Released my startup MVP Outpost, begging for feedback | Hacker News Reader

Released my startup MVP Outpost, begging for feedback

outpostp2p.com

28 pointsappscript29 comments

Your "About" section is more clear than the descriptions on your homepage. Perhaps you can find a better way to convey your value proposition. Your homepage doesn't tell the average user what you do very clearly. Below are some small copy issues.

"Ride, Rent, and experience a new way to travel." -Either capitalize the word "experience" or lower-case the word "rent". Right now it's not consistent in punctuation, in my opinion.

"With Outpost you can check out many person to person services into one spot!" -change "into" to "in".

"Pick a ride share to get to your destination or just walk there." -You need a better way to convey the value of your site in these small descriptions on the homepage.

I would add: “person to person services” → “person-to-person services”.

So other than the link snafu (maybe quickly code something up to redirect /##### to / in javascript), this seems pretty cool.

I clicked "What's around me?" and immediately I liked the feedback "locating...", felt really snappy for some reason. The geolocation was good (within 200m which is plently for what you're selling). The results were interesting ("Oh there's someone offering a ride to Finland, how cool").

Only at that point did I figure out what you were selling, so you definitely need to work on your copy on the landing page ("Ride, rent, and experience a new way to travel" doesn't cut it, more like "Find rides for sales and appartements for rent from multiple sources near you").

I'm not familiar with the space, so I can't comment on how good the idea is (i.e. what your competition is), but it sounds like a good idea and nice execution.

A suggestion: maybe make it automatically locate me, and show something like 5 results on the landing page already, without the map but just in a nice list, to "show" what you're offering instead of telling through copy, and with a link "See overview" or "See more" or something.

An interface thingy: The flash messages in the bottom right didn't catch my eye at all until I scanned the map and saw them. My eyes were in the top left so they don't even appear in my peripheral vision to catch my attention

I like your home page design and color scheme, but:

- the centering is broken: your information source sites are a bit to the right compared with the 3 steps

- you give me a search box and hint a location, but I don't really know for what... I guessed it should be a destination for a travel but was pretty unsure

- I read P2P as "peer to peer", and I can bet others will too

When I searched for Lisbon, Portugal, I got a ton of results about people that are planning on going there from Madrid, Spain, and offering rides. Clicking on them sends me off from Lisbon to Madrid and got me lost for a while. You should remove the rides from the searches and rework them completely, otherwise they'll provide too much noise and confusion.

Searching for things with spaces presents a lot of labels with the space encoded as "%20".

Overall I like the idea, good work.

Information and search is usually easier and more comprehensive on the original site. With that said, there has to be a good reason for me to visit an aggregation service to view that information. For me this site doesn't do it for me. All your doing for me (in the housing category) is plotting Airbnb & 9Flats on a map, which since there are only 2 sites doesn't add a ton of value for me. I would rather go directly to Airbnb to find potential housing because more owner information and more powerful search options.

Again, I think aggregation adds true value to consumers when you save them from visiting 10+ websites, but not from 2 or 3.

I'm finding the locations for rides to be very confusing. I searched for "Denver, CO" and there are a number of people offering rides.

It says "Los Angeles -> Denver", which would seem to mean it starts in Los Angeles and ends in Denver? I don't think so, but that's certainly how I read it.

Also I want to just click anywhere on the item (in the map view) and have it take me to the details. I find getting to the details link itself to be kind of frusturating.

Overall I think it's really cool. Love the map interface. Seems very polished already.

Really like the What's Around Me button. It's a good way to immediately show people what outpost can do for them. Before clicking it I wasn't sure, as the homepage copy is a bit vague.

It's definitely one of the selling points. Op should make it a bigger button and put it front and center.

I agree with you, I really wasn't sure what the home page is communicating.

Just seeing all of the places for rent near me was pretty cool. By far the best feature.

This was definitely a great feature. One suggestion though.

When you first hit the button it says: "0 results found for City, State, Country". It properly fills in the location, but NEVER say there are 0 results found, unless that's actually the case. It takes about 2 to 3 seconds for the result counter to update (I'm on a fast line so I assume that's purely backend). In that 2 or 3 seconds, I nearly clicked away, thinking there were no results.

I would look into the most efficient way to let the person know instantly that there are or are not results (the accuracy can be refined over X seconds, but what's critical is knowing there are results).

Route numbers and street names are missing from the map -- you just see the outline of where the names and numbers should be [1].

Cool concept, but I'm not exactly sure what your service is trying to do from just a quick glance at the home page; as corylehey said, you may want to change your call to action to something that describes the main benefits.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/wr3FGSY.png

Sorry, that's the link, I can't seem to edit the post: http://outpostp2p.com/

You linked to http://outpostp2p.com/##### which shows nothing. I clicked on the outpost logo and it took me to the home page, but I don't think people will bother giving you feedback if you link them to a blank page.

You might want to look into how you filter the tourism results. I'm from Regina, Canada and the tourism tab gives me tours in Rome, Boston and Bucharest - they seem to grab every listing that contains the keyword 'Regina'...

You've told me it's a new way to travel and that it's easy. But you haven't told me what it does and why I would want to use it. Lacking that it's pretty easy for me to hit the backspace key without ever trying it.

I agree with the points about the "about" screen being much more clear as to what you do than the front page, and that the styling on the maps is horrible... really REALLY don't like looking at it.

It would be great to display the prices in the local currency, especially when selecting the "What's around me" link. Otherwise just having a currency selection option would be good

Feedback: With nocript I got no info on the screen at all until I allowed parsecdn.

Maybe leave some kind of <noscript> thingy?

I like it! I though it had a simple, smooth, and intuitive interface. I tried my local zip code.

What is your business model?

Ideally we want to take a small fee per transaction we send to affiliates and not from the user (so the user always pays what he's offered)

that link appends four #### to the URL which seems like it causes it to break.

Also after looking at your landing page I have no clue what the service does. You say "Ride, Rent, and experience a new way to travel." This doesn't tell me much, other than it does something cool, why not just tell me the #1 benefit to using this service?

I was confused as well. I typed "Austria" since that's the country that I live in. I pressed "enter" too quickly and it brought me to Austin, Texas. It also only has a single match in Austria, which is Hallstatt. I'll tell you exactly how I experienced the website: I entered text, it opened google maps, it showed me destinations on the left and when I click on one it shows me a price. That's where I didn't know how to proceed. What was that price? What does it include? How pay? Which of these routes matter to me? I don't have any idea which one is good or bad, which one is relevant to me. Is this site supposed to be for general holiday planning, or hitchhiking or what?

This is what I get with Ghostery installed: http://imgur.com/RBRny9r

I added a quick fix in javascript for the /##### error. Thanks to relix for giving me the idea.

Comes up completely blank for me. All white, no error, no nothing.

I have no clue what any of this shit on the front page means.

Smart concept, I really like the premise. Two negative points.

First, once it found results for my location, it just sat there with the loading circlet spinning perpetually. Some other locations didn't have that problem (eg San Francisco results loaded after a short while).

Second, the Google maps styling is absolutely horrendous. It's so bad that I'd never use your service because the maps are terrible to visually consume. It reminds me of the flat design style (for GMaps) that someone posted here recently.

Also, figure out a way to get yourself a better domain (as challenging and expensive as that is these days).

Outpost.com used to be Cyberian Outpost, back in the early dotcom days. Fry's owns it now, but they're not using it and there's little traffic still flowing to the domain (and they're probably never going to use it). Maybe they'd sell it.

So this is a Kayak for P2P services. In one place I can book a room on ABB, a car with RideJoy, and maybe a tour with Vayable. Genius.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com