Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings. 1 year now!)

Mike, wow...thanks for the offer. I re-launched my site as a paid service about a month ago. It is an online text editor for Dropbox. (I guess you can disregard this if you are not a Dropbox user).

I hope you don't mind temporarily shelling out $6, but I would really appreciate it if you could sign up for the service and answer a few questions:

- Is it clear how to sign up for the service on the home page?

- Does the signup/payment workflow feel straightforward?

- Is it clear how to get a refund? Is the process straightforward?

- Does the app feel fast or slow?

Thanks! Very very much appreciated. The site is https://www.textdropapp.com

Hiya! Sorry it took a bit. (I've been fighting with taxes.) So...

- Signup: I was a little surprised when it sent me directly to Dropbox to signin. I thought it was an error, but realized it was asking me to signin so I could authenticate your service. Then I authenticated and was faced with your price. I don't think this is the right way to do it. I know you're trying to test the viability of your product (separate from your price) but I think there's more going on here.

First, you didn't warn me about a price with the exception of mentioning a "subscription" and a 7-day guarantee. Waiting until after authorization frustrates me because if I didn't want to signup, now I have to go back to dropbox and cancel my authorization there (instead of just closing the page and moving on with my life).

And even though you're using an inverted pricing model (subscription price grows with wide-spread use), you should use that to create a sense of urgency to signup faster instead of hiding it after authorization. Use demand to compel them to try sooner by showing the raising price up-front before they authorize Dropbox.

- Then there's the issue of permissions. Because the first experience with your service via Dropbox is "Give this random app FULL access to your ENTIRE dropbox." I think it's a lot to ask someone when they just want to edit their text files with your service. It could help if you prepare them before sending them to the authorization funnel with a warning/explanation screen.

+ The app is incredibly snappy and a pleasure to use.

+ The search bar is helpful even if it wasn't immediately obvious that it was search. I think it was easy to discover though. Maybe make it robust enough to support fuzzy search (a path of app/js/main.js could be found by searching for "appjmain") and masking (*? characters).

- PLEASE put some basic file handling functionality. (Delete, rename, move would be helpful...) Anyone editing dropbox text files will probably want these functions as well. (If they're there, I couldn't find them.) It also wasn't clear how to "close" a file aside from switching away from it.

+ Refund seemed to be cake. I'll let you know if I have trouble getting the funds back. (Big fan of stripe.js, too!)

Hope this feedback helped. And again, sorry for the delay.

Hi Mike, please, no need to apologize for the delay. I really appreciate you taking the time to look at this.

These are all great points, especially regarding the signup process and and permissions. I think you have validated some of the concerns that I have had regarding these issues.

I do have delete and rename, but maybe I should pop up a quick intro screen for first-time users to get acquainted with the functionality.

Thanks again and all the best to you.

- I'm participating in the venture-lab.org internet class and helping people learn to apply the Business Model Canvas along with lean startup methodologies,

Hi Mike - Thanks for the generous offer. Appears like you have a lot of knowledge to share.

Could you share your experiences in applying the Business Model Canvas and Lean Startup methodologies? What are some common pitfalls startups fall into when trying to apply these concepts?

When do you start using the canvas? ie Could you use the canvas with no potential ideas, only perceived customer problems?

The context to the questions is: Curious to know how you conduct a brainstorming session (ie session to generate ideas) and then knowing where to go next. When do you start using the canvas?

Thanks for being awesome Mike.

You could really help me by having a look at http://localbeer.me and making suggestions on how I can bring targeted (craft beer drinkers) traffic to the site. It's sitting at 4-10 visits per day right now. I'm not sure if I've got the design wrong, or if it's just a boring site in general. Is there a killer feature I could add? (I thought auto-locating breweries near you was a killer feature). There is a chicken and egg issue here as well, because the site will get way better if people review beers, but with such low traffic, nobody is reviewing beer. Maybe some suggestions on how to tackle this chicken and egg issue?

As a general beer lover, I can give you some issues. I've visited your site before, but forgotten about it. The main issue is this is solving a problem I don't have: I already know where all my local breweries are (and you're missing some in DFW, most notably Deep Ellum and Peticolas). But that's not the point--you aren't telling me anything particularly of note about these breweries. I've been to them, I know what their tap list looks like, and I follow them to get updates.

What is more important to me is building a system to find where I can find my local beer. Who's got the Rahr seasonal? Who's got Peticolas Velvet Hammer on tap? People (including me) have tried to tackle it. The problem is that distributors control that data, and they're not keen on giving it up.

Anyway, I'm sorry to give harsh feedback, but I don't see me regularly visiting this site. It doesn't make my life better at all--it's just a neat way to look at stuff I already know. I think the site looks great, just solves a problem I don't have.

I couldn't have said it better myself. I'm not interested as where the beer came from (although, that's definitely interesting information i'd want to find when I'm already enjoying it) as I am where I can find good beer to drink! The best kind of app for that might be a mobile app where I can log the beer I had and where I'm drinking it so I can try it again later (or recommend it to someone else through your app).

Once you have people posting what beer they had where, then you don't need the distributor's information anymore. Then you just need to go to bars with great beer selections and get the locals into your app.

Of course, before you go down this route, you might want to pop into a few bars and ask the patrons if they would even use such an app.

This is a pretty cool site. Unfortunately for me the DC/MD/NOVA area has almost no breweries at all. Pennsylvania appears to have a ton though.

Two suggestions: (1) Pictures of the bottles/cans, (2)Information on where a certain beer is available.

Despite the fact of no breweries around me, I would still love to try some of these PA brews. I'm sure many are sold in Maryland. Is it possible to get that info?

To answer the 'no beer near me' question - it's pure manual data entry on my part, and it's about 1/10 done...

Maybe this is just me, but the font is incredibly hard to read (I'm on Chrome).

Hello Mike!

It's good of you to offer your help to the community, especially as you have a lot of valuable experience to share!

Basically I'm trying to decide on my next project to work on and I would find some constructive criticism on a handful of my ideas very useful!

I'm kind of torn in multiple directions but I would like to make something that actually brings me some revenue!

Most of my other projects have been for the fun of it & not monetized/free to use so far.

I could list my top 5 ideas and you could throw back a hell yes / hell no based on your gut instinct!

Thanks!

Sure, shoot.

I'd just like to point out that I've come to Mike for help on numerous occasions and he has always given me fantastic and useful advice. If you need to get questions answered, Mike is the guy you want to talk to.

Oh and Mike, I still haven't been able to find an internship for this summer. Thought I had one locked down, but I guess not. Still trying though! Oh and thanks for the interview skills book, it was amazingly helpful.

Mike being awesome as always. Thanks for another round of "No Strings!"

I'll piggyback, as always, and offer to help any HNers with machine learning, statistics, Python, or NumPy/SciPy questions they might have. Feel free to comment here or email me (address in profile).

Have a good weekend, all!

Thanks!!!

Mike, thanks for continuing to be awesome.

I'm working on a hardware startup. So, what would really help me right now is your thoughts on this question I posted earlier - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3899105

Sure! Found a video you might be interested in.

hi Mike!

I have been reading your offer posts for a while now and always wanted to ask you something, but never thought i had a question worth asking.

Today is different :)

I would really love some constructive criticism on the usefulness, usability and viability of my little side project.

I know there are one a penny of Twitter schedulers, but what I wanted to build was a simple emailing service where I could schedule a bulk of tweets in one go. Do you think that could be useful to others beside me?

I tried to post before as a Show HN post but didn't get much attention... perhaps not getting too much attention is also a feedback i should think about, though..

the project: http://buffero.me

Hi there!

I agree with Brian in that your treading dangerously close in name, look and feel to the current market leader and might find yourself getting a C&D or a terse email before you ever hit any real traction. I'd reconsider your brand before moving much further. It'd be a shame if your technical accomplishments get tarnished over some bad PR situation.

Regarding your product, I think email input is a difficult feature to pull off. No matter how simple you make the format, your users will find a way to screw it up. And users will blame your service for the poor experience. Having to defend your product to customers and training them to properly use a product is VERY TOUGH.

Further, if you want email input to be the one feature you use to differentiate yourself from your competition, that feature had better be MAGICAL. Posterous is one example of a company that used email input to help users publish content to their blog as it's key differentiation. They put together a great blog platform, but the email input was their 10-second onboarding. "Email your first blog post us and we'll set everything up for you!" THAT'S MAGIC.

Your differentiation aside, I don't think that's what your biggest problem is. I realize this is an MVP, but I think many people take the MVP thing too literally. If you're launching a product in a market which has (as you state) a lot of competition, your MVP launch should at least perform on-par with the rest of the market. First impressions are hard to fix and launching a sub-par MVP will likely doom you to failure by obscurity.

What you should do: Start thinking about how you want to improve on what's out there. If it's email input, then iterate on that feature over and over until it's like magic. On each iteration, get people to use the feature and see if they like it or hate it. I would even take Brian's suggestion and use Buffer's API so you can focus on THAT feature alone. (And don't get discouraged.)

Hi Mike! Thank you for your honest comments! I've received a couple of comments already about the name - too similar to bufferapp. Unfortunately, I decided to go with the name i've chosen before I did a better research of what's already out there. But I agree, I need to change the name before I proceed further. Lesson learned: do an extensive research beforehand, always. Thanks again!

Hey how do you think these people will feel about your name http://bufferapp.com/ ?

Or is yours built on top of theirs?

Well if you want to help, Sign up for the Dropdock beta at http://getdropdock.com and give us your feedback next week when we launch our private beta ;)

PS: Your awesome, Keep doing what you're doing. You are an inspiration

I'll offer some feedback right now... I think the product is pretty slick, but your site suggests this is the "easiest" way to send a file. A big question remains on what the first-time setup is like. How do I get other people on my "list" and how much friction does that process have? Because if it's any harder than right-clicking a file, selecting "Send via Email" and typing an email address, I'm immediately out.

Maybe other people could be asking this same question (and leaving your page before dropping off their email addy)?

Hi Mike, do you have any experience building 3G or 4G enabled CDMA/GSM devices? Ideally this would be an FCC certified module that would be dead easy to interface with. I have no antenna design skills to speak of so that's a concern too. Thanks!

I don't directly have experience, but the company I'm working for is in that space. Did you have specific questions? Maybe I could ask an expert here?

Mike, no that's ok. Thanks again for offering your help, really do appreciate it.

This is more of a SEO question.

I got 100,000 pages, all computer generated, but all high quality information as well (not scraped/duplicate content). Should I make them all indexable right away, or gradually so as to avoid any Google penalty?

I'm not an SEO expert and have no familiarity with Google's page rank algo, but if I had to take an educated guess:

100k of content from one domain would probably never just spring up overnight. It would probably be best to publish your content from most linked to least linked over a period of time that makes sense. This way, the content that is gradually posted is not likely to have dead links (while the target is still waiting in the queue to be published). You're still probably going to have some negative impact if all the content links to itself and nothing from the outside linking in. And I understand Google's crawlers now detect organic content generation (comments, likes, linkbacks, etc) so if that sort of interaction makes sense in your content, you might get negatively affected if it's not there as expected.

Just some thoughts and take it with a grain of salt, of course! :)

How can 100,000 pages of anything computer generated be "high quality information"? What are you generating?

I admit I am skeptical, but I am also genuinely curious. :-)

Hello Mike. I would really appreciate it if you can give my new product, pgXplorer (downloadable at pgXplorer.com) a whirl and give some feedback. It is a desktop GUI client for postgres v8.4 and above.

Davy -

I regularly use psql as part of my job, but I gave pgXplorer a whirl. It seems less responsive than psql, but that's a big reason why I use the command line client anyway. One thing I noticed is that you're asking for "Port" twice in the connection properties dialog - I think you mean "Password" in the second instance. I'm probably not your target audience, but I'd like to know - what's the proposition? Why use pgXplorer instead of pgAdmin, for example?

Thanks a lot for your feedback. I truly appreciate it.

Nothing can beat psql in speed in my opinion. pgXplorer carries the overhead of a GUI of course and there is an added level of abstraction when talking to the database. pgXplorer has been built with ease-of-use in mind.

> ..you're asking for "Port" twice...

Sorry about it. It has been rectified at the source. I shall be updating the installers shortly.

> what's the proposition? Why use pgXplorer instead of pgAdmin, for example?

Good question. I started with the premise to supplant pgAdmin as the open source GUI tool for postgres. But I don't hold that view anymore. I am thinking of pgXplorer as another open source GUI for postgres.

There are several design choices that are different from pgAdmin (and possibly other database GUI tools).

* First of all, we have one instance of pgXplorer handling only one database at a time. So in the unpalatable event that pgXplorer crashes, it brings down only that instance. While one could launch multiple pgAdmins as well, it lists all connections regardless.

* A 2-D grid like layout for tables,views and function on the main canvas with search option to quickly highlight a desired item. Very useful when dealing with names in Unicode, where there can be no perceptible alphabetical order (like Japanese).

* The SQL editor/console is fully Unicode ready. In pgAdmin, when doing a search/replace with Unicode characters, pgAdmin's editor does not work well.

* Editing tables and inserting data in tables handled in a better way than pgAdmin I think. Bulk updates can be done in pgXplorer when a single column is selected.

* Copying and pasting data into LibreOffice Calc/Excel with headers. Also, it is quicker than pgAdmin.

* A simple table designer for newly created (columnless) tables.

These are some salient features of pgXplorer. More features are on the anvil.

I'll make it a point to keep giving it a whirl, if only to help out a fellow HN'er. I do agree that there's room for improvement in the desktop DB client world, but I've not run into the problems with e.g. Unicode, that you mentioned. This is probably just my personal use history (I work for Mapquest and spend a large amount of time doing geographic queries). As I said, I'll continue giving it a whirl as best as I can.

One thing that I have found virtually intolerable in any DB GUI client I've used is the latency after connection, presumably to load table definitions and other data for display. With psql, I connect and I just start going - the latency is imperceptible. I know that having such metadata readily visible is the reason people use GUI clients, but I find that I frequently don't need that. It's very easy for me to do a \d $tablename to see columns, or select count(1) from ... to get rowcounts as needed. In fact, the cost for doing this is roughly the same as the cost of clicking a table name to expand a schema in a GUI, so really all this sort of behavior does is get in my way.

Another thing which I would find enticing would be special attention to displaying query plans. The output of "explain" isn't exactly the clearest, even to someone who's got a pretty good idea how a DB works, and I run explain queries infrequently enough that I have to check the documentation to make sure I'm understanding the result. Even simple clues - e.g. color coding the output so sequential scans are red, for instance - would help.

Best of luck with it, though - and if I can help or if you want to bounce anything off me my e-mail is in my profile.

> latency after connection, presumably to load table definitions and other data for display

You are correct. Particularly to have auto-completion on table names in the SQL editor, highlighting primary key columns, etc.

(1) I understand that psql can be quicker in experienced hands. For me, particularly having to type out chinese characters for table names (I am not a native speaker of the language) is really difficult. pgXplorer eases some of that pain by auto-completing. So, in this specific case of mine, it is a bit quicker.

> Another thing which I would find enticing would be special attention to displaying query plans.

I presume you know about http://explain.depesz.com/? Very useful and open source too. I will be trying to add something similar in pgXplorer as well.

Thanks a lot for the helpful offer. I will certainly connect by email to discuss some related things to the project.

Edits: (1)

Hi Davy. I really like the minimalist approach to this app. Install was straight forward (but a little sad a Linux version doesn't exist yet). No complicated shortcuts (I like) and basic functions. It seems hard to screw this up.

Sadly, I don't use Postgres and I didn't have any databases sitting around to test it against. If you know of a quick way I could test it against a database, I'd be happy to share more. Otherwise, it looks great!

Thanks a ton for the kind words Mike.

> but a little sad a Linux version doesn't exist yet

Working fervently on this. Couple of issues being sorted out now are: a) undesirable window behaviour and 2) packaging for popular linux flavours.

>...I didn't have any databases sitting around to test it against.

Unfortunately, the easiest way I can think of is to install postgres on your own machine. As a very very low priority item on your schedule, if you can try out pgXplorer on your local database and give some feedback, I would really appreciate it!