Ask HN: Does my startup suck?
www.reppio.com
honest opinion/feedback would be appreciated. i want to know what i can do to make it better.
honest opinion/feedback would be appreciated. i want to know what i can do to make it better.
This is the weirdest attempt at reverse psychology growth hacking ever.
2. I would not recommend making another thread, since that is bordering on spammy.
there's also publications that's specific for local lifestyle magazines that's more relevant for me. for example, chicago mag is part of modern luxury and they have l.a. ny miami "mags" etc... you can pay to have it blasted to their user base which is a double opt-in newsletter subscription (risky move that worked for us bc its so targeted - chicks that like lifestyle sht). what i did was get that blasted to approximately 150,000 people (60,000 in chicago) with majority of reader base residing in la, ny, chicago. their average click through rate is 2-4%. the email ad was cleverly designed with a shopping giveaway so when people click through they come to the landing page and then the viral coefficient kicks in to get their friends to also register to get notified when we launch. if i had to do it again i think one can optimize the sht out of this to make it so much better. my was a half-hack job but still worked great.
also our current landing page was optimally designed so that it would naturally get good upvotes on stumbleupon. we had 3k people per month hitting our site via stumbleupon.
reppio being a social commerce player can leverage off of other social commerce sites pushing to svpply and even tumblr to get users baited with pictures and then come to the landing page to give us email addresses. all of those combined plus on the ground and various other tactics led to a significant amount of email addresses ahead of launch. that set we started to blast.
maybe i was premature in saying that techcrunch/tech sources wouldn't be that relevant since there are writers who write in this space and we did hundreds of hours of work on this but to no avail (we also didn't want to hire a pr person to run this and in hindsight i don't think i know pr that well). however, i didn't want to leave it to chance and so i hedged all positions for launch. now i'm sure the real hard work begins in trying to find product market fit / see how i can get re-engagement up from my core set of users. i'm in the business of engagement; that is the single most important variable for my business. just ask that chick who cut a check to pinterest very early on even thought they had a couple thousand users.
this is why i'm going to HN to get feedback from a variety of people. i know that my demographic will be geared toward women. that's natural way for my business to shift focus. but there is a player who has succeeded in balancing a 60/40 split in user base in the lifestyle category. and asking men who probably don't like shopping and seeing if there is any way i can make it cool for you guys to want to engage with my site was the goal of this post.
2. i'm a lifestyle site. why do i care about going to techcrunch or any other tech site to debut my site? it's irrelevant. we also had a landing page up for 2 months while working on the site to grab email addresses where we mixed giveaways and share options to get users. how many of these are "legitimate?" 7,000 are technically speaking; out of the much greater number that just input their email addresses and has yet to verify. time well tell if they're "legitimate" - but shooting for more than 10% at max is probably out of the question. nevertheless, don't question my numbers.
why can you not help by answering my question? isn't that what hn is for? if you downvote a guy who had 1 fake account set up to get things moving (which in fact i technically didn't. just had one of my friends sign up and comment so the aforementioned comment is not valid).
if you cry foul play than you should never vote on reddit since the entire site launched with fake comments to begin with.
you should also go on and comment on dropbox acquisition of mailbox bc mailbox's counter. yeup that was fake.
you should then monitor techcrunch every time a tinder article gets published and comment there since the entire supply side was created with fake hot girls to begin with.
oh yeah btw. techcocktail. their monthly stupid competition that is the core part of their business? it's all fake. mechanical turk wins the race on the last day of voting after 11am. true story.
Legitimately curious
Just launching my own startup and into the customer discovery/ user acquistion phase.
1. Having to sign up to see what you all had turned me off from the jump. Just skipped it. If your product isn't a necessity - don't make registering to use it one.
2. Kill unnecessary fade ins and outs like on the menu structure at the top. Give me a solid look that's as short and fast as a typical user's attention span.
3. As many others have stated, kill the facebook only registration. It's there for a convenience, but making that mandatory is a buzz kill. Facebook isn't for everyone.
When those 3 things are addressed, I'll happily create an account and survey the rest :)
I can't comment on the usefulness because GILT and Fab and the flash sale craze has finally killed itself, but if you market yourself to the right hipsters, I don't see why this venture wouldn't grow in those locations. Think Hyperbeast.
1. social commerce sites typically have a fraction of the conversion rates to normal e-commerce sites. e-mail re-engagement is very effective for return visits. even a simple best of the week gets high open/click through rates. I do agree with you right off the bat is not ideal. However, given the space I play in, I cannot be in the etsy transaction phase to get sign ups --> see fancy (they now have 10m users - what is your opinion of their strategy)? when i showed the first click through page for 10 seconds , my bounce rate dropped to 60% from 70%. do you know what i should be shooting for?
2. great. thanks for the insight. will do.
3. what's interesting is that i have the email sign up option but i guess it's not clear enough. only thing is fb is great from a social user acquisition standpoint. there's embedded virality aspects within the site such as collection and commenting that works great in acquiring super targeted users (their friends). 70/30 of our users opt with the facebook sign up. but you seem to say that we should make email sign up much more prominent bc sign up is better than no sign up. maybe like a wanelo.com look? do you know the efficacy of having google+ / twitter as well or stick to the most effective one on my platform and then just give email.
i'm not in the flash sale business. i'm in the discovery commerce business (what i want to do is create a platform for local retailers to properly market their products/stores without having to get into a groupon scenario to get discovered. gilt/fab naturally has to move toward a marketplace concept because of growth and market conditions: need to move bigger amount of inventory and in a booming stock market scenario, inventory with good deals is not that readily available.
thanks again so much for your comments and i hope to incorporate a lot of the changes as fast as possible. btw do you know anyone who is a pro tablet/mobile/cross browser interface guy that can make my site usable in other states than just laptop on chrome/firefox? my guys do not have that experience.
also if you would like please use the username: rebecca@reppio.com password: guest to peruse the site.
your feedback has been super helpful so far.
3. I didn't see it. Using lazy registration is better viewed through the lens of "What information can I use to grow." With Google+ , Twitter - what information does it give you to help you grow?
Facebook gives you a large amount of information about the user, their connections and more - but the network isn't as hip as it once was - therefore, make both forms of registration equally accessible. - Promote connecting with Facebook after registration for those who chose not to in the beginning. Show the benefits such as connecting with friends, showing what's popular etc to help. Also, beware of relying on facebook data as email address are now "@facebook.com" by default and others have unreachable college email address. Give them the option to change their email address while keeping their Facebook UserID intact.
I'm a designer/developer. My email is in my bio, if you need help just hit me up.
Your photo of NYC on the homepage seems to be ~18 months out of date. WTC1 is finished as is WTC4
the value is that you get to see inventory that you can't find anywhere else and all consolidated onto a single platform. 500 shops. all in 1 place from ny, la, chicago.
is it better to show the inventory? or have a deeper landing page with more info? we have 10,000 curated lifestyle products with a catalog and guide.
what is the best way to communicate that without getting to wordy?
when i had the signup modal two steps in, noone wanted to sign up bc they can get most of their daily dose of cool items fed to them on 1 page. would it be better to have sign up modal pop up after x time? would that help even if it was 10 seconds?
Just my $0.02.
However there's extensive UX research that the "you must create an account to continue" step in e–commerce is the single greatest reason for shopping cart abandonment (it's not quite apples-to-apples for your site but consider it).
As far as communicating: I just so no reason to interact with the service, it seems like a splash page with a sign up. I get no sense of the sorts of stores you represent, the inventory of items available. Why should I trust it? Why should I do business here?
I'm probably not your typical user, I live in NYC and frequently travel to Chicago so the other question in my head is: why would I use this when I probably can walk down the street (metaphorically) and shop direct? What's the value add to me? What do I get by adding your service as an intermediary between me and the store?
Put another way: if I were to come across this site outside of HN commentary, I see nothing that would cause me to interact with it. You don't have much if any press to go by to judge reputation. Your twitter feed is mostly launch promotions.
Your tumblr feed could be interesting but all of the images link just to your homepage, so even if I had an account I'd have to rummage around to find the item I just clicked on.
I went ahead and created an account and what I find are: - yep, the tumblr links just go to your homepage - you have my gender but still display dresses to me - I clicked through both stores and items and: meh, I don't see a strong value here to buying here.
A final comment: you don't have an SSL side set up on your site. There is zero chance I'll "add a credit card" to a site running without SSL.
1) you must understand where i will be getting a lot of sign ups. if it is through press - then the press already spins the story... these people show a VERY high conversion rate http://www.luxandconcord.com/launching-today-reppio-new-way-...
now the problem is while we may get press, there's people coming from fb or tumblr or svppLy who get hooked on the items we feature, but don't know the whole story. so that's an iffy crowd; SOME SIGN UP SOME DON'T. there are techniques to solve that problem i.e. make sure click through from those channels link to the product page that is public. then word of mouth referrals are also super high conversion rate even with the wall right up front. but the last one is of course the toughest: someone like you who has no idea what this site is about. it's obvious that we have't done a good enough job in explaining the type of product / stores and what we're about. thanks for the insight.
2) i respectfully want to point out that you may be missing the point (or maybe i am so you should let me know if i am). you're focused on transactions. i'm focused on discovery and engagement. the transactions will inevitably come. your writing implies that you are a typical male shopper / or engage in "purposeful shopping behavior" and looking to always think about shopping in a utilitarian form. that means you prefer using filters and the search bar. this is in direct conflict with most of my beta users. most of them never use a single filter or search bar. that's funny because the way women shop is for the most part, not utility-driven at all. what you do on hacker news, they do on my site or pinterest or on wanelo. kill time. shopping is a hobby and they love to browse for long periods of time via tangential discovery mode. --> pinterest, polyvore, keep, wanelo.
wanelo proves that generic categories with mixtures of composition in items keeps engagement rates high for women population (just this month they finally came out with actual subcategories). my goal is not for purchasing optimization but engagement maximization. (the bad part of that focus is that it would be hard to make you happy - inherent conflict to your utility maximization - antithetical to most males' online shopping behavior. mens' goal of successful shopping is to get in and get out whereas for women it's to get in and get lost, hence why pinterest and wanelo is 80+% females... and investors in the valley were like "wtf. why would anyone use this pinterest thing"). ironically pinterest and wanelo both had walls to sign up for well over the initial inflection point (albeit i admit much better transparency than what my site provided - so maybe the solution is i allow users to get a glimpse of the site. the way i define business = why would you come to my site to continue to browse each and every day for cool unique lifestyle products (similar to browsing a magazine). if you do that there are numerous way to monetize besides transaction especially as i am focused on providing an omni-channel solution to local shopping experience. online discovery is just the beginning steps.
3) this brings me to "non-targeted product pictures." i can easily create a STYLEseek DNA game and set you as a certain type of user and give you exactly that type of items. you definitely don't have to be MIT kids to figure that simple algo out. however, FANCY with 10m users and 600m valuation has proven that that is not what aspirational lifstyle/tastemaker types like to do when they browse/shop. they like to a) sift through and collect their own, b) get lost into pages c) get introduced to new things in lifestyle/fashion that's happening. if you ask a girl to go on styleseek after 5 min they'll say i'm bored. if you ask a girl to use urban daddy to find bars they'll say this sucks bc "i don't get lost" that is why refinery 29 and bustle are all geared toward women getting lost in content that is loosely connected. at reppio, we connect by style tags. we've curated the initial set but if you want you can filter by style tags. otherwise, my counterargument is what's the difference between going on styleseek vs going to my favorite niche blog or just nordstrom.com? too much targeted discovery actually diminishes value to certain type of shoppers (majority of women and trendsetting men).
it's becoming clearer and clearer how hard the fusion is to accomplish and how tight in consequence the curation has to get. so perhaps you didn't like it because our curation wasn't tight enough. if you look at wanelo and why after wanelo already conquered social commerce for young females, keep popped up (this founder is not stupid by any means), you can tell that the curation is tighter on keep.
4) i would like to explain important of discovery. yes you can walk down the street. nyc has 2,000 mens' shops by the way - 90% crap. are you sure you know all of them? my partners and i spent over 10 years reading every fashion lifestyle magazine bc that is what we love doing and so yes i do know most of them. the chicago shops on our platform - they are not on michigan ave. they are spread out all over the city but still regarded as some of the best mens' shops in the country. there is opportunity cost of time and convenience built into the value proposition whether it online/offline shopping.
also the vision is not 3 cities. we're rolling out SF and Miami in 3 weeks. The goal is to aggregate all of the major cities around the world that's amazing for local shoppping. so how would you shop at tokyo's best paper denim jeans boutique or sao paolo's best sunglass shop? you can't. only at reppio will you be able to. that's exclusive access. that's convenience afforded by hyper local aggregation at a global scale. london, paris, hong kong, buenos aires, syndey, and montreal, and all the major shopping cities are plugged into a single platform with a single checkout process / no language translation and integrated user experience.
5) lastly, great point on SSL. very helpful.
hope i was able to answer some questions you had about the platform. let me know if you had any counter-points / other faults you saw with the product. thanks!
did it really make you not sign up?
Also, I can't tell if your site is like Pinterest, where I flag things I'm interested in, or like JackThreads, where the store's product selection is nicely curated.
we give options for both fb and email but i guess it wasn't clear. power of fb is that one can easily share with each other (product pics as well as comments - if you look at our comment box - you can @mention and it'll get communicated to that person so it reduces the friction to sharing).
thanks so much for your input. last question: did you think that the product catalog was unique and well-balanced? what did you like or not like?
i would still very much appreciate if you can provide your feedback in regards to what you liked and what you didn't like about it.
if you don't mind, i would really appreciate it if you would give it another try on your laptop as i respect the honesty in your answer.
please use the site using the following login info- login: rebecca@reppio.com password: guest
thanks.
btw. can i ask you if you were deterred in signing up bc of the modal that popped up? other people here seemed to be pissed. i've tried to test so many different ways. it seems like if there is a story written about us (pr piece) conversion skyrockets. otherwise, conversion goes down. but if i show inventory and other parts of the site, a lot of people are lazy bc we have a forever scroll function on the shop page so people just browse what they want for 5 minutes and they leave.
any insight would be super helpful. thanks for the compliment!