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Comment by lukifer | Hacker News Reader

Rule #1 of a release announcement: don't assume we already know what your product is. Every time you fail to give a 1-sentence elevator pitch in your blog post, hundreds of potential customers say "meh" and hit the back button, taking their thousands of friends, family and colleagues with them.

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I was actually coming to HN to say the exact same thing. I assumed the link to "Cheddar" in the blog post would give me some information -- also assumed that the logo would take me a top page that would have information about the product.

What I have learned: * Cheddar is out for Mac * Cheddar is opensource for iOS * Sam is the creator of Cheddar * Archiving is not supported

What I have no learned: * What Cheddar is * Why I should care

>>What I have not learned: * What Cheddar is * Why I should care

Anyone want to summarize those two points?

Todo list app.

It's a little depressing how underwhelming that answer was.

What I learned: "Cheddar has shirts!"

I'll give it to them that, for the first 2 seconds, I was starting to get very curious. After 3 seconds, I was gone.

And also I think it would be a good idea to put an easy link to the main site at the top of your blog, and maybe that 1 sentence elevator pitch as the subtitle.

Your main site mentions nothing about pricing. I'm assuming it's all free at the moment, will it always be, are ads part of the plan or will premium features be turning up later?

[edited to be a little less abrupt]

If there hadn't have been some discussion here I'd probably have not dug deeper. Looking at the info page for the desktop app I saw a mention of Cheddar Plus, and not finding a mention anywhere I else I signed up to see if there was more info.

The free sign-up appears to let you have unlimited tasks but only organised into 2 lists, and for either $1.99/month or $19.99/year you can get Cheddar Plus for unlimited lists.

I'm not saying they're wrong in this approach, but my gut reaction was that it felt 'off'. Thanking on it a bit, if it was me, I'd probably have limited the total number of tasks in the free account, but left the number of lists unlimited.

I'd want people to be able to organise lists however they wanted, but find themselves running out of task items. If users have a limited number of lists before they decide to buy a Plus account they can only create muddy generalised lists, rather than specific well organised ones.

With users able to create better organised lists the app would hopefully seem much more useful and organised and leave a more positive experience.

I was very frustrated by this. The feeling was only compounded when I couldn't easily find an "about us" link. Eventually I did, but that only made some vague hand waving about organizing life and syncing between devices. I'm still not sure what this is all about.

This.

I had to click through the blog and try really hard to find out WTF the app is/was.

Also, screenshots.

Yup. It would be trivial to add an explanation right between the first two sentences.

"I’m super happy to announce Cheddar for Mac is now in public beta. [Explanation Here] You can download it here."

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