Critique our startup: HeavyInk.com

Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other goodies thrown in.

The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways.

There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).

So: please check out the site, and give your feedback, either here, or in the HeavyInk forums (http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1 )

We really do take all feedback seriously, and have prioritized various features and bug fixes based on customer comments.

Thanks!

I like the site overall, but here's some initial gripes:

"20% off Everything and Free Shipping on All Orders"

Could probably stand to qualify this with 'Special Offer' or if it's something you always do, 'We always offer...' or something. Maybe it's just me, but the way it just sits there right now, my first thought was something like, "Is this place going out of business?"

Search results page is a bit confusing, and it would be really nice to have an advanced search so I could exclude fields (first search I tried was for Priest (example: http://www.amazon.com/Priest-VOL-3-Min-woo-Hyung/dp/15918201... - if somebody can tell me how to make a link into a single word on N.YC I'll clean this up). It doesn't appear you have the series anyways, but it would have been nice to specify that I was searching for a Title and get a 'No Results' page instead of browsing through 3 pages of 'Not What I'm Looking For'.

If buttons (like 'Subscribe To Issues') aren't going to be an actual link (i.e., your pointer doesn't turn into a hand when you hover over it), there should be some sort of mouseover effect to indicate it's not just a dead link (and maybe a click effect, too, for people with slower computers / connections that won't load the next page straight away.)

Yeah, I agree regarding the search results being confusing. It didn't turn out exactly as I wanted, but its on my ever-growing list of tasks to improve it.

Well, I don't know anything about the size or statistics of your industry. I don't read comments, so I can't really buy anything.

Your design is ok, but why not make it a little more comic-bookish? Maybe get a designer to give you something similar to the cover of Amory Wars you have at the top there.

In retail your success is going to come down to things we YC denizens can't see from a glance. Prices, selection, service.

The market is about $500 million/year. We're not going to get VC funding, because there's no chance to become a billion dollar player. However, we'd be more than happy to get 2% of the market, and make a 10% profit!

As far as why the design isn't overly comic-booky: we did a ton of customer and competitor research before we picked the feature list or started writing the code, or doing the design, and we found that one objection many people have to comic book stores is that they feel like ghettos: they're perceived as not welcoming if you're not already part of the subculture. With that in mind, we consciously chose a design that was fresh and exciting, but didn't echo the super-hero motifs and stylings that many other comic book websites use.

For what it's worth, I like the design a lot. Was there some kind of process you went through to get it looking like this? Did you prototype and show users, do some sketches, photoshop, etc?

Thanks!

You can read a lot more about our design process on our old blog ( http://heavyink.com/blog/ ), but the short version is:

1) come up with basic idea for website 2) put up a survey 3) ping comic bloggers; get 400 people to take survey 4) narrow down feature list 5) get a UI consultant to help us design how the features get spread across the various pages (lots of "scenario" stuff: "say that you're a young woman shopping for manga. What do you type? Where do you click?"). 6) hand the "wireframes" from the UI consultant off to our graphic designer 7) review the sketches; decide to pick a new graphic designer 8) get sketches back from second graphic designer; tell him "No, make the color scheme more like Netflix". Repeat this last step in 100 different steps: feedback on size of elements, etc. The engineering team provided the feedback, the graphic designer provided the expertise with fonts, layout, etc. 9) done!

...well, actually, nothing is every done. We've got to revamp the tabbed navigation, the RSS customization buttons, and a ton of other stuff...but it was well enough done to go live!

Cool. This and the salaries for your employees were all self funded from your other venture without debt?

Pretty much.

SmartFlix is profitable, but it has debt.

All of the salaries, rent, startup inventory, consultant fees, trademark fees, legal fees, etc. for HeavyInk were payed for by profits from SmartFlix.

That said, SmartFlix itself has debt. Why? Because it's really capital intensive. If a given DVD rents out once every 60 days, and we make $4 in profit on a rental, and the DVD costs $60, then an upfront investment of $60 breaks even two years later. So: SmartFlix has incurred a bit of debt (half of it real debt owed to banks and other small lendors, and half of it paper debt, in the form of promissory notes to engineers who were on half salary for six months, etc.).

The capital intensive nature of SmartFlix was fine, but it means that it's hard to grow past a certain size - in the absence of VCs rushing to give us $1 or $5 million (and, frankly, they're right not to - SmartFlix isn't going to have the return that they're looking for), then growth slows to the rate at which we can purchase inventory with profits.

...which is one of the reasons that we looked for a second startup idea that leveraged a lot of our core competencies (ecommerce, fulfillment, datamining, etc.) but did not require nearly as much cash tied up in inventory.

Instead of having that huge arrow to get people to install the OpenSearch plugin (or at least in addition to the arrow), you should use OpenSearch autodiscovery. When you go to a site with autodiscovery implemented, the logo box of the search bar glows blue. Go to Wikipedia and look at your search bar to get an idea of what happens.

Most users probably either don't notice or don't know what the blue glow means, so I can understand keeping the arrow, but you might as well add the autodiscovery too. Someone might do something nifty someday by crawling the web and scraping those autodiscovery links to build some sort of meta-search engine... that still wouldn't be as useful as Google, but it'd still be nifty.

http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#Auto...

I really really liked the yellow search bar, but I think you should make it point to something more useful than adding a firefox search. I personally don't use that for anything but very major searches(google, ebay, occasionally wikipedia). what if you used that bar to point to a sales special or something that can drive revenue or would be really appealing to users.

I have never noticed the blue glow before, and I must say it is hardly at all visible with my theme (some Vista standard):

http://screencast.com/t/bZ5XX0u1uCg

Maybe the glow is a bit more apparent in some other UIs or with other kinds of color themes?

You're in a pretty cool area. Like I said from a previous post though, I would suggest that you either talk to the guys from ComicVine (to see what they did wrong- they're now working on a another startup even though ComicVine is doing fabulously well) or figure out a way to beat them (I would suggest cribbing the stuff you like from them and then just making it better)..

As someone who read too many comic books when young, the digital comic phenomenon is really gaining serious steam. If you could let people upload their fan drawings and do licensing with the major publishers, you could really get a better in. Comicvine did not have that and as a result was never approached by Marvel or DC to acquire (the two companies just were pissed).

Good luck! The days when I bought comic books are long past, but your site is inspiring. Perhaps I'll find something new worthy of buying.

Thats awesome. If you sign up and rate the kind of stuff you used to like, as well as stuff you specifically don't like... the recommendation system should give you some decent suggestions. (If it doesn't, I suck.) They're not as good as they will be, because our data set is still fairly limited, but its getting better daily.

The website looks slick and I'm a big superhero/comics geek. I signed up and will poke around when I get a chance.

Awesome, thanks!

Go rate a few of your favorite comics, and then click the "recommendations" tab up top - we've been getting a lot of compliments on this feature.

Can you get recommendations without having to log in, too?

Not personalized recommendations, no.

A question for YC-ers: does this sound like a valuable feature? My inclination is to think "no", but I might be wrong...

Use the current session history to do personal recommendations to users that aren't logged in. As a user browses through the comics he will generally click the things that interest him and a single great on the spot recommendation can be a deal sealer for a new user browsing your site.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/08/heavyinkcom-a-mashup.ht...

Boing Boing! Congratulations. The pagerank gods have smiled upon you. Let us know how much traffic/repeat traffic that gets you.

My personal blog once got linked by BoingBoing.

The machine glowed fiery red, just before it caught fire and died. :-)

Hopefully the fact that we've got a dedicated box with extra memory for HeavyInk will stop a repeat of that story...

It's clean but I feel it looks too much like netflix. Suggestion: Put the black splotch on red effect to one or both of the sides.

When you're browsing for titles, it would be nice to put page navigation links at the bottom too aside fromt he ones at the top.

Looks good, just one thing, in my browser (firefox 2.0.0.8 on linux) the signup button display is funny.

Yep. It worked fine in 2.0.0.7 on linux (that's what we used during devel), and then Firefox released 2.0.0.8, which regressed a bit, and reintroduced an old Firefox bug. There was uproar (we weren't the only site that looked bad in 2.0.0.8) and the Firefox team expedited the release of 2.0.0.9, and the site looks great again.

We actually held off on the announcement until 2.0.0.9 was ut!

So: consider upgrading Firefox right now, and give it another shot!

Problem is that Ubuntu hasn't updated Firefox to 2.0.0.9 in the repositories yet.

I like the idea but I think you need a designer

Good Luck

the ratings don't work in firefox 2 on osx.

Interesting. Its been a while since I did any testing on the MacBook. Thanks.