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Comment by wushupork | Hacker News Reader

How is this different from a LaunchRock in essence? I feel like for many consumers, it's very hard for them to imagine the product w/o seeing/touching/interacting with it no matter how great you pitch or describe it. If someone were to describe to me a blog of funny cats or what's essentially Instagram, I don't think I would have cared much and never really appreciate how much enjoyment I would derive from both just from the pitch or description.

On many occasions I've asked people if they wanted x or would it be cool if it did x and lukewarm would be the best description of their reaction. But seeing the live or real version of that x gave a totally different reaction.

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Valid point.

LaunchRock takes a while. While you're waiting for DNS settings to go through, adding a favicon (still not sure why that's required), you could've tried out 10 ideas.

LaunchRock is an amazing tool, but it makes you bring your own traffic to your idea. In addition, it's not the quickest thing in the world.

We envision LaunchSky to be an outlet for trying out your ideas to a sea of evaluators who are ready for evaluating them (and signing up as early users).

This strikes me as a clone of Kickstarter but in place of funding you're giving people the ability to vote, and vote for free.

I think it has its uses but ultimately to me, votes hold no value because they aren't inherently valuable to a user. I would back projects all day long on Kickstarter with someone elses money but I have never backed a project myself.

Think about how downvoting on StackOverflow works. It costs you karma or points to downvote somehting, it's not free.

I think I would probably use LaunchSky as a way to make sure people didn't think it was potentially the worst idea they've ever heard of but outside of that I couldn't place any real faith in the platform for big ideas. I would probably limit myself to posting ideas which I felt I could build in a few evenings.

In some ways this is similar to Launchrock from the perspective of the poster. However, whether or not it's usually true with most launch pages, when you show people your launch page you are implying that you intend to launch. The purpose of posting to Launchsky is to get feedback, in the form of interest and comments. One user might post up five ideas (basically visual elevator pitches) and be able to decide from user comments and votes which idea holds the most promise (or which ones don't stand a chance for reasons X, Y).

I used Launchrock the very first time I tried to "bring an idea to the world" and had maybe 40 signups. Mostly friends. If you're just starting out, you have no idea how to bring traffic to your site, create buzz, or do any kind of online marketing at all, so I definitely see value in being able to submit an idea to a community of early adopters and get at least an inkling if this is something worth pursuing.

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