Ask HN: Would you pay for these services I'm thinking of building? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you pay for these services I'm thinking of building?

13 pointszackattack11 comments

Hey guys,

I have two ideas for startups I'm thinking of building.

Idea One: The problem: firms often struggle with which copy to put on their websites. (Better copy significantly improves conversion rates.) If a firm has the infrastructure to run A/B tests, then that's great, but I thought of an independent solution.

This is my product: The customer/firm enters in two different phrases. They are loaded into my product's database. Workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk service are then recruited and paid one or two cents in order to view a webpage and click on either of the two phrases, which are displayed on the webpage in a random way.

Customers are instructed to click, following a gut reaction as to their preferred phrase. Measuring reaction time and click proportions would give some measure of users' preference and willingness to click/act on given text.

Customers would pay approximately $5/month + $1/campaign (or so). This could especially increase CTR on anything, like a craigslist job ad. If you pay $75 to post an ad, wouldn't an extra $3 be worth it to attract a few more applicants? Any ebay ad, sign, headline, etc? As the product matured we could collect even more detailed demographics, for better targeting and making the sample more representative of specific populations.

Idea Two: It's hard to come up with ideas for company names/domain names. A good company name/domain name will be better for a young business, because the product/etc will be more memorable - people will be more easily able to recall it. So, you give us a few different possible names, and we take a significant # of people in for a study and pitch them your company with the possible name combinations. A week later, we test them, and figure out which ones performed best with either cued/uncued recall. Rates per name test undetermined presently.

What do you think?

#1 will never work well for the simple fact that when people know that they are being asked to pick something without actually going through the mental process of evaluating options and picking a goal, they will not pick in a way that correlates with a larger population that doesn't know it's being tested.

The best way to test something is to try it on people that actually want something and voluntarily are picking something and going towards a goal... and don't know they're being tested. The proof is in the pudding: if the copy works better than a control, it should produce a sale/signup/whatever.

Asking a bunch of people who are working for pennies if they want to buy some product that they have no clue about and are not in the market for, based on a copy they don't even understand well, is a waste of money and would even do you some damage since your customers might be more sophisticated.

Now, if you positioned it for simple, general websites, it might work better. But then again, those sites are not high paying customers.

PS: Look into Google Optimizer: http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

I suppose a principal question is whether the results tend to extrapolate and generalize.

no, statistics doesnt work like that (sadly).

Also, you have no way to check answers. MTurk workers might just pick random to increase their earnings. Random results will just create noise. It's even worse if you have just two options.

I kind of like it. I've worked in contexts where the "decision makers" write terrible verbose copy. It would be nice to quickly see "but here is what the data shows"

For that matter, forget mechanical turk. Get some really bad ass copywriters working freelance for you. Give me a text form where I paste in my A/B copy and an optional explanation... I hit submit and within 30 seconds a professional copywriter has chosen the better copy (extra $ for an explantion etc). Charge $2 per review and make it really simple. I've been in enough "copyfights" that would have easily been worth $2 to resolve. "mechanical turk for copy"

If you go through the trouble to hire professional copywriters (even freelance), you could offer addons as well; like $0.0x/word for professional spell/grammar checking (and other services).

Re #1 - drop monthly and increase per-use fees (to $10-20) and your idea will find its audience.

Monthly fees drag the customers in a long-term relationship that they most likely don't want to be entering. Setting the per-use fee that low serves no purpose. If you want to go after customers with no money, you will get them. Instead however you could go for those who can pay, and you would still be able to acquire them, since the idea works for them as well.

Who would pay $10 or $20 per-use fees ... you?

#1 and #2 are more or less the same thing. I'd phrase the service as A/B testing, and then give #1 and #2 as some of things users can do with it

You need a way to narrow down, among all the people using Mechanical Turk, people who actually fit the user's target demographic. You need this right from the get go.

e.g. What people in India think of my craigslist add for something in North Carolina is totally irrelevant.

Also, I agree with another poster, who basically stated that you should make a generic comparison service, and let people compare anything, whether they be two domain names, two versions of a site, or whatever.

Is this a product you would actually use - the generic comparison service? Assuming we had proper demographic targeting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com