Ask HN: Review my startup, http://conweets.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my startup, http://conweets.com

11 pointsayushchd27 comments

First, lose the ornamental display font you've set all your copy in. I almost gave up reading. Setting type in apps like this is a solved problem. Google [font stack], pick a conservative one, and use it. If you want to play with fonts, do it in your headers.

Second, you should know that this has been done before, most notably probably by Bettween, which ultimately failed. Do people really have the problem of tracking conversations on Twitter?

Note that Bettween had a pretty effective marketing tactic that you could steal: finding really interesting conversations and promoting them, so that their site functioned both as a sort of Twitter aggregator (key function of an aggregator that you don't have: most interesting stuff bubbles to front page) and as a vector for sharing conversations in places like HN, which spread the Bettween app around.

Your super-effective caching engine, described with words like "query" and "request" and "server" and "cache", is not relevant to your users. Like, at all. Try to develop an allergy to describing technology. If the benefit of some technical feature you build is "speed", then just say your site is super-fast. Don't waste time justifying it. Does that turn a whole paragraph into a 5 word sentence? GOOD. Users don't like reading your marketing copy.

> Your super-effective caching engine, described with words like "query" and "request" and "server" and "cache", is not relevant to your users. Like, at all.

I agree totally. In my marketing copy on LinkPeek I attempted really hard to stay away from the term API even though that is what the service is. Basically you must describe the product like your real customers would describe it.

Your advice about fonts and texts is certainly correct. I am working on it straight away. About the aggregator thing, yes I am working on it, but we do have a "trending" conversations section, but it isn't very dynamic because of less traffic.

The front page should really tell me something about your startup. I can not figure out what you do until I click on about-us.

Please if you are going to have a home page, put something there other than "connect with twitter". Explain to me what you do in a sentence or two. Not a paragraph. This can be the difference between me (not clicking) and someone else (clicking) who end up (not) using your service.

Thanks for the handy suggestions.. will do the required changes very soon. Much, much appreciated.

I very much second this. I also found it difficult to understand what Contweets are doing - unfortunately reading the About page didn't make me much wiser either. Without knowing what to expect, I'd guess that most people wouldn't sign up.

I think a simple tagline would help a lot. Something like "Who tweets who?" or "Look who's tweeting now".

One of the sentences from the About page would actually make a pretty good headline: "a single conversation doesn't always tell the entire story".

This is not a startup, this is a tool. Maybe you can make a bit of side-income from ads, but don't expect this to become a company on its own.

Problems:

- Don't use buttons that look so 'bubbly'

- Bad colour scheme

- There are two different Facebook share buttons

- The copy on the about page is terribly written

- On the conversation page, I have to click 'track new conversation' to start fresh; big problem when there aren't any results, I'm essentially stranded with no 'obvious' action

- If I track @blah and @bleh, don't put me there under 'You', it's totally irrelevant to the conversation

Agreed, more of tool than a startup. Working on other suggestions. Thanks a ton.

Your purpose is not clearly stated, or I am an idiot for not understanding.

I would use the following:

<h1>conweets</h1>

<h2>Track twitter conversations.<h2>

<p> a short (3 sentences or less) story on how or why to use this service. blah blah ect. If you are interested click the link below to continue: twitter oath here. </p>

BTW how are you planning on monetizing this? Making money and becoming sustainable is my first goal when building new startups.

I am sorry for terming at as a startup, I think its more of a tool. Although, we are looking to increase its scope by adding more features like tracking all the conversation of a single user.

I am working on making "what it does" more clear. Its certainly not stated clearly. Thanks for the advice

If you have a plan or suggestion about other features, do let me know.

the ad placements really take away from the experience you're creating. build a great product people come to use, then figure out how to incorporate advertising.

extra thought: you have the luxury of any monetization approach you'd like -- don't feel trapped by typical display units.

We really don't have any other way of monetizing this right now and need to cover up initial costs, hence the ads. We have tried to keep the ads to a minimum apart from that one big banner ad.

Understandable, my advice is just to be mindful about the trade-offs between the degradation of the user experience and short-term revenues.

Clickable: http://conweets.com

Did you try it?

The nice feature would be when I choose one friend and then the app will show me longest conversations with somebody.

Nice idea. Lets see if we can work out something interesting out of this :)

I have no clue what this does.

On the other hand, I don't think this is a startup.

Agreed. More of a tool than a startup.

very neat, haven't seen it done this way before.

Thanks :)

what's the setup btw.? Ruby on rails, php?

PHP with MongoDB as the dbms

comic sans? srsly?

Hi, where did you see the use of comic sans?

that weird font on the frontpage tweets

It wasn't comic sans. It was Calibri. I changed it to Helvetica now.

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