Ask HN: Review our startup (www.chuwe.com) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review our startup (www.chuwe.com)

21 pointssgrove26 comments

Programmers have stack overflow, but what about more general startup-questions? Or question regarding running a small business in general? That's Chuwe.

You can probably figure out the rest from there, but I'll add one more bit. To make it a little more interesting, there's a community-funded pot that'll be dished out to the most interesting question and answer (according to an open vote count) at the end of each month. We'll always start it at $30, so that'll be the minimum.

We have a pretty solid plan for where we're going, but this seemed like a good place to start and get some feedback from everyone..

Thanks for checking it out.

www.chuwe.com

edit: Thanks to #startups for all of their feedback while getting this up and running!

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I gave some criticism in IRC and sgrove asked me to post it here, too. So here goes:

I think the entire design leaves a lot to be desired. The color scheme is distracting. The green draws your eyes directly to a less-important item. The question should be the most important item. (Possibly followed by whether there are answers or not?)

The "answers" should be given at least thesame weight and importance as "votes",

"2 days ago" should probably be removed for the near future. Why would someone participate in a community that has such little activity? You could always put it back if things liven up.

The icons are completely unclear. You explained that the "tag" icon was a hand, but I still dont see it. And even so, not sure how that relates to "tags". And the word bubble is usually used to represent comments not answers.

Thanks, and upvoted.

1.) The point about green being distracting is a great point, something we hadn't thought of. We're working on implementing a gray-to-green bit that corresponds to points (similar to hn) and just stuck it at green for now. We'll be sure to make it to the eyes are drawn to the titles, and not the points.

And yes, the answers are equally important as the questions. Working on a redesign right now.

2.) Good point about the reference time. It's always there, so I somewhat assumed it should always be there, but it may serve as a deterrent to new people entering into the community. Removed until it's less depressing :D

3.) Icons. Got it. The tag icon was an open hand, just like "tagging" someone. We'll change it to something more traditional (being cute like that probably is a bad idea), and adjust the other icon as well - any suggestions?

Just to play devil's advocate, I'd punt as much as you can on the design aside from a few tweaks here or there. You'll always have people saying they don't like this or that about the design, but at the end of the day if that's all they are complaining about you are doing the right thing. If not, prioritze other complaints first. Content is still king.

The main goal of the site should be to get good content in the door and get it distributed to the users. Additionally, before you make any user interface changes from feedback such as the OP, definitely do a few ad-hoc user tests with friends or random people off the street as a sanity check. It's cheap and really helpful.

"The main goal of the site should be to get good content in the door and get it distributed to the users."

Part of getting good user content is removing friction.

I think you're right, but gfodor is right as well. The goal is to get good content, and we have to remove anything that stands in the way.

It's just a matter of prioritizing and focusing your energy on the right area. That seems to be one of the key ingredients of success.

We'll, I've noticed that Ask HN often times comes across as "critique our design". Which is fine enough; we have tons to learn on that side.

And if being responsive means tweaking this minor things, it's no big deal. We're working on ways to build up the content - because you're right, that's going to top everything in the end.

Thanks for the encouragement by the way! :D

Good luck to you. We're in the same business, so here's some advice. The first questions on the home page will determine the tone of the subsequent users.

Currently, when I visited, question #2 was how to start a brothel in Nevada. If you are not careful, you'll end up like Cambrian House, with projects like "congress is corrupt, help me get rid of congress". And then what?

Do not hesitate to moderate by yourself.

That's a very good point. Personally, when I saw this (about two hours after we opened it up), I assumed it was a prank.

There were two choices - delete it, and it goes away, no harm done, but nothing gained. Or try to turn it to our advantage a bit. I decided to actually research it and come up with the best answer I could (having never considered anything brothel-related).

Turns out it is legal in Nevada, and there are a number of stipulations covering it similar to New Zealand. I had no idea before. And that'll come up if someone searches for prostitution :D

I think you're ultimately right, we really have to approach this in the right way to get the highest-content possible. Unfortunately, Cambrian House turned into vencorps before I had a chance to actually use them.

To that end, I'm searching for people who can seed the site with high-quality questions and answers - I hope this was a high quality answer, but I have to admit it wasn't a high quality question.

I'll have to take a more in-depth look at fairbusiness! Thanks for your advice.

If you are not careful, you'll end up like Cambrian House, with projects like "congress is corrupt, help me get rid of congress". And then what?

That wasn't what killed Cambrian House. It was the idea of crowdsourced software development itself. It's as silly an idea as crowdsourced novel-writing. Even if it weren't, the overhead of co-ordinating participants would be an order of magnitude harder than just writing the system.

The inconsistent use of "Chuwe" versus "ChuWe" was the first thing I noticed.

The other thing I noticed immediately was the way the green box didn't line up with the question title. Another minor gripe I know...

How're you planning to seed this? Stack Overflow (from memory) had a private beta seeding period with invited beta testers who made sure that when the general public hit it, they had a great first impression of the amount of content. At the moment you're probably losing a lot of people who drop in, see how little traffic there is, and don't bother posting a question.

If you're going to allow anonymous answers, you should probably have some community spam protection ("Flag this"). Also if you're not logged in, I would put in voting controls as a call to action and to try and get people to register.

Thanks for your feedback - we'll make sure everything is consistent in the next couple of minutes (or so I hope!)

Design gripe noted.

It's an interesting point about content, perhaps we should revert back to some "closed beta" system while we build up a reasonable amount of content?

And we'll work on getting the flag bits in, it was up next anyway. I had hidden the voting, but it's true it should be there as a call to action.

Thanks tons!

I think this is a great idea. Startups need a place to talk. But I question, is this really a startup? By that I mean, is this a potential business that will employ people or is it more of an online forum where people can talk about startup stuff?

Fair question. We don't see much revenue coming from this, it's just the first part that we wanted to open up for public use. As we develop the community and site, we have some plans for monetization, certainly.

For the time being, we're cockroaches - living cheap until we can make it to ramen profitable.

1. I'm not sure what the numbers in the green box indicates. Are they upvotes from users indicating that the question is a good one? Are they the number of replies? The number of views? Perhaps frequenters of social voting sites may know this but even sites like digg say "87 diggs" in the little box.

2. Make the concept of the money pot more prominent. I think its the most important piece of information to display. Try to rework the layout to put it at the top, perhaps next to the logo.

3. Consider asking more questions with your account, then looking up the answer online and answering it. Consider it your personal notebook of business info. I haven't thought about this rigorously, but I would at least give it thought. It would make your site seem more accurate.

4. Users don't want to answer the same types of questions over and over. Consider making a startup 101 page that tries to lay out the very basics of startups that some people seem to be asking. Then users can just point people to that page.

How do I page through the questions? Seems like this could be offered with a modified version of wordpress and you would get way more functionality. Just change blog to question and comments to answers.

Paging - We just launched two hours ago, so just a few questions. Content will of course be our Achilles heel, but we're thinking of ways around this right now.

Using a blog seems like a fair enough suggestion, but this should grow in a pretty unblog direction, so we're building it up right now.

We'll likely opensource this part in the near future as well.

Typo in emails sent out when questions are answered: .come instead of .com

Widen the text inputs on the sign up page, right now they're really narrow.

Fixed the typo, thank you very much. We'll put the forms through a major redesign - after the green for votes, that seems to be the second main complaint.

Well the first thing you should do, is change the font for the answers. Light gray that strains the eyes = epic fail

Epic fail...harsh. But welcome :D

Changed from gray to black. How is that?

One thing that I find confusing is the dotted line that separates the question from the tags. At first (and second) glance it seems that the tags belong to the question below. To be honest I never realized I was mismatching the items until I saw the last question on the page.

theres too much white space in the green box? you gonna fill it up? also i was able to reply to a post without an account, use captcha or something to prevent spam

Well, for the spam, we'll work on it manually for the time being. We want to make it as easy as possible to join in at first, kind of zero barriers-of-entry (would you have posted a reply without having to make an account? What if you got the captcha wrong twice?). No captchas right now, no email required for an account, etc.

As spam becomes unmanageable, we'll implement captchas for anonymous accounts. They're ready to be flipped on with a switch!

The white space in the green box is for the voting arrows, but I think you're quite right. Everyone has mentioned those, so we'll have to work on them.

The design has a whole needs to be more consistent. Several visual elements seem to be working against each other, like the green that was mentioned.

Also, I think the area that is used for questions needs to have more width to it.

Green is top on our hitlist. It's goin' down.

Do you mean the content div should be wider?

Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

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