Please review my site: Pinkdy.com (fertility calendar) | Hacker News Reader

Please review my site: Pinkdy.com (fertility calendar)

pinkdy.com

15 pointsantirez35 comments

This is the classic example of a site that should not have any form of registration to try it out.

How about a big "try it" button, or better still a calendar on the homepage where you can click a single date and it will get you started. I mean that's all the input you need, right? Why force people to enter their email address twice just to see what one of these calendars would look like.

Once a user has had a chance to try it out and decide it's cool, offer a "save" button that prompts for an email and password in a lightbox.

Ok we must definitely do this. Thanks a lot!

jasonkester, that was my first thought also. Instead, show a sample calendar and have the first form or clicks generate an account with a random-character string that can be bookmarked (long enough so as to be difficult to guess). From there, tie all data to that unique string.

The info, save for personal commentary, is of a private nature but unexciting enough that you can possibly escape login-based security.

Alternatively, you could offer password protection as an optional thing.

IMO, if it's possible to avoid a login wall, I think it's worth considering.

Perhaps it's just me and feel free to disagree, but this is a classic example of a site that should have not existed in the first place. It solves a problem that doesn't exist and it does it in a way that is inherently more complex than it needs to be.

I cannot think of any woman I know that would even considered using this. It's like a fridge that orders a milk for you - cool, but useless.

Perhaps, maybe, if it were a part of a specialized established women's site, then it would get some traction, but only as a smaller feature of comprehensive set of services catering to, say, women trying to get pregnant.

In general you are correct, but some women need/want to monitor their cycles.

Consider a woman with a noisy cycle (28 days +/- 5) or with a mean different from 28 days (29 days +/- 2). Such a woman may become nervous about pregnancy on a regular basis: "I'm 2 days late, and my flawed human memory doesn't tell me that this occurs 30% of the time for me. Oh shit, am I pregnant?!?" The service can remind her that this is normal.

It's also useful for women with regularity problems (a detailed timeseries would be useful to show to the doctor), or women trying to get pregnant (not always as easy as condom ads suggest).

Also, consider that you may know women who need this service, but they may not discuss the need with you.

Women with irregular cycle will not rely on statistical analysis to try and get pregnant. They will go and buy a basal thermometer or an ovulation test kit instead.

The "oh, shit, I am pregnant" use case is laughable. Again, the pregnancy testing kit is far more accurate than the statistical analysis and it can be used few days before the first day of the period. No service can do that.

The only case where stat analysis of the cycle is applicable is for people who do not or cannot use contraceptives and do not want to end up being pregnant. This is a negligibly small group as is, and I suspect that its subset of Web 2.0 aficionados is going to be close to zero.

The "oh shit, am I pregnant" case saves women the trouble/worry/expense of using a pregnancy test. Similarly, basal thermometers/ovulation test kits are expensive and annoying. This service occupies the space between "just hope for the best" and "go to the drug store and start worrying."

Incidentally, while a pregnancy test will tell a woman if she is pregnant before the period, she has no reason to worry until a day after it should have arrived (ignoring condom failure).

Why would any woman use a simple and easy cycle tracking service when better methods are available at the drug store? For the same reason you might google someone rather than paying $50 for a background check.

I agree with you that a market for this may not exist, or hard to find.

But, as a fellow entrepreneur I can see that they found a problem (maybe personal) and tried to solve it. I know women that are trying to get pregnant (yes this is an problem) and want to know the best time for it. Would they use a service like this? I actually asked a few in the last few hours, here is what I got back: "I wouldn't want to share it on a site, maybe if it was just on my computer"

"It would need to provide more functionality then to just track my cycle - seems like a feature to some other sites"

There are three things I would look at first and foremost 1. Name - pinkdy really isn't that memorable and has little to do with getting pregnant. With competitors like fertilityfriend and knowmycycle and mymonthlycycles you probably need something that is a little more descriptive 2. Landing Page 3. SEO

When I first read this I thought you were going into a market that was way too crowded for you ever to succeed (in English at least). But actually the top search results for "track menstrual cycle" and "track period" and several other searches are not that strong and with the right SEO you should be able to break into the top results. The landing pages of your competitors are awful. Too much text and too much of it in light pink which is hard to read. A simple high impact landing page could help you beat a lot of your competitors - but that isn't going to help if you cannot drive people to your site with the right SEO.

Two other ideas for you to think about. 1. what is the market like for other languages? Maybe there is a lack of Spanish language competitors etc - it might be easier to get going with them first. 2. I don't know if you can create a widget that can be included on forums, but there are a lot of womens forums around where they discuss all sorts of things. A lot of these women are trying to get pregnant and if you can tap into them on those forums it could be a good marketing opportunity.

Obviously as everyone else has said here, do get the English right, and it could be worth checking if someone in a foreign country uses the site and for some reason feels they want to sue you that you are safe.

Good luck.

This is a very good analysis. Thank you! About the other markets, indeed in Italy there wasn't a single player and actually we are doing well here. I suspect other bigger European markets are a bit harder to enter, and if we should do the effort of good quality translation I want to play big trying entering the US market.

The SEO and landing page efforts are really worth to try, and of course we'll sort out the "Try It Now" thing :)

Thanks!

Generally, I would recommend that for a customer-facing site you either:

1) Have a copywriter who is fluent in the target language write the copy

2) Have any translated copy checked by either a native speaker or someone who is very, very, very, very good at the target language AND the problem domain.

I am not an expert in your problem domain but I am a fairly good hand at copywriting for software sites, and was tired of just doing native checking of Big Freaking Enterprise Apps, so take a look at this for some inspiration:

http://pastie.org/522774

You'll note that I made copious use of HTML markup. If you're writing on the web, you REALLY want to do that. It will make a world of difference in your conversion rates. Also, talk less about features and more about benefits to the user.

Also, in the US at least, PINKDY IS ALMOST CERTAINLY A MEDICAL DEVICE. I am SHOUTING because you NEED TO KNOW THIS. I wrote you a disclaimer in there but I am NOT a lawyer and offering your service in America exposes you to SIGNIFICANT legal and regulatory risk.

That's great, thank you very much for your help! And about the markup, indeed the current homepage is very boring and there is too much text.

I guess that about the issue of pinkdy being a medical device I should check what fertilityfriend and other big players are doing about it. I hope it's just a matter of warnings and guidelines about security of passwords and data...

Thanks again

One can tell just from reading the headings that the page was not written by a first-language English speaker.

This gives a low expectation of quality in the technical aspects of the site. All that text to read, then I have to log-in (no doubt waiting for an email) just to see visually what it does ... next!

A few months ago we created dinamicherosa.com, a fertility calendar targeting the Italian web. Since we started to got users and even if there are already big players in the international market, we are going to launch this English version of the site, with separated accounts and forums.

The point is, we want to do more. The good point about our system is that's very easy to use, but we could love to ear what are in your opinion the killer features of this kind of services that no one implemented already (it's ok if it is very hard to implement it).

Thanks for any feedback.

p.s. I understand HN is not exactly a place were there are a lot of possible users for our service so it's very hard to do feedbacks about it.

You need to get someone to go over the English (record != remind, rapports != sex). (E purtroppo, io non ho tempo)

Also, requiring a login is kind of annoying for those who just want to test it out.

Hello David,

indeed this of a good quality translation is an issue we must fix! It's particularly hard given that the field is very specific and there are a lot of medical terms.

About the login, do you mean we should create one-click disposable account where the user can later insert a username to create a real account? This can be a nice idea indeed. On the other side the registration is very simple so possibly even a fixed demo/demo account with one-click auto login can be enough.

Thanks!

I would make the front page contain the form to get started. Later, if you want, you can register.

Also, your main headline 'Welcome on Pinkdy' is grammatically incorrect, I'm guessing you mean 'Welcome to Pinkdy'?

If you want to see how it works "inside" I just created this demo account:

username demo pass demo1234

It seems like you should whitelabel this and try to sell it as a service to an existing womens or health care site.

Also, for the US, this site may need to comply with HIPPA privacy and security standards.

http://localtechwire.com/business/local_tech_wire/opinion/st...

Indeed if we'll find it's too hard to bootstrap it in a market that is a bit hard for us to enter, to whitelabel/sell it can be a good exit strategy.

Also many thanks for the pointer to the HIPPA thing, it's a good idea to conform even the Italian side to it.

Should comply, doesn't _need_ to.

They are neither a healthcare provider, clearinghouse, or other covered entity.

I know that logo from somewhere: http://www.ampelmann.de/ Ah ja, Berlin!

I would suggest doing a design contest on 99designs.com, or geniusrocket.com (expensive but they do creative videos etc. too) - and see what newer designs you get.

1. The pink needs to go, its not a good association (someone else said this)

2. Need a 30 second video tutorial

3. Show a sample calendar (that no one can change)

Check out this UI dos/don't list that might help: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/23/10-ui-design-patt...

1. cool idea - especially for people planning kids this can point out the best days for...

2. the site is not so appealing visually. Take a look at www.23andme.com

3. mobile access will prove superb for this site - access anywhere and also privacy.

> 1. cool idea - especially for people planning kids this can point out the best days for...

As someone who was actually involved in "planning kids" I can assure you that this site solves a problem that does not exist.

antirez: You need to add more timezones. For example, you forgot India (GMT +0530).

Thank you very much to everybody commented here, it was a very informative thread and we'll be able to improve the service thanks to your advices.

you might add the ability to export the calendar in ical format for inclusion in google calendar or any other calendar application.

Great idea, thanks!

Your error message about unsupported browser (I assume that's what it is) displays in Italian but the rest of the site is English!

You just have to insert your first and last manstrual days.

That's a spelling mistake right on your frontpage.

cycle : desktop alternative (GNU/Linux).

The copy on the home page is good, thumbs up for that!

I am not so sure about the color-sheme. Do you think redish is the way to go with that topic? I am not sure myself but somehow I have never seen a packaging for baby-pills or so using that color. I think it provokes un-good associations. (Yeah, while beeing the perfect fit, but there are moments in where not stating the obvious is the prefered way).

Agreed. Red or pink might be the wrong color considering the obvious association.

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