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Comment by hiddenstage | Hacker News Reader

I hate that you have to sign up before browsing the site. I'd be much more interested in signing up if I can browse with free will.

I'm assuming you can only vote if you sign up? If so, the target sign up market for LaunchSky are devs/entrepreneurs/etc which are usually not the target market of the apps that are using the service.

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Is there a site to browse? It looks like it's just a demo to me ("We’ll be launching LaunchSky early 2013").

(Did not try signing up because I totally agree with you.)

There's no site to browse.

It's a demo / launch page. Sorry for the confusion, but I guess that means it's a decent launch page?

Confusion = good launch page?

Conversions* = good launch page.

I agree this is so annoying. I love the idea though... I have a good idea -> I pitch it and then 100 people start building my idea too. Nice!

Now I don't think having an idea is the same as executing it well, but I could imagine people being hesitant.

Oh and because of the annoying landing page I vow to never to use your site, nice try.

Sorry to have lost you, but thank you for the feedback!

There are tons of people who called Quora annoying for doing the same thing. They also have a tendency to go around in public talking about how they won't use it because it's so annoying. Annoying or not though, it gets people to sign up and many of those same people who claimed to not want to join because of it being annoying end up on the site. Maybe it is annoying but the concept works.

Good thing I am not so insecure about my ideas that I need others to give me validation for them.

I can imagine though that the kind of person who goes to networking events on eventbrite, who starts talking about his 'great and orignal' 'idea' to create an app where people can take pictures of food in restaurants and then let others search these pictures to see whats for dinner around them, does need this validation. (I have actually been to numerous events where more than one person at a single event had this 'idea'. )

I think when your idea is crap, you secretly know it, but after quitting your job and investing all of your savings, it becomes really hard to cut your losses.

It's actually a little inception-esque. You're pitching an idea for an app about ideas for apps.

I think it's essentially light-market fit testing but it actually kind of blew my mind that the site itself poses the same question it hopes to answer for others, "Would people use this?"

inception or not, you nailed it.

I think you should be more clear that it is a launch page on the first screen rather than after clicking the sign up button.

It sort of seems like a Quora-esque "you must sign up to see more" type of thing right now.

I agree. I was kind of annoyed when I thought I needed to sign up to browse the page and of course I didn't.

Ha good catch. I assumed the stuff in the background were already projects on the site, tried clicking out to browse, got frustrated and clicked back.

Yeah, there's no site there. I was fooling around with the CSS trying to get rid of the pesky modal views (sometimes it works), when I got to the page... which was just an image http://launchsky.com/img/bg-app.png. It's a good simulation but I think the author needs to make it a little clearer. I went in and put my email in thinking I was signing up and... nothing. It just refreshed the page I think. Then I went to my email thinking I had to confirm my account and there was no email. So I did it again with the same results. Maybe I'm a noob, but I think perhaps it could be a little more clear.

Sorry! If the product was fully built, we'd of course let you browse.

But for a product that preaches testing before building, wouldn't that be a little bit silly? :)

Do users have to be registered to vote? How will you bring in the non-developer person to sign up to LaunchSky? If I was building a SaaS type app, this would be awesome because my target market would actually be voting. But any other type of app I'd like the avg consumer to be voting.

We'll probably split support in some way.

NOT SIGNED UP: likes/up-vote; something basic SIGNED UP: the above + "i'd use it" + feedback; still have to figure out how to effectively incentivize these users and keep them coming back for more.

This is a great question. Our primary crowd will initially be tech-focused, so if you pitched an idea where your target market is restaurants, you're not going to get people from the community clicking "I'd use it." That said, you would probably still get some useful feedback (other apps in the space, technical challenges, etc), just like you would by posting here. Later down the road, we might be able to offer access to other markets by posting to our site (e.g. select by a market category when you post, we push out your post to a group representing that market).

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