Show HN: The best thing I made nobody uses

StavrosK, I hope that you've posted this looking for some feedback, because after seeing your site I really wanted to give you some constructive criticism.

If you want more people to use it, I'd suggest making your site more clear and easy to understand. I find it extremely frustrating now. Let me take you through what's going through my mind. Firstly, I have to tilt my head looking at a half formed image, and even then, I have trouble wrapping my head around what's going on.

I look to the right, and it's asking me to log in. Ok, but log into what? I thought this was a browser plugin? My two choices are Log in or "Persona" ?

Still struggling, I carefully read the description text in the bottom right (however at this point, you've already lost 99% of your audience).

"Just drag the browser button to your bookmarks bar to install." Great! Let's try it out. Wait, what browser button? I try clicking and dragging around everything that resembles a browser button, but I can't figure it out. At this point, I give up.

It's very frustrating, and it's a shame, because it's probably well made.

To make it better, I'd explore doing the following:

First, the low hanging fruit. Move your "Share your links, easily!" to the top bar. The second 'heading bar' doesn't add anything, and is distracting. I'd also come up with a better tag-line too, one that's less generic. "0.7 seconds to send interesting stuff to your friend!" "Need to share? 'Share now! Copy/paste' is more like 'Copy/waste of time'. 2 fast clicks and you're done."

Obviously, I wrote these quickly and need a bunch more thought.

Then, I want to see screenshots of what it actually does.

[Picture 1 - I see an interesting site, I want to share it!] [Picture 2 - I click a button, select the people, and click done] [Picture 3 - I make a coffee, because picture 3 is unnecessary, we're already done here]

Then, once I'm interested in it, I want to see how to install it. Once again, ideally with screenshots and a very easy button that shows me where to click and drag. Ideally, detecting browsers and showing browser specific instructions.

Of course, none of this stuff will actually save you if this doesn't turn out to be what people consider 'a real problem' worth investing the time and effort to solve, even if it's just 3 seconds to install the browser add-on. But following this advice and making the value proposition and instructions to install it, will help you get that feedback, since you'll be removing the considerable barriers currently in place to get people to give it a shot.

All the best and I hope everything goes really well!

Hey everyone!

I wrote this little thing a few years ago to easily share links with my friends. You just add a bookmarklet and click it on the page you want to share, select who you want to share it with and it emails them. No accounts or anything necessary.

It's been amazingly useful and that's how my friends and I share links daily, but, for some reason, I can't convince people to give it a shot. Any hints or tips would be appreciated.

It's not a very big pain point. If I want to share links with friends, I tweet at them or send a DM, or use an IM client. So I would only need this app when sending a link to a friend that's not on Twitter or IM, which is like once a week. Not a big enough need to install a bookmarklet.

That said, it does appear pretty well done. I would consider taking the code and pivoting to an adjacent concept - one that you've validated and proved product-market fit.

http://www.ashmaurya.com/2009/11/achievingproductmarketfit/

http://blog.clarity.fm/the-journey-to-product-market-fit/

http://www.slideshare.net/ashmaurya/10-steps-to-productmarke...

good luck

The reason nobody uses this is that it's solving a non-problem.

You can email links to friends just as easily by double clicking on your address bar, copy, go to email, paste.

No third-party browserware required.

It is well designed and I like what you have built. Maybe a couple of reasons why this hasn't taken off.

1. You need to install something. I personally try not to install anything unless I absolutely need to. Maybe this could easily be done as a bookmarklet instead.

2. Just email isn't interesting. In addition to emailing links, you could provide the option to tweet it, publish it to well known blogs, post on fb walls etc.

Alternative bookmarklet that does basically the same thing (only tested in latest Chrome):

javascript:(function(){ var a = document.createElement("a"); a.href="mailto:?body="+encodeURIComponent(window.location); a.click();})()

Unminified:

    var a = document.createElement("a");
    a.href = "mailto:?body=" + encodeURIComponent(window.location);
    a.click();

Personally, the benefit it would give me over IM isn't sufficient enough to download, and convince others to (the latter being the biggest hurdle)

I was actually looking for something exactly like this and was considering building it myself. Thanks!

Ruuttu, you (or your comment) has been banned.

EDIT: After coolsunglasses' reply below, I can see why. That was a mean and uncalled-for comment.

It's always torment to watch your babies languish. You build it, and then it just fizzles. I've got a few projects like that, borne of spare time and such, most of which aren't particularly marketable.

This looks like a far more marketable thing than the last thing I built that nobody uses (obligatory self-plug, http://tweetasenator.com/), which I sort of halfway mention when I get the chance, but doesn't have the ability to make me rich, so despite its utility, will almost certainly just languish as a tool that me and a few friends use.

This looks nice, and while I can't tell if this is the obligatory marketing kickoff post or if you've just noticed that nobody's using it, I wish it well.

Edit: For what it's worth, I'm not entirely sure that this is better than Instahero, which you also wrote, and guessing that it's throwing a connection refused, I guess nobody used it either.