Ask HN: Rate my Web-App/Start-Up | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rate my Web-App/Start-Up

8 pointsjbrun14 comments

Over the past year I have been reading HN pretty regularly and gathered a lot of great comments, posts etc. on start-ups. I would very much like to get comments from the community on my new start-up, particularly the UI, pricing, and other technology features.

Info and sign-up at http://www.nimonik.ca

Further Description of the Site:

For the past few years, EEM, an environmental consulting group, developed NIMONIK as part of their environmental legal compliance business. NIMONIK is an information service on Canadian environmental regulations, centralized in an online database. It has worked well and served our clients well, but it is time for a new generation.

We saw an opportunity to move the business in a new direction, make the service easier to use, more dynamic and much more affordable. In May 2008, we formed a new company which bought NIMONIK, and since then we’ve been working hard at shaping a richer website that we hope will be a community hub for Canadian environmental managers.

We’re confident you will find our new service quite unique. Our aim is to reduce membership fees, allow users to import/export information on ISO 14001 requirements, and upload corporate documents. Users will also be able to add comments, rate articles, and literally create some of the content - building institutional memory for their companies.

On this project, I am working with Yves Faguy, a lawyer who also worked at EEM, and Paul Maclean, the president of the consulting group. We also have a fantastic team working on the content and the software with us.

Soon, NIMONIK will become a community driven website for Canadian businesses of all sizes.

Press Release found here: http://www.nimonik.ca/2009/01/press-release-nimonik-announces-new-version-of-subscription-service/

After spending 5 minutes on your site I barely understood what it did. After reading the About Us and watching the video I had a better idea, but I'm still not quite sure why I'd pay for a service like this (I realize this isn't geared towards me).

My only suggestion would be on the front-page tell me why I need your site. Something like:

Keeping up with environmental regulations is hard. Let us help. We simplify the process to let you focus on stuff that matters.

Then tell me how you do that.

Overall interesting idea, good luck with it.

Thanks and good point. The target market is mostly manufacturing industry who is already pretty familiar with these issues, but I like your suggested sentence.

I think if you just change up your homepage, it will be a thousand times better. Other than that it looks great, well marketed!

Having burned through $5M in the early 00's at a startup doing exactly this, I think you're in for a tough ride.

Environmental agencies hardly ever actually enforce the regulations on small businesses that would purchase your product. In our case, we found that the only way you could actually get the EPA interested in auditing your facility was if you used our software to file your paperwork. The Agency was interested in finding out how accurate our software was, so the end result was that our customers got picked on.

Meanwhile, businesses that simply ignored the regulations or sent back the paperwork incomplete were let slide.

In short, I'd check to make sure that you are solving a real problem with real consequences. In my experience, Environmental for the Small Business doesn't have any enforcement, and is thus not a real problem for which people will pay money.

Interesting, there is a longer story behind this project. I would be interested in briefly talking to you about your experience. You can reach me by email jbrun @ nimonik . ca

Thanks in advance.

I stopped reading at "As web 1.0 gave way to web 2.0". It seems your website contains slightly less vapid jargon, but I still think your homepage could do a better job of selling the service (Jasber had some good advice). Beyond that I can't offer much as I have no knowledge of Canadian businesses and environmental policies.

I second the motion for more clarity on what exactly you do and why people/companies want it.

Also, on the "Pricing & Signup" page, when I click on "Sign-Up" under a certain plan, it would be nice if the radio button defaulted to that plan.

Your customers may know, but I didn't know that SME stands for Small and Medium Enterprises. It may not matter since you list the features, but that certainly confused me.

I don't really like the box around the SME plan. It may work if you use some other color. Also, the Red on Blue doesn't work. When I saw it, it seemed wrong, and then I checked this article: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377508 which agreed.

Also, since you're targeting companies, you may want to allow company name rather than first and last names.

The company I used to work for has a similar product aimed at Australian users, but still to fulfill what I think was the same ISO standard. I can say from experience that yes, it is a niche that most hackers probably won't understand, _but_ it should be an attractive one. A lot of businesses signed up for our product because they didn't want to have to understand the legalese of the compliance regulation - they just wanted a site that said: for this situation, here's how you manage it.

I think it's a great field to be in, as it basically involves rewriting regulations into plain English and adding examples, then charging to access them. Nice, passive income :)

Based on a quick read of this ISO 14001 Guidance Manual http://www.usistf.org/download/ISMS_Downloads/ISO14001.pdf which states (for section 4.3.2)

Legal and Other Requirements: “The organization shall establish and maintain a procedure to identify and have access to legal and other requirements to which the organization subscribes, that are applicable to the environmental aspects of its activities, products or services.”

Is this really a big deal? I would imagine any company with an internal Wiki could comply with this by just adding a page or two.

In theory, it could be done internally and currently most companies manage it via excel spreadsheets.

The problem is three fold

1. Tracking new and updated legislation

2. Understanding existing legislation

3. Understanding changes and the impact on your operations

Those are some of the items we try to address for companies. Also, we feel our customers can benefit by sharing information with other companies who have similar operations.

"We simplify environmental legal obligations and maintain your legal register." <- Curse of Knowledge. For a layman like me, I really had hard time understanding this sentence.

I don't know anything about legal environmental obligations but what made sense to me was the last line on the front-page: NIMONIK is the best automated tool to meet ISO 14001 requirements for the management of legal requirements. I would suggest putting giving the line a better position.

I would also suggest changing the preview image for the video. Vimeo lets you select from several screencaps so maybe there's a better one in there.

This site is a cargo cult dance in action:

1. You've seen highlighting on header texts and you thought it looks nice and want to add it to your copy. So, why are you highlighting what seems to be random words?

We "simplify environmental" legal obligations and "maintain your legal register." ==> We track and simplify environmental legal requirements for your business. No highlighting is required, it's already a short sentence.

Also, in your features page you start to randomly highlight things in all the paragraphs. If the highlighting is what's important, why bother writing out a whole paragraph then?

2. You've seen demos and thought it helped people. So, why does your demo video complicate things? Why do I as the end-user need to know your site used to be a textbook community? Why does the video's title-card even say textbook community? The explanation also doesn't hit home as to what your site does. In the short 2 minutes you wasted a lot of time on pointless items. Focus on quick facts and quick edits.

3. You thought public releases looks professional so you drafted one up. But your end-users -- for example, this community -- don't care. We especially don't care that you just copy and pasted that here. In just a sentence or two -- leaving out that "as web 1.0 gave way to web 2.0" -- what does your website do?

4. In your pricing and signup you just basically ripped off 37signals' recent blog post about their signup page. You even tagged your $99/month plan as your most popular plan. Really? Is this really necessary?

There are more things that needs a bit more polish, ping me for more help.

Not sure what a cargo cult dance is, but thanks for the comments, all good points.

1. Simple disagreement on style. I'll think about it.

2. The audience who is potentially interested in my site are not tech savy people. They tend to be environmental managers in traditional companies - they don't twitter, participate in forums or contribute to wikipedia. As such, we try to bridge the gap by contrasting our site with the traditional method of obtaining information on environmental legislation - a book. Yes the video needs to be better, I'm just waiting for Camtasia on Mac to rebuild it.

3. Better press release on our blog. Yes, we need to fine tune our message. Just wanted to give HN some background info on the site.

4. Duly noted.

Thanks Again.

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