KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback | Hacker News Reader

KnowledgeBid - YC applicant - looking for feedback

knowledgebid.com

15 pointsrwebb47 comments

Very cool. One small suggestion, and its probably just me being picky. I would advise removing that little graphic on the right of the woman on the phone for the customer support. Everytime I see those I associate it with late 90's web stores. They are way overused..

ha! how could we remove stephanie!? also, our target users have just gotten used to using "late 90's web stores" :)

seriously though, we're trying to figure out how to make people feel comfortable when they come to the site. we ask for a lot of information and are presenting them with a pretty ridiculous proposition. i'm not sure if stephanie gives us more or less credibility, but it does put a human (albeit stock photo) face on there at least. figuring out how to get people comfortable with us and what we do is definitely one of our next big challenges.

Very good point. I was not considering your target demographic, but that makes sense. Getting more users is way more important than small stylistic changes! Good luck.

Zoiks. I think the usual YC advice is "take half the text off your front page". Take 95% of the text off your front page.

That's definitely what folks are saying here. Our next big challenge is to make the random people who have information our buyers are looking for comfortable when they come to the site. These are generally folks with little or no net acumen that we've contacted out of the blue. If making an uber sleek web 2.0 landing page is the way to make them comfortable, then we'll absolutely do that.

I'm actually going to go against everyone else and suggest making it messier. I think with a site like this you actually benefit from having some ridiculous graphics, a la the million dollar homepage. Right now the site is difficult to read, but that's only because there is too much text too close together. The problem with super clean is that it gives the site an empty feel. Throw in a few gifs to give the site a little personality and it makes it feel like there's something going on. You can always clean it up later, like what Amazon and eBay have done recently and MySpace will probably do in the future. Some might argue that eBay should have been cleanly designed from the very beginning, but personally I think the initial garish layout probably helped it to gain traction.

The only trick is you still need a way to convey what the site is about, make it easy to navigate, and display whatever information the user needs to see on any given page.

thanks? my sarcasm meter is broken. i have no idea if you are serious.

I'm completely serious. Unless I'm being completely fooled by randomness, I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of the top ecommerce sites have started out messy and have gradually become more clean AFTER gaining a following. eBay, Amazon, alibaba, yahoo!, epinions, squidoo, etc.

Perhaps the trend reflects the fact that they finally worked out which one is actually better.

If the user knows what a site does and what they're trying to do, then it makes sense to have a really clean design that gets them where they're going in the fewest clicks. But back in 1997 most of eBay's prospective users didn't know what eBay was, what they were doing there, or what eBay could do for them.

Hypothesis: The less the users know what the site does and what they want to do, in other words the less clear the goal, the less important it is to minimize the number of clicks to reach that goal. And the more experience users have with a site, the more important it is to streamline the process.

I think premature optimization applies to not just code but also design. For example, joining the Wikipedia community is probably much more difficult now even though the meta pages are much more ordered and clean than a few years ago. Whereas when the community pages were a hodgepodge of random crap it was a lot easier to just jump into the community and start contributing.

Eww.

Don't do that.

If you want, make some other, throwaway messy version, host it on a different domain, and prove to yourself that messy is bad.

BBS's had personality. Hacker News has personality. And they're clean. Trying to make a website seem like it has personality by deliberately making it messy is an example of the worst kind of superficiality -- superficiality that lies about it's origin and intent.

Authors start with a blank page, so if there's something there then it's probably there for a reason. It doesn't really make sense to claim that the ecommerce sites of the past were messy "by accident" but that doing the same now would be superficial. The design of Hacker News is great, but I don't think there's one Ultimate Best Design that should be applied to every single app.

No, but you also need to have a very clear design which transmits a mental model of how your site operates. I'd be skeptical of a site that was messy and over cluttered especially if I was going to be using it to trade knowledge!

I think a clinical, empty look wouldn't do, but adding more mess is the wrong direction.

If clutter made it harder to form a mental model then everyone in Vegas would be lost.

edit: But the reason everyone isn't lost is because Vegas is basically one straight road with flashing lights on the sides. Which is more or less what I'm proposing.

Also, I see your point about the knowledge seeking demographic. Not sure whether I agree or not. For every Jimbo Wales looking to hire a philosophy postdoc, there could be a hundred MySpacers looking to hire someone to clean out their bongs. Or maybe not, who knows.

Also, on a different topic, there should be a way to embed ads for experts onto my blog or homepage.

Thanks - this is on our to-do list as well. You could use SpringWidgets now but we'll probably make a Digg type widget down the road and let bloggers embed referral codes in it.

I really like your tagline. It immediately framed what the site is about. I know that's the point, but still, I really like it.

hey thanks! that's great to hear. we played around with a bunch and thought those were best.

No problem. I suppose you want some real feedback too. From what I can tell about YC backed sites, they are usually very, very, very clean. What I mean is: your homepage is too busy. Going along with my original comment, you should drive your tagline home.

Chop out everything that isn't necessary. In fact, the only thing you probably need to have is exactly what it means to sell and what it means to buy information using your site.

Make it as clear and simple as you possibly can.

From the way your design looks now, it seems that you're trying to have all your bases covered. It's a good impulse but you can do that in better ways.

But anyway, good luck on your application.

awesome feedback. you are 100% right about trying to cover all the bases. our testing has shown that people don't read anything unless they have to, so putting the actual guts of the market in front of people helps them figure out what is going on.

In fact, your tagline is so good, I would emphasize it even more. Remove "The Information Marketplace". That means nothing. Make "KnowledgeBid" smaller. Make "Sell what you know. Buy what you don't." bigger. I would even put it before "KnowledgeBid". That pretty much says it all. Sounds like a good thing. Hope it works out well for you. Keep us posted.

We've heard that from others as well - thanks very much for the feedback!

Good concept and I would suggest the following:

(1) Instead of all those messy listings you should have a GIANT search box right in the middle a-la google.

(2) Drop the categories. Work on your search algorithms instead.

(3) Make it much easier for visitors to identify themselves right on the front page: freelancer, employer, curious person, etc

(4) Write down top 3 reasons for why you are different from craigslist or jobster. Make those reasons obvious and apparent on your front page.

Good luck!

thanks very much - very interesting feedback and ideas

Wow. That's something good enough to actually use. I might just do that. It sure beats craigslist.

THAT is what we like to hear :)

By the way -- you need to separate preferred name from official name, since you use the latter to search authenticate and search public records, but that isn't obvious.

Ah that's a good catch. Thanks! We should note that the name on your driver's license is preferred. The system can actually disambiguate pretty well (I go by a random name and it asks me clarification right away) but it obviously doesn't work all the time.

We just reset your account so you can try to authenticate again with your official name if you like.

About the site I personally don't like to see all that text displayed right away, it looks too crowded for me.

Good luck.

Thanks for the feedback - definitely a consistent message here that it's too busy.

I'm a designer, in my opinion if you want to have all that info displayed in the front page you may try adding a margin to the .question_list class and maybe changing your font-family in the class .description to Verdana (also you should add more font-families in case the user don't have that font).

I'm just saying that you should let your page breath. ;)

Thanks for the technical feedback. I'm responsible for implementing the chaotic front page.. sorry. :(

I'm assuming you're suggesting Verdana for the class .description because it's a little more wide than arial at 11px? I've been switching between the two.. but it's pretty apparent now that the page needs some more 'breathing room'.

Good luck with your startup!

Try playing with font families, sizes, margins and line heights ;)

Where did the current listings come from?

I wondered that too, and also wondered if there is some sort of template which the buyers use. If that's true, the template approach hurts because it blurs all the buyers together when they probably need help differentiating their request.

there's a set process buyers go through to create a listing. not sure if that's what you mean by template...also not sure what you mean by blurring buyers together...

The buyers info always starts with something like "We would like to speak..."

I wondered if there was some default text in the set process buyers go through when they create a listing. Perhaps default text that started with "We would like to speak...".

Because all the blurbs start out like that, I found it hard to skim over the list (hence the blurry comment).

This may not be your problem, it may just be that all your buyers are just copying each other. Does that explain my comment any better?

Ah yes, that does clarify things. We've helped our buyers write their first listings, so that's probably why they look similar. The steps that buyers go through prompt them for specific data points that help them create complete listings, but the description you are referring to is just a text field. It's interesting that you were scanning those - I just did as well and the similarity of the text jumped out at me too. Thanks for the feedback!

If you're helping them write the listing, suggests they simply say what it is they want.

Obviously they could like to contact people. They wouldn't be on the site otherwise.

Good point!

about half of the current listings came from our beta group of buyers, the other half we put up and are based on what we came across in our market research. we are only promoting the listings that are from our buyers though. if we received a legit bid on one of the other listings, we probably would accept the bid and talk to the person about how they happened across the site, what was confusing, what they liked, etc.

i looked at this space/concept a LOT years ago. lots doing .. nothing made it. except for fortune tellers on keen. even google closed up shop here. Q&A markets are free on yahoo because online non-social info is free and low value. high value stuff is service provision (ie. doesn't scale in time) and the good people get good rates w/out messing with internet customers who tend to flake out (just try renting an apt on craigslist). i don't see a way this works, but sure is a great idea.

thanks for the comment - very cool to hear from someone that is familiar with the space! we've spent a lot of time looking at GA, YA, Keen, GLG, etc. - if you're interested in discussing further shoot us an message via:

http://knowledgebid.com/contact

lots has changed in the last few years :)

joe is bummed none of you tried to import your linkedin profile into your account :)

When did you launch?

the site has been live for a couple of weeks but we haven't told anyone except potential sellers/consultants. we have a small number of buyers and are limiting to that for the time being.

I could tell you what I think about your app, but that would be $250.

Seriously, looks like a combination of KM and one of those bid-to-program sites. Beats me what the market is like. I like the general grid layout you have, but like others have mentioned, perhaps a little cleaning up is in order.

...add in a little VoIP and identity authentication and you've got it.

clean up is definitely on our to-do list.

thanks!

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