updated the landing page with some screenshots. Will try to perfect it more over the weekend...

I love the basic ideas behind it. I'm over "free" sites and services. I can't afford to pay for everything all the time, but I'm happy to do that for important ones. And online publishing is important to me.

I also like the idea behind the "personas" concept: I have many interests and roles and why not have one place where you can find all of it? Could be good.

After setting up my account I feel a bit overwhelmed though. And I'm not sure what to do next. The onboarding would probably better in stages. Right now I'm confronted with a wall of text and many unfamiliar concepts.

I would also question the wording of the main features. "Personas" or "expressions" are not self-explanatory. I have to read the explanation to understand what they are. I have a lot of things on my mind already and need to keep track of even more things in my life. This feels like I have to learn these concepts first before I can do anything. They're also defined in a circle:

> Personas: We have many talents and interests, persona is a way to group and present expressions and content in a cohesive way.

> Expressions: Expressions are added to your personas to showcase your awesome content. You can create them in personas.

I find that confusing.

Maybe an onboarding in stages would alleviate that. But I would also propose to rethink these terms and maybe look for something more familiar.

The form to add a new persona is also more for the tech people out there and not so much for a creative thinker. I am supposed to choose a "Slug"? I personally know what that is and why it might seem important. But I can see how confused other people would be who are just looking for a nice place to post their content.

Hi jantissler, thanks so much for your feedback! It makes me very happy (and validated) that I'm not the only one who craves for such a platform.

In terms of the confusing terminologies, I agree, and based yours and on a lot other people's feedback, I will prioritise a guide tour for better user onboarding.

With "slug" I'll double check and see how I can improve it, I think I did add some tooltips in to explain what it is, but perhaps it's still too hidden.

Personally I enjoy the terms “Persona” and “Expressions”, alongside “Aura”, the name for interactions. I feel they give the service some much needed flair in a sea of similarity. Plus I’m a big JRPG fan, so it tickles me to say I have a “Persona”.

Hey OP here, I'm glad you like them! Did you notice the Easter egg on the pricing table? ;)

"For the past few months I've been working extremely hard on this side hustle in my spare time"

Please for the love of god stop using the term "side hustle". I don't want to spend any time helping "hustlers". The term gives me instant negative vibes.

Am I the only one?

Are these sign up links solely for writers? Has anyone actually signed up yet? I can't find any links to read or listen to anything. How do consumers use this? Just read whatever you want? Does it require a login? Do you have to subscribe to read? Are all users treated the same with the assumption that anyone signing up wants to both publish and consume?

These are questions of curiosity, but my uncharitable honest feedback has nothing to do with your product, more that I've come to believe the entire concept of "content creation" has become epistemically bankrupt and harmful to the world, exacerbating hustle culture and feelings of personal inadequacy, while commoditizing that flow of data into consumer eyeballs further away from useful information and entertainment with any artistic value into quick bites of maximally simplistic outrage bait and cheap dopamine hits.

I don't think you can solve this problem. Avoiding VC funding is great, but the content creators themselves have bad incentives regardless of how the platform funds itself. I don't claim to know how to solve this problem, but encouraging people to become the loudest shouter in a crowded room full of people only vaguely paying attention most of the time isn't it.

Hi nonameiguess, good questions!

> Are these sign up links solely for writers?

No not really, anyone could (and should) sign up because I do believe that everyone is unique and has their "personas" to show for, whether it's their natural talent, or skills, knowledge, anecdotes, etc.

> Has anyone actually signed up yet?

I've only just soft launched it, mostly to gather feedback before I start doing the marketing side of things, so no not really, yet.

> I can't find any links to read or listen to anything. How do consumers use this?

My hope is that once I improved the product based on the feedback, it'll start attracting people who simply want to blog and don't want to (or don't have the skills to) set up their own blog. This way the content will be gradually built up.

> Does it require a login?

Absolutely not. This is actually one of my pet peeves for certain existing platforms. I hate login walls, I believe good content should be publicly visible to everyone.

> Do you have to subscribe to read?

Nope, it's entirely optional.

> Are all users treated the same with the assumption that anyone signing up wants to both publish and consume?

In short yes. The plan is to offer value-added functionalities such as the AI voice, as premium features so the platform can have a sustainable way of existing.

> the entire concept of "content creation" has become epistemically bankrupt and harmful to the world

You know what, I agree with your observation. And this is actually the primary driver behind creating Persumi. For that reason, I never positioned Persumi to be a competitor to the status quo social media platforms. I think the whole "content creation" space needs a bit of shake up.

> the content creators themselves have bad incentives

I agree with this part of the statement.

> regardless of how the platform funds itself

But not necessarily this part. If a platform isn't pressured into selling more ads, or introducing more user-hostle features, and instead focused more on the users and content, the vibe would be quite different, and I would hope that then it will attract content creators who either would naturally gravitate towards such platform, or would adjust their behaviours/content accordingly to serve their audience.

At this stage nobody knows how to solve this problem (otherwise it would've been solved already), but hey I'm still naive enough to give it a shot. :P

Read through your marketing page and the "why i built it" blog post, still unclear what exactly is the problem you're solving.

The problem they are solving is they want more money.

I mean, automatically converting posts to a podcast format is a neat feature. Seems like RSS feeds from the service are also up and running, and there are some other neat AI-powered features such as auto-TL;DRs and "writing assistant." Given that there's even a free tier, I really don't get what you're complaining about.

I did not complain. I’m simply pointing out that people don’t make these types of platforms for free. Profit may not be the main driver, but it is a necessity if you don’t have tons of VC money.

The discover page looks like a flow of SEO optimized AI-generated content.

Hey sorry about that. Most posts on the discover page are from my old blog I imported, they do look a bit SEO'ed, but definitely not AI-generated.

i see the word "personas" and immediately think: have you thought about how your platform could be used by plural systems, or people with dissociative identity disorder, who have multiple entities in one body? cohost allows multiple "pages" per account, completely unlinked and independent from each other, and this is absolutely invaluable for systems. how do these "personas" stack up?

(i could be entirely misunderstanding what "persona" means, but the question still stands)

the reason i wonder this is because we are a system with dissociative identity disorder and we would want to be able to express ourselves individually. on HN we do share one account but on cohost we each have our own pages

here is a resource explaining plurality: https://morethanone.info

Hi OP here. Great question!

When I first thought of building this, I was thinking about people's different personalities (one for family, one for friends, one for work, etc) and their different interests (I'm a programmer, I'm a gamer, I'm a photograher, etc). So in short, the platform is built to allow one person to have multiple different versions of themselves. And people can choose to follow a user, or a user's specific personas.

That makes intuitive sense. Now, what's an "expression"?

so personas are sort of owned by each user, and the user has their own user-wide page that encompasses all their personas?

It looks very cool. I'm not sure if it's a bug or what but I can't seem to get the the "New Post" button to enable to actually create something. It's also very confusing and unclear what Expressions are. I love how you immediately start with "there are four concepts here", but expressions is murky and after playing with it, I don't have any intuition for how these concepts actually manifest on a profile.

Hey thanks for the feedback. Many users like yourself have given me the feedback that the concepts were very poorly explained, so the next thing I do is to build a guide tour to onboard new users. Thanks for your input, I really appreciate it!

Sorry mate, but I hate tours. You'd have lost me with a tour.

There needs to be some way for me to just immediately know by exploring the UI what everything does.

Thank you for the "non-VC backed" part. Good to remind people that innovation can thrive without VC worship.

Thank you! Yes absolutely. Even during the development of my MVP, both Twitter and Reddit were... well we all know what happened. I was just shaking my head.

Even though Persumi is not meant to be a competitor to Twitter or Reddit, I can't help but think that a content creation platform without the VC drive and agenda, would probably grow into something quite different.

Yes!! We never raised VC either, and it has been 12 years… here is more info:

https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf

I remember emailing back and forth with DHH (of 37Signals/Basecamp fame) back in the day. DHH and Jason Fried were very big on this.

The concept behind it seems great, but as others have pointed out, I am missing the screenshots or some kind of video that lets me see what the platform is like. There is also some weird padding at the sides of the landing page.

Thanks for the feedback. I will think long and hard about this one. As I mentioned in another thread, I struggled with capturing the essence of the product with a screenshot or two, given it's user content based... Definitely taking this feedback on board though! Thank you!

Yeah you just have to have someone share some content. People can extrapolate. Think about the apple vision pro demo. They showed pretty unexciting usecases like looking at photos, spreadsheets and watching a movie. All the things i can already do. But people can think of their own ways of how they’d use it.

So don’t think you need to capture a perfect scenario, you just need to capture a couple, people will fill in the blanks.

Otherwise it is kind of scary signing up for something I don’t even know what it is.

Like you have “reviews” but the fact that i can’t even see the content those reviewers shared makes it feel super phony. This one guy talks about how it “changed his life”, yet you are telling me there are no screenshots you can use?

I’m fairly certain those reviews are fake, considering the punny names and “(totally legit) reviews” being the title.

Signed up and will give it a run. The messaging says all the right things and the page looks nice and clean. So I'm hopeful so far! I'll try to get more useful feedback

Thank you! Please do, I appreciate any feedback.

Side menu button is not initially padded (mobile)

Oh! Which side menu are you referring to? I've tried both Firefox and Chrome on Android and couldn't reproduce it...

Top right. Samsung browser

also, all the dotted-underlined text doesn't seem to have any tooltips for us? had to open devtools to discover that you seem to be using some data-tippy-... attribute, presumably for some javascript to pick up, but why can't you just use regular html `title`?

Ah, the honest answer is that I hadn't really thought about it. Subconsciously I guess I don't like the way `title` looks, so I opt'ed for something that works a bit nicer.

Given the product won't work without JavaScript I didn't really think about the non-JS experience...

it's not even the non-js experience, it's just that your js throws a bunch of big fat errors because your subresource integrity is totally invalid and plyr isn't allowed to load

edit: oops it's localCDN's fault... still i think a static landing page requiring JS is kind of weird, what prevents you from putting `title` in the html and then renaming the attribute in javascript?

You could get instant users if you make it compatible on the Nostr ecosystem

Thanks! Supporting decentralised protocols is on the cards - initially I was going to implement ActivityPub first, but things got a bit complicated so I opt'ed not to build these for now.

I do want to eventually add Nostr and ActivityPub support. Ah, priorities... :P

Is it entirely hosted in Australia?

Good question! I will write a more detailed blog post in the next week or two. In short, it's hosted on Fly.io - with instances distributed across Australia, US and EU, with a clustered Postgres in those regions too.

You'll need to register with the US copyright office as soon as possible. Not doing so means that any jerk sending a DMCA, legitimate or otherwise, can sue you personally and win, even if you prove in court that you had no knowledge of the specific instance they are suing over. This comes up more than once a year on English-language social media sites with as few as 1000 users, which can be shocking to people new to operating social media and/or forums.

There are also other relevant laws like COPPA, FOSTA-SESTA and GDPR, but the timeframe for those is not particularly urgent. Additionally, if you aren't retaining legal counsel and are handling things yourself, the Australian Communications Alliance has some handy explainers on compliance with these other laws for site owners.

How does this not happen more often to Mastodon servers?

I think the maturity of the userbase plays a part in having less copyright violations and/or reporting abuses than normal but additionally the people who host Mastodon instances tend to be more clued in than you'd expect. The few times I've seen Mastodon hosters ask for help with their first DMCA they already have a registration set up.

Ah, thanks for the tips, really appreciate it! I'll look into these.

Quick QA ticket: Saving a "link" type expression with no value will is allowed, but will cause an Internal Server Error when trying to visit the persona page where the expression is displayed.

That aside, I was surprised to not see any video support! I know that's my fault - you didn't say anything about video support - but it's hard for me to take a content-creation/social-media pitch seriously if it doesn't support even short-form video content. As someone working on my own side hustle, pricing what it would take for even modest video support, I understand exactly how infeasible this is for you! Just letting you know that most people won't understand, so you really have to take people by the hand with this so that they don't try to treat it like another social media platform.

To that end, I will say that you are in DESPERATE need of a "guided tour" feature. I wasn't able to create a new "Post" object until I had created a Persona, and then an Expression, and even that was poorly communicated. After I had created an expression, I tried to make a post, but it still just said 'you need to make an expression before you can post'. Which was specifically, technically correct in its wording to be "true", but there was no way for me to parse what it said ('x kind of expression') into something I understood (I needed a Blog type of expression, which is apparently at least one subtype of the explicit type that was needed). I'm hoping that I missed the obvious stuff that says "make a post to your main account page", which doesn't require any setup in order for a user to make a simple 'hello world' post. But if I did miss it, there's your feedback about that. If I didn't, there should be either a quick step-by-step, or an auto-setup example.

With all of that out of the way, I'm otherwise pretty impressed! The site functions well and works with a type of friction that I'm sure all creatives have felt, which is how to manage disparate types of creative output in something that can manage them all well. I think the idea of personas and expressions maps pretty cleanly onto categorization that many people do for their work, so it all comes across very clearly. If I had one complaint about how it's mapped, it's that it is handled a little too "programmer-y" for general UX. I know that's not a super-helpful problem description, but a general rule of thumb is that if you can clearly understand how the data is broken down to be stored, it's probably too much "cruft" for general user engagement. More succinctly - I don't need to understand "expressions" or any kind of sub content like that; I just need to understand that I want to "post" as "this persona". However you need to handle that to make it seamless is where architectural elegance comes in.

Moving on, it's well-documented, the interface is straightforward and snappy, and it looks like it's got good expected functionality, like discovery features and personal feeds. As far as the well-tread areas, you've definitely put together something that looks rock solid. Great work on the execution! After seeing so many "new twitter"s in the past 6 months, it's nice to see a site just doing the simple stuff right. That's half the damn battle, right there.

There are other minor things, like deleting personas that have expressions not managing those subrecords by user intent (in my case, it just didn't delete the expressions; no prompt to delete, keep, or reassign). But those are all pretty "either way" kind of things; I'm not trying to nag. It's a pretty awesome product, so far, and it looks like its got legs to be something remarkable! Looking forward to it!

Hey catapart, wow thank you so much for the detailed feedback! I've fixed the link bug.

Re video, it's a great question/observation. I had considered it, but ultimately I decided that running/streaming videos will be prohibitively expensive, so I'll only investigate and invest in video if/when the platform can sustain itself.

Thank you so much for suggesting a guide tour feature - this will be the very next thing I build.

Totally agree with the minor things you've noticed. A lot of it are already on my backlog to fix/improve, so thanks for taking notice!

And thanks for the words of encouragement, it means a lot! Hopefully it won't be too long til I improved all the things raised here by yourself and others.

I don't see any mention of ActivityPub or Federation.

Whilst it doesn't support ActivityPub, I do want to eventually look into that. In fact, initially it was going to be part of the MVP, until I realised it was going to take me too long to make it work, so I opt'ed to de-prioritise it for now.

I don't see anything in OP's post nor the linked "why I built it" that would suggest ActivityPub or federation. What are you seeing that suggests that these terms are missing?

When OP said "social media platform"

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