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Comment by benschrauwen | Hacker News Reader

This is really the first version of the editor and we are working on several more features. But a big design goal for us is actually to make it as simple as possible to design electronics. We believe that a lot more people could be designing electronics if the tools were simpler and if you could easily build on existing electronics modules, just like what happens when building software. This is at the heart of circuits.io

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Hi, I have only very basic knowledge of electronics but I was still very much impressed by your software. I cannot suggest improvements on the electronics side but being an online marketer, I wanted to give you some tips for marketing, in case you find them useful.

1) You need to make the final output embeddable, like slideshare, so that people who are creating schematics using your software are able to put it on their blogs and website

2) The embedded version can have a link back to your site, e.g. "Modify this circuit" or better "Run this circuit" so that you get backlinks and the visitors can interact and come to your site.

3) You are 100% correct with the "try it now" button, but instead of redirecting them to a signup page, try using a modal popup over the circuit. I'm sure you'll see a good increase in signups with a split test.

4) You can also create a shareable URL (like tinyurl) where even without signing up a person can send that URL to a friend or post it on twitter/facebook. This will get you even more traffic / backlinks.

Just a few things on the top of my mind.

I gotcha. It's a good start then. I'll definitely keep an eye on it. A couple suggestions: have an option to turn on a grid in the background. Also would be nice to be able to rotate components.

From the help button in the top right, it looks like you can rotate and flip the components. (To GP)It definitely wasn't the easiest to find, maybe have a tutorial video showing how you are doing some of the things like rotating and moving traces to the bottom layer in the main video? Looks pretty good so far though; I might give it a try later with a board I've made before.

[Edit] A grid would be killer too; great suggestion.

[Final Edit] Tooltips on the components/actions would help your goal of making electronic design simpler/easier to do.

  Selecting: Hold down shift and left click elements.
  Box select: Hold down shift and drag a box around the elements to be selected.
  Deselect All: Left click on the canvas.
  Move Element: Just drag it.
  Connect Terminals: Drag from schematic terminal to other  schematic terminal.
  Disconnect Terminal: Left click terminal. Click 'X' .
  Rotate Element: Select element and push 'r'.
  Remove Element: Select element and push 'del'.
  Flip Element Horizontally: Select element and push 'h'
  Flip Element Vertically: Select element and push 'v'

Thanks for the help!:) I totally agree that we need tutorials and videos. Sorry about that!

Definitely contact us if you have any trouble.

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