Review my startup, Listnerd.com | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup, Listnerd.com

listnerd.com

29 pointsstormen45 comments

Speaking as someone who has built this product before, I think you'll run into the same outcome that my product, Well, Bagcheck, Listly, Listgeeks, and others end up at:

It doesn't actually provide any value.

It sounds really harsh, but unfortunately, that's the reality. People show up, make a few lists because it sounds fun, but you don't give anything back to them. You don't end up getting information that isn't already more readily available (and more useful) in other forms. There's this notion that people will carefully curate lists of things they care about, and it's true that they do, but only for a few days. There's no incentive to come back and maintain them because they aren't getting anything back out of it.

You can certainly say that I'm cynical and/or jaded from having built this and seen it first hand, but I think there's a reason why none of these sites ever stick. I don't believe it's due to them being built by bad engineers, or being implemented in a way that doesn't work, it's just that it's a feature and not a product.

Let me add to what ctide has to say by asking this:

"What problem does it solve?"

Seriously, what problem are you solving? It has to fit in 2 sentences. If you can't come up with a concrete problem that this is solving, no one will pay for it.

May I ask, i felt the same way but I myself am not much of a facebooker who likes t share his life, post on twitter or post on pinterest.

Maybe its just me but all those ideas are the same arn't they ? They just need enough people to participate and it becomes fun, meaning its enough for people to come back. If people all left facebook there would be no reason to post status updates anymore, same goes for twitter. They dont actually have the kind of value that people are willing to open their wallets for (and people dont, im sure if facebook started to charge for their accounts many people would leave). In the case of listnerd isnt it the same. If the marketing efforts are good enough then why couldn't it follow the same trajectory as the other social sharing apps?

Personally I have always wondered why people want to share their life online and hence why I personally dont have an interest in social sharing apps but many people do. Now people are more open online then with their own families and this is just another different way to share so my question is what makes this different then any of the other social (post what im interested in) sites that have been so successful over the last couple of years ?

The thing you're missing from that list is thingist, which is my "lists" app.

Yes, it does provide value. Thingist has become my, and the few other people that have run into it's:

Photo sharing site

Bookmarking site

Music playlist site

Shopping list

Link aggregator

Blogging platform

Etc.

I've been keeping "songs I like" for almost two years, and it has replaced grooveshark or spotify for me.

So yes, lists do provide value.

http://thingist.com

(sadly I haven't worked on thingist much in the last few months. Depression is a bitch like that)

I would argue that thingist is actually a micro-blogging platform that has renamed tags to lists. :)

Mine (http://lists.io) turned into a useful app for me as well, but I had to deviate pretty far from our initial idea (which was nearly identical to this) for that to happen.

I think we actually talked to each other a while ago :)

I think you're forgetting a few candidates. Ranker.com and Listverse.com both have massive amounts of traffic; and they're based around lists - albeit with a far worse UX than Listnerd currently offers. So I wouldn't write off lists based on the ones that haven't made it; it's like saying Facebook can't make it because Myspace failed.

That being said, I really believe in the value of lists; it's why we created the site after all. But: thanks for your input. We'll work as hard as we can to prove you wrong :)

Ranker and Listverse aren't social listing sites. They don't prove your model.

Actually, Ranker is. Users can both vote on, "re-rank" and comment on existing lists, in addition to being integrated with Facebook and Twitter.

You're using

Which means mobile devices will not zoom out to display the screen as it appears on a desktop, which is what you do when you're using a responsive design. But you aren't using a responsive design, so on a phone it appears only showing 320px of the page, rendering it unviewable and unusable.

Take that out OR implement a responsive design.

Sorry not to give feedback about the idea, I don't really have any, but fix that. It'll help ya out, especially while this is on HN.

Thanks for the input! We're hard at work with a mobile version (should have went mobile first...), but it's on its way - 2-3 weeks shy of a release. We're doing a responsive theme, but right now, everything just sucks. Sorry :(

Yes, so you need to take that meta tag out of the header. Then it will look find, just really small, on a phone.

If you need any help with that, give me a shout

Sorry if this sounds harsh, but why would anyone ever use your site?

It's well designed and does a lot of the marketing, web-design-y stuff right, but I can't see any reason why I'd be motivated to start using your service.

It really feels like the product first anti-pattern. The first thing you should think about if you want to create a serious business is "Who is my market? What am I selling? Why would they want to buy it?". You don't have to have a boring answer to those questions, you just need an answer.

We're selling user-generated and user-curated content to everybody with a passion. We're Pinterest for lists.

To separate good products from bad? To find the best wine, beer, CMS system, programming language, cities to visit, video games to play, websites or even banks - all based on user-contributed votes? To engage in discussions around the stuff in your life you care about? I can think of a lot of reasons you could be motivated to start using a social list site.

Thanks for the input :)

I'm posting this first, will give a review of the product as a 2nd comment:

1. The dropdowns for registering birthdate are very unusable since I can't type in them. Trying to search for the year I was born by scrolling is hard. Can you use a standard HTML dropdown?

2. After registering I got redirected to: http://www.listnerd.com/error/404

but I had filled out a title to a list I wanted to create, I thought it would create that list once I was registered.

3. When I clicked "Create List" from the 404 page, it redirected me to the login page. I just registered so I assumed I would be logged in.

4. After I tried to login I get redirected to: http://www.listnerd.com/?login=nserror

but since its a modal dialog I can barely read the error which shows up below it.

So it seems you may not have the non-social login/register side stuff completed but for obvious reasons I don't connect my networks to random sites :)

Here's the problem with crowdsourced lists:

100 Greatest presidents: #1 is Richard Nixon http://www.listnerd.com/list/top-presidents-of-the-usa

You don't get serious lists. There's always trolls, or people that are uninformed adding their 2-cents.

Hmm.. I don't agree with you. There's always going to be trollers, but look at reddit; they managed to crowdsource links. If you can crowdsource links (with all the hazzle of Indian SEO-spammers, bloggers wanting traffic and corporations wanting to push their products), lists should be do-able too. But I acknowledge there's a real challenge there, for sure. Thank you for your input :)

I thought it was rad! I found value in some lists as well. I think you've got a lot of potential and hell, if you're about the experience and helping people discover, then keep rolling with it!

I must warn you though, I've been down a similar road relating to intention, all the while thinking in the back of my mind that I can somehow flip the switch and create monetary value. It didn't work like that.

If you're not being true to yourself with your motives for the sake of justifying where the project currently is, then take a step back and re-evaluate what you need to do to achieve your real motives/desires with the project. This is a personal suggestion stemming from my own experiences and is not meant to be offensive in anyway. Good luck!

Thanks for the input - and the praise. To be honest, the value in our lists is limited so far. Some are really good, but we need to keep improving both the content and increase the number of votes on the lists to actually create really good, unique content. That's our number one priority these days. Will definitely remember what you said about not expecting monetary value any time soon.

Dude, absolutely love it. I've seen this a few times before but this one has huge potential. The product looks social. All it really needs is randomness".

Not sure what the word is, but best I can describe it is randomness. Link bait. Link cycle. Idk. Keep me going. I view one, okay. Don't make me hit back and type something else in. Take what I've seen already, suggest alternative content on the side, keep me clicking like YouTube does. Make me kill time before I even know what's happening.

Do that and you really have an amazing product. I could see myself wasting hours with stuff I'm interested in, just keep me going.

Thanks a lot :) That's an excellent suggestion! We'll try to implement it asap. And kudos to you for seeing what we also (think we) see; which is a market - and need - for user-generated, collaborative online lists :)

I think it's really hard to review it without understanding the goals of the project.

Are you trying to make money with it? Are you trying to grow it to 1M users? Are you trying to build a feature for Pinterest to buy?

You're getting a lot of different opinions here. Some are saying its a wonderful, social product with a lot of potential. Some are saying you aren't solving a real problem, which gives your project a fairly short shelf life.

It just depends on the goal, what do you hope to achieve with it? I've always had a hard time evaluating things without knowing this.

Good input :)

The goal is to build a number 1 traffic destination; a kind of Pinterest or Youtube for lists. At its heart, Listnerd is a social discovery and recommendation tool. We want to help people separate good products from bad. That's our main goal. Everything else comes second. Money isn't the primary goal - or even the secondary. It's just a tool to create the site we want.

You've got some input sanitizing to do.

http://www.listnerd.com/item/tse%3Cscript%3Ealert%283%29%3B%...

Thanks a lot! We'll add this to the todo list in Basecamp asap!

I'm hacking together something very similar to this right now, actually...have you considered doing a Pinterest for lists? Instead of the user curation component, doing more of a "make lists for me that are public on my wall"? Like, "Countries I've been To," "Movies I Want to See," "2013 New Years' Resolutions." Etc.

Your site needs a 'Pleases & Sparkles' button.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/155927/if-it-pleases-a...

I like it.

Clicking on "Create New List", when I am not logged in, should ideally show the overlay without taking me to a different page. At least thats what I think.

Hmm... Noted! Will put it on the todo list. Thanks!

To be frank, this isn't a startup. This is a weekend project.

Also, the generic random background photos on the homepage just don't make sense.

Hi. Listnerd is a bootstrapped startup. So far we've invested 100k into it. Listnerd is a startup owned by our media company Omega Media, which has a yearly revenue of roughly $1.2 million USD. So I'd say it's a startup. Thanks for your input!

Did you come across Well in your research? http://well.io/

I'd like to throw another social list-agregation service in the pool: https://getamen.com

Yeah, but it's not directly comparable. They let you rate stuff, but it's not very granular. It's just "amens"; not up- and down-votes, or even a 0-10 scale, like we offer. It's quite one-dimensional.

No, actually we didn't.. But it's certainly a great site. Looks really nice. But, as I said to someone else, it's quite one-dimensional - as it only offers "hearts" (upvotes). There's no granularity in the rating scale. We offer up- and down-votes, in addition to a 0-10 scale. I think that's quite important for a social list site.

It looks like you don't escape content of submissions, allowing XSS attacks to be made.

Thank you, on it now! Do you have a specific page/input field in mind?

stormen, send me an email and I'll give you some original ideas to implement. I'm starting to get depressed seeing a well designed, well coded (probably) yet another list aggregator, music service, social whatever.

Thanks! Will do :)

how is this different from https://bagcheck.com/?

As I also answered for Amen and Well.io, their site is quite one-dimensional - as it only offers "likes" (upvotes). There's no granularity in the rating scale. We offer up- and down-votes, in addition to a 0-10 scale. I think that's quite important for a social list site, atleast if you want to be serious about rating and ranking stuff.

Why the downvote? The up/down or a 0-10 scale is a UX choice in the voting mechanism, but I am not sure how that is a major differentiator.

Feedback: Since your intention is to recommend relevant items you might want to optimize the referrer experience. It took a lot of clicks to go selecting a list to accessing the relevant content. E.g it took me 3 clicks to find http://www.listnerd.com/item/savant-1, and then I gave up on finding the artists music or a link to it on that page. On bagcheck it takes 1 click to access the relevant referral link.

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