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Comment by lleu | Hacker News Reader

I specifically tracked this problem and built https://lleu.site to try and get businesses in my city off of social media.

Built a menu editor. Has a built in blog and image galleries. Events calendar and event posts. Has a single page simple mode and multi page editor. Contact form with message intake and forwarding. Easy UI that I don’t change underfoot every quarter so its consistent. Works on mobile and low powered devices as well.

Kept the monthly price low and I’ve done cold emails, mailers, newspaper ads, online ads.

Still barely any takers. Probably a bit of a branding thing. Maybe its something else.

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"lleu.site" might not be the clearest in regards to what the service offers. It reads too nerd. Something like "easyweb.site" or "yourown.site" might better describe it.

Thanks. I am definitely injecting too much nerd. I just couldn't help myself. I do have alternate urls available but point taken. I should probably redo the branding.

My first reaction was that it was visually intimidating for a non-computer person. I went through the workflow of the demo and it was pretty easy, but I suspect most people wouldn't make it that far.

Appreciate the feedback. Would you mind highlighting anything in particular? I can take it. My main efforts went into the platform. I admittedly stumbled through the landing pages. Wasn’t sure how far to take it. Most of my designs end up rather simple but I was concerned it wouldn’t attract people. Its terrible if its having the opposite effect lol

Clutter.

IMO the four designs that I saw as examples are not attractive enough. Especially coming from the editor's builder, they should make a stronger showcase.

The examples look fine to me.

Potential customers want to see the menu (or product range or similar), location, a couple of pictures. It's supposed to give useful and necessary information. The intended purpose is:

Before: your cafe does not have a website.

After: your cafe has a simple website where people can see the menu, hours, and location.

This tool accomplishes that, and looks fine.

It's not supposed to give the viewer an aesthetic experience so novel and surprising, subverting the entire paradigm of cafe menus, to leave the viewer questioning reality and rethinking their entire approach to life.

Why use this tool that looks vibe coded when you can also use wix (which sadly also looks vibe coded nowadays)?

I appreciate everyone’s feedback, but it wasn’t “vibe-coded”. I’ve been in software over ten years and am targeting non-technical users.

I’m aiming for a mix of dazzle and simplicity.

Wix is at least $10 more per month. The intention is to keep the price low without making it impossible to afford to operate on a smaller scale.

Many small businesses have nothing approaching what tech businesses consider a low budget.

If your product works as described, I think it would be great for a lot of small businesses. The only problem is that your potential customers don't know about it, and there's no easy way to discover it.

Restaurants generally have low margins. What brand recognition do social media platforms have with an average person? How much does it cost a restaurant to list themselves on social media? That's your competition, widely-known and free.

You'd probably have better luck if you gave them an actual dotcom address, and you managed all of their online presence for them (Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, etc.). But even then it's hard to compete with free, especially when your prospective customers are stingy.

Edit: I suppose you're also competing with Uber Eats. You can already see menus there, whether you want delivery or not.

I noticed users in the United States can't sign up. ("United States" is not in the list of countries in the required Country field, and it's also excluded from "18. Regional Service" is the Terms of Service.) Is that intentional? It could be part of the reason for the slow uptake.

Yes, my primary concern is serving the Canadian market at present.

I wouldn't have the highest confidence in the results if I open up the homepage and my fans rev up tbh.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. I’ve tested it personally out on some real clunkers. Maybe the animations on the landing page don’t play nice with every browser… Hard to know without more details, but I guess I appreciate you checking it out either way.

It doesn't look like they're "trying to say" anything. They said it.

They opened the homepage and heard and/or felt their fans rev up, which didn't leave a good impression. They don't have confidence that your product/service is worth paying for (perhaps not worth using even if it were free).

There's nothing else to figure out.

Yes, it's the animations. They're very intensive in general but especially the ones that AI-generated sites like to use to get around the basic attempts to block them. I was admittedly a bit hostile because the frequency, intensity, and hiddenness of animations is becoming an increasing aggravation across the web, and more and more frequently they're disregarding my OS/browser settings to disable animations.

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