Ask HN: Review my startups interns startup - BinaryCake [free credits] | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my startups interns startup - BinaryCake [free credits]

14 pointspclark20 comments

We've got a great guy working with my startup (Broadersheet) this summer. He's just launched his first startup - BinaryCake: Development Screencasts - an awesome achievement for a 15 year old.

If you register at binarycake.com and redeem the coupon "hackernews" you'll get ten credits - more than enough for a video of your choice.

The videos are really great quality, they cover topics like Test Driven Development, iPhone Development and PHP.

Check it out, give great feedback here and I'll send it to him. Thanks!!

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Rather than actual critique, here is a user story. It takes place... inside my brain!

diiq's story:

----------

Will there be 250 credits worth of content soon? 5-10 credits a video (maybe), 2-3 videos per month (maybe), that's... nearly two years, if the videos are cheap?

Trying buying credits. Why can I only by credits in these numbers -- why not any number? Some of the screencasts cost 8 credits. I don't want to pay 10 dollars for what you say is only worth 8.

Ohhh! I'm supposed to go somewhere else to redeem the coupon... hunting for the right button.

Found it. Aaand the coupon doesn't work. Hmmm.

So I guess I'll download a preview. Maybe it'll be worth $10 to see more. I'm pretty good with PHP, and I've done TDD, so I'll grab the iPhone development masterclass --- I don't know anything about iPhone development. Maybe I'll learn something. Downloading... wondering why this isn't embedded...

Watching a splash screen and music...

Hmm. Something about a method that gets the number of lines. Whoops! Preview is over.

I should get back to debugging.

---------

It's not a story with very happy ending, I'm afraid.

Maybe it's just me, but I couldn't figure out precisely what you guys did within five seconds of looking at the page, and that is for me a turnoff. I think it's part the color scheme, part the in-your-face layout, and part the overwhelming feed on the left side. If I just took a quick glance, I would think this is a blog, not a startup.

So you do screencasts? What type of screencasts? If that isn't inherently obvious at the start then a potential customer may feel left in the dark. The only place I can be for sure that these are developer screencasts is the tiny "kickass developer screencasts" text under the logo.

Be obvious with what you do! Peepcode (http://peepcode.com/) is an excellent model for a screencast site. By having "Rails" and "rSpec" in big letters to the right of their logo, I know instantly what they sell.

I'm no designer, but that's what strikes me at first glance. What an excellent achievement for a fellow teenager though!

(One final tip, make your <title></title> have the words "developer screencasts" in it. It will help make sure people know what you are giving them.)

It would be nice to see how much 1 credit costs before having to sign up. For example, over at PeepCode (http://peepcode.com/) I can immediately see how much a screencast costs without having to click around. Good luck with your startup.

Hello, thanks for the feedback. We've decide to go with the credit system because it means that we can charge less for shorter, more concise screencasts and it's less confusing for users. Consumers are aware of and understand credits because many services implement them - the Xbox Live system is a great example of this.

You can also head over to the about page ( http://binarycake.com/about ) and see a list of credit bundles you can buy and the costs.

Thanks for the feedback! Jamie

In what way are credits less confusing for users? If anything I would label them as more confusing, as they're a level of abstraction on top of money. They can make good business sense, certainly, as you'd rather hold on to the customer's left-over credits. And consumers can be more likely to spend credits due to the mentioned abstraction layer.

That said, they're a firmly consumer-unfriendly model, for those very reasons. And even then, the "more likely to spend credits" factoid only comes into play once they've actually bought into the system - seeing that it's Yet Another Credit System can be a slight added barrier to entry.

Expanding on this, if every place I spend money online worked with its own "credit" system, I would have upwards of 20 idle balances of my own money earning interest for someone else. Not a very palatable future.

Very well done.

The navigation is easy to use (you can tell he focused on usability), the videos seem top notch (nice background music in the previews), and its useful to me as a developer.

One thing, and its probably nitpicky, is the color. The green and white on black is standard hackerish theme, but I can't do it for very long without it starting to bother my eyes. He might have better results w/better colors.

But yeah, very cool.

clickable link: http://binarycake.com - simply register, and redeem the coupon "hackernews"

Why credits instead of just money via credit card or Pay Pal? Seems like you want people to have some left over and then buy in more and keep going, similar to Microsoft Points. I'd rather just pay exactly what I need to for each screencast.

Tried to review, but "This coupon is no longer valid"

The reason why everyone's having this problem is because I only released 20 coupons, which were used pretty quickly. I've released 20 more - they should work now!

try now

The site looks good, the preview screencasts are good quality and the voice and inflection of the preview I looked at did not grate on my ears (like some other screencasters, not naming any names). Overall, I'd use this, as I have used others in the past.

Coupon not working for me either. "no longer valid"

nope ... still doesn't work

Not working for me either.

working now

Are we supposed to enter "hakernews" once we are redirected to PayPal? If so, it didn't work for me.

try "hackernews" after clicking the redeem coupon button.

still not working for me

Not working for me either.

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