Ask HN: Rate my startup, Nrds | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Rate my startup, Nrds

nrds.co.uk

21 pointsjparicka23 comments

Your feedback is much appreciated. Thank you! ~ Jan Paricka

Looking at your front page for 30 seconds, I have no idea what you're offering, and so I close the page.

Also, is that top-right page-peel really necessary? It makes it look like you're trying to pile gimmicks onto your page to impress newbies, and by default it blocks some of the text on your page. Not cool.

The "invest in us" page reads more as a gimmick than a real business opportunity. Private companies rarely, if ever, list valuation amounts or concrete prices at which a share can be bought- this makes your company look amateur.

Also, the line "This is an opportunity that could be big enough to IPO, and will certainly have a number of interesting exit opportunities," sounds more like the daily spam in my inbox than a serious business.

This also violates federal securities laws and could earn you a C&D from the SEC.

I find this all v. dubious:

"What’s important about a NRDS Datacube is that it is given so much written material stated in enormously varied ways, covering enormously varied subjects and such exhaustive explanatory information, that when it is asked to do something — analyze text, lookup a reference, or anything else — it is able to understand language rather than merely sort it."

What do your mean by 'understand'? If the message analysed the statement "It is cold today.", what would its conclusions be? Surely 'understanding' that statement requires understanding the experience cold. Please clarify for me.

http://nrds.co.uk/DemoEngineInput.html doesn't do anything...

No dice for me as well.

Also tldr;

A video showing what it does instead of pages and pages of text would be much more helpful.

side note: A speech-to-text interface for your engine would be quite badass if it really does understand regular language. Would be like Goog-411... except better.

side side note: Wolfram-alpha needs a telephone speech interface.

Whoever made the logo copied it from this one -

http://logopond.com/gallery/detail/42366

Thank you to everyone who has given comments and criticism. We do appreciate everything you have to say, and we will be making changes based on your thoughts. Unfortunately, due to a problem with the engine, the demo will not work. We are working on getting it back online as soon as possible. This is unfortunate, as we feel the demo is impressive. Please keep the comments coming - we're taking everything into account.

I was going to ask you if you are testing the demand for such a thing without building it first - I'm glad this is not the case.

I work in natural language processing and couldn't figure out what should I expect from the demo. It is all marketing speak to me. I upvoted the submission in hopes someone would summarize it. Would you please try to explain it to a hacker in one paragraph here?

Ok then, how about saying what the demo would have done, had it worked?

If the demo is impressive, it should be the only thing users see when they visit the site. None of the copy on your website means anything to me at all. Like some other people here, I thought it was a joke.

You need to seriously rethink your copy. I read a few pages of the site, but still have little idea what benefit your product is to me. It reads like it was written by someone's who has english as their second language. Harsh, but true.

* "Unlocking the mathematics of LANGUAGE" means nothing * Demo doesn't work (at least for me) * Page curl in top right is a waste of your and my time * Who are 6com? Their 90's looking site is linked to from every page, yet is in a foreign language * For a company that appears to generate metadata every page lacks meta tags, or differentiating title tags * Typos - "taxanomies", "DemoEngin"

As others have mentioned: it is not clear in 10 seconds what you do. That and your demo is pages of text, nothing I can interact with.

I need to be able experience your product in some way. Reading about your promises of a revolution in looking at data is not enough. It comes across as vaporware.

The page appears to be down for me.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://nrds.co.uk/

It looks like you're competing with these guys. http://www.textwise.com/

I get the feeling your site may over promise on this a little, I get a lot of "the sky is the limit" but not much on what one would do with this.

I tried using semantic fingerprints (from Textwise) to create features I could feed to a classifier for creating a personalized job ad filter. My results were pretty mixed. Maybe I was trying to get the wrong things out of the technology.

The 'Try It Out' and 'Demo NRDS' links don't lead to any demo.

I almost get the sense it's a flat out scam from looking at it... especially as someone else mentioned about the links to foreign language sites, etc, and asking for large amounts of money from investors so upfront...

Is this an elaborate joke, or part of some "alternate reality game"?

This is no joke, we are just unfortunate that the engine went down. Perhaps I asked for a feedback to early?

I am trying to get hold of my colleague to bring the engine up again. I am hoping this will be done shortly.

I agree that the text needs to be looked at - this is the reason why I asked for a feedback.

The main issue with the homepage is that it doesn't immediately capture my interest to learn more. Your buttons on the bottom "invest in us" are large -- bigger than the actual body text!

Instead, why not make two or three super important points that describe your product, and have that take up the majority of the body?

You could also A/B split test multiple version of the homepage, and track which versions lead to more people ultimately trying your product, or clicking on more pages.

Hope this helps.

I would hire a copywriter; the copy seems to be the weakest part of the site from looking at it briefly.

One question I couldn't answer from the front page was whether this is aimed at regular users or is a business-to-business product - I sense the latter, but it's not obvious. Please repost when your demo is functional again.

You have the image nailed down. Perfect. You come off as both casually hip (the logo) and very well established. The little tear-down sheet at the upper right corner is a nice surprising touch, but might quickly get old ;-)

My best wishes!

"this is a document DNA"

What is this supposed to mean, lack of apostrophe notwithstanding?

Also, the title of your submission sounded at first reading as if you were insulting us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com