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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

I'd suggest an extra tier where you can generate a very tiny story without signup to try it first.

As is, I jumped out of the funnel already.

I also jumped out of the funnel and had this “I got tricked” feeling after selecting the story parameters. I’m someone who would use this, too. But I’m not giving you my personal information unless I can see what it does.

You don't have to confirm your email address there. Just enter something random. That's usually what I try on sites like this, when it doesn't work just close the tab and move on.

I know it’s a friction, but we were (maybe still are) a bit paranoid of abuse or bot attacks, as we are using a paid api to roll this thing. One suggestion others gave was to show stories generated by other users, I think that might work. What do you think?

Why not offer a whole library of stories generated by other users that have been reviewed by a human and deemed good?

I'm the target audience for this app, but I don't really want to generate my own stories; I want to read. Generating stories is just additional work for me, and I don't know how good the story is before I generate and read it. If I had access to a library of human-reviewed stories, I'd just read those, knowing that they are at least okay. You wouldn't even have to review them yourself; you could have a system for users to rate stories.

You're selling this as an AI product, but I don't care about AI. I care about learning a new language by reading stories.

We have included the latest stories generated by the community, so there is more content to discover on the app. We can have a look at the voting & sharing features etc. later.

That is really a good idea!

Then subscribers could like/upvote Stories when they like them.

Have beginner and intermediate examples (1 page) available. Also helps show what the real UI looks like. Because the current tiny demo UI is probably not the real one, not sure?

Also, pricing is not mentioned anywhere on the start page or before signup

Provide a free experience that doesn't hit any paid APIs and doesn't require any registration or friction, you'll convert much better.

Conversion can mean paying customers, not just free users.

I could see using this on a mobile/tablet app.

Just have the beginner puppy book available in all languages (or major ones).

1. Generate a story.

2. Make it available for all (major) languages.

3. Profit!

Also, integrate with captcha + rate limit to prevent abuse. Authentication alone is not strong enough deterrent to a motivated adversary.

- Stories generated by other users would be interesting.

- You could look at running a locally hosted model. There are some good story writing ones, albeit unsure for languages.

- Help visitors generate example stories for language pairs on your website ... if a language pair already has one, maybe show a pre-existing one.

.. if it's a new language pair being tested, inform the user it may be shared with others to let them see how the system works?

Yes, consider something like letting the user keep track of "minutes reading" or "word points" after generating a story as the point where you log them in.

There has to be user value to login or nobody will do it.

There is a progress and practice page for users, maybe we should emphasize this better in the main page?

Yes, same here.

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