We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism | Hacker News Reader

We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism

listnerd.com

51 pointsstormen132 comments

Oh man, not another "11 sexy girls with star wars tattoos"...

Normally I would follow "if you don't have anything nice to say" but since you literally asked for it:

Your site tries to build a better mousetrap in one of the worst corners of the internet (better means 'worse' in this case). "List sharing" is a known cheap trick for internet marketers who are the bottom of the barrel, exploitative of both original content creators and those prone to being sucked in to mindless content (aka internet junk food).

Maddox has a memorable rant that sums it up better than I can: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=ranker_sucks

Your site is not unlike the "reply girls" cancer that devalued youtube, or the fake thumbnails showing cleavage on related videos for everything.

Why would you want to "revolutionize the world of lists"? This doesn't even make sense.

I actually really like information / data lists. Obviously that's a far cry from the "11 sexy girls" lists.

I'd be happy to see a revolution in data lists. There are all sorts of occasions I'm looking for the top X in list format and would love to run across it as the top result, in a clean format that loads fast. One site that had a million of those (that are accurate) would earn my bookmark.

I suppose Wolfram Alpha does some of this well.

Thank you for your input!

Clickhole also does sites like this gloriously.

http://www.clickhole.com/

Well, ideally we don't want to create those kinds of lists. Remember that our lists are interactive, meaning that anybody can interact with them, changing their ranking. Ideally we want to "empower interest-based communities to rank the best stuff out there". That sounds gay, and it is - but at the same time, it's true. I love red wine for example; and it can be really hard finding comparative lists between different kinds of red wine. Sure, you have Vivino (the app), but that is all kinds of fucked up. So I might want to create a list called "Best wines from Tucany", which directly compares the wine. Then, if I get my some friends that I trust to vote on the list, BAM!, it's a list of superior quality for both myself, my friends and visitors to Listnerd. That's our vision. We're not there yet, but we're working on it - hence this Hacker News post.

I call BS. This appears to be a new take on "Show HN"...trying to get attention. The site works, looks OK, and you appear to have users, so it doesn't really suck. If you thought the concept sucked, then you wouldn't have done the site in the first place.

If this were a legit post, I would say this:

I think this is a relatively crowded niche you're in. I'm also sure that you dramatically overspent if you actually spent $200K getting this developed. But it appears that your developers did what you asked them to do...."make me a functional site that does X". So if the end result "sucks" to you (99.9% of your users don't know or care about CSS and other issues mentioned in these comments), then there is only one person to blame.

plus one

As pointed out by those who have "made it," they faked it, lied and pulled any trick to get attention and users.

I say don't believe anything on the Internet!

I don't know, $200k does look a lot for that site...

Hey! I just want to say, this is awesome and I wish you the best of luck.

I am a Developer and I noticed a few really concerning things in your CSS:

1. I believe you're committing the greatest CSS Sin: Emulating the DOM structure using nesting. Here is one example: "#site-header.newheader nav>ul>li>a.buttonGreen"

That CSS Selector should not exist like that. You shouldn't be using ids (first) and second this should be be: .buttonGreen {}

It looks like bad Sass or LESS is being used and nesting is being abused. If you'd like more advice on how to fix this I have written many talks.

The reason these selectors are a problem is because of the extremely long paint time. Right now your site takes around 30ms to paint. It should be closer to 10ms.

2. The CSS classes used are meaningless. Above there's a "buttonGreen" class. However, what if you redesign and that button is now blue? Do you just edit the CSS (like should have to be done) Or do you change your HTML and CSS to reflect a basic styling change? This only hurts you and maintaining your site.

3. You're loading 2.4 MB of data on your home page. 1 MB of that is images, which is fine, but that means you have 1.3 MB of data loading. The good news is that on mobile almost 100% of what you are loading are images, however, that number is still 2 megabytes. I'd see if there is a way to lower that number.

4. It is extremely busy. I was really confused when I got to the site. I am not a good designer so I cannot give specific advice, but I'd think "calming" the site would help a lot.

5. On Chrome Mobile I cannot click the hamburger button. It does nothing.

6. You need to simplify your creation flow. You have 4 pages right now, it should only be 1.

7. Your select boxes need a dropdown arrow.

8. USE NATIVE SELECTS and restyle them using CSS. Use a fallback for IE and IE only!

9. Mobile functionality is not the same as desktop functionality, this is a big one that needs to be fixed. You should be able to do the EXACT same things on mobile that you can on desktop.

10. The goal of the site should not be browsing, I don't think. I think it should be about: Creating lists and sharing lists. Browsing should certainly be an option, but make creation and sharing more prominent than browsing.

I believe you're committing the greatest CSS Sin: Emulating the DOM structure using nesting. Here is one example: "#site-header.newheader nav>ul>li>a.buttonGreen" ... If you'd like more advice on how to fix this I have written many talks.

I didn't know this was an issue until recently and now I'm slowly fixing it on my main project. I'd love your additional advice/pointers!

Of course! The idea behind using preprocessors is helping you write CSS more easily. The goal is not to write obfuscated CSS, but rather to write CSS well! What it really enables (imo) is to think of styling in an Object Oriented way. Whenever you're about to write a block of Sass think "What is this thing?". The answer is almost never a "green button" but rather "getting started button". Or something like that. It also helps you to think in terms of inheritance:

The "getting started button" and "buy button" are both interaction buttons. (Similar buttons, but one is green and the other is yellow).

In Sass you represent that this way: 1. Placeholder %interaction-button class where you outline the fact that it has a border radius, color, and any other shared styling. 2. A button maker mixin where you put the colors that need to be changed, and any other flags (like has_sub_text: true for the unbold text) and then @extend's the placeholder above. 3. The classes ".buy-button {}" which include the mixin you made.

Is it advisable to just use plain old CSS these days?

In general, you get more out of using a preprocessor.

In practice however, the generated output isn't always the best, and it's worth a look over to make sure it's not generating slower selectors.

Hey Id,

I'd say learn how CSS works first and really understand what it's doing. However, Sass can help you write very maintainable efficient styled code.

I will always recommend using Sass, but only if you know what CSS you're making and know that it matters what CSS is being output.

To clarify, for the `.buy-button` class, is that where one should put super-specific styles like `margin-left: 12px`?

Also, is there a good place I can learn these kind of things? I'm a programmer trying to get better at CSS (SCSS now that we've setup the asset pipeline)—so far I've been reading random A List Apart and The Sass Way articles, but I feel like I could use a more holistic, in-depth understanding of CSS if there's a good book out there for that.

To answer your first question, yes that is exactly where you should put your super-specific styles. You want to put your communal styles in your placeholder, styles that all types have but are different in the mixin (background color, etc) and the rest on the class itself.

The best way to get better at Sass is to follow people who are active in the community (which unfortunately is not me). Start with Chris Coyier and Hampton Catlin and work your way from there.

If you don't mind me plugging my own talks, I have a few that are really good at learning Sass:

https://speakerdeck.com/liamdanger/why-your-sass-is-bad-and-...

https://speakerdeck.com/liamdanger/what-if-css-was-object-or...

https://speakerdeck.com/benbayard/how-to-raise-a-code-puppy

I appreciate your advice on this! From what I'm learning from you, it sounds like I'm committing some bad CSS practices myself.

I would take a look at BEM. It's methodology and set of naming conventions to help write better, more modular and reusable CSS. It can take a while to get used to, and to get it right, but once you do it's a lifesaver. I can't imagine doing front-end dev without it now

http://csswizardry.com/2013/01/mindbemding-getting-your-head...

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/04/16/a-new-front-end-m...

I'm not a designer by any means, so take this with a grain of salt, but after reading through the first link, BEM bears a striking resemblance to hungarian notation, which I think most of us decided was a bad idea a long time ago. Do you have any sense that this naming convention is different somehow from the naming conventions that have been used and abandoned in other areas of software development, and if so, what makes it different?

Actually there are a couple of rules that I managed to pick up from the frontend community about CSS rules.

1) Don't use tag names in css

    div.something should be .something

2) Don't use id's

3) Isolate elements into logical components and name part of those components in the css.

    <button class='button button-primary'><span class='button--icon-search'></span></button>

Hey Partyfists,

thank you very much for your answer. You put a lot of effort into it, so I wanted to reply in the same manner :)

The CSS stuff was done by Jesper, one of the founders, that unfortunately left the company. I'll tell him about the CSS issues you address.

As for issues 3-10, I'm noting down all of them in our todo list and I'll address them individually. Thank you for great input! :)

Of course, feel free to reach out with any questions you have. I'm on twitter @partyfists let me know!

Best of luck to you guys.

It lacks the touch of a good designer. Everything seems slightly off... from colors, to fonts, to text placements, to 20 other small touches. It all adds up to an amateurish feel. Some examples:

1. The colors. Ugh.

2. The formatting of the content boxes should be more consistent. All pictures should go to the edge and have the same height. Logos should have padding, not stretch to the edge (e.g. YouTube). Even once this is fixed, the different palettes in the different pictures are what's contributing to the clutter. Maybe make all the pictures b&w... not sure. Do you need the chrome for these? Boxes with shading and extra lines is a bit dated. Check out digg.com for a better example of this style. Generally this is the biggest issue.

3. The "Popular Lists" graphic should be half/half on the area above/below. Right now, just a few pixels lay on the green area. Plus the white is too close to the off-white of the section below. If not for the shadow, I probably wouldn't be able to tell you were going for.

4. Something looks odd about the font in Chrome. Certain letters seem bold, or somehow "stretched" a few pixels too tall. (e.g. The "E" from E3, the "B" from Best Viral Videos)

5. The anti-aliasing is inconsistent. Text isn't being anti-aliased at all. The logo is anti-aliasing unnecessarily (at the top/bottom of squared letters). The pictures seem to be low-quality JPEGs which contributes to this issue.

Assuming all the formatting is done via css a good designer should be able to fix most of this in a few days.

I doubt that any of this will move the needle in a meaningful way for this site.

Thank you for all of this, we'll look into all of it :)

The content and audience are I suspect far more important than what your site does at this stage, and you should narrow the scope on both of those.

You have what looks like a serviceable site to produce lists (not really a complex challenge). I'm not sure why you think your site sucks? I'm sure you'll get some feedback on styling, content etc (it's not really to my taste, but hey, it's not terrible either), but if you are seeing slow growth, it's probably not because your site tech/design sucks, it's because no-one really deeply wants to make lists in the first place. The idea and marketing is the problem, not the execution.

So, who is the site for, what's the target market/demographic? Who are they making the lists for?

Perhaps instead of targeting everyone, you should narrow your focus, and start targeting a particular market. This sort of site needs either a very specific focus to which the list making and content are tailored - say shopping lists, or it needs a specific demographic.

If you want to make this a social site, perhaps target a demographic like Norwegian teens OR mums if you have experience there, but don't target the entire world from the start.

If you want to make money from shopping, maybe tailor this to just best of lists of products for particular niches and invest in content?

As it is I don't see how lists about These 7 Things Will Make Any Man Want to Fight for You and Best Tracks in Mario Kart 8 are going to keep anyone on your site. The content just isn't compelling at all (there are hundreds of existing content farms churning out stuff like this like buzzfeed etc) and it is far too scattershot.

PS Install some caching software prior to posting on HN :)

You mention buzzfeed, but buzzfeed is basically just lists of stupid memes, and they have a lot of content and a lot of users.

Thank you. After reading your comment - and many others - we'll look into narrowing down our niché. We're thinking about video games, movies and TV. That's a pretty defined target audience with a clear need for lists (separating good games from bad, movies, shows, etc.)

Escape them inputs, dawg!

www.listnerd.com/lists?letter=</script><script>alert(document.cookie);</script>

After seeing this, talking about id selectors in the css seems...

It's 2014, isn't it? Damned!

I'm surprised no one is asking the obvious question: why does this website exist? Why do I care about lists? When would I use this site? Does the world need another Buzzfeed/Upworthy/Viralnova? Sure, as others noted, the CSS has problems, the design looks off, and the UX is potentially confusing. But I don't think your problems are technical. The problem is your concept: you built something the world doesn't need.

Backstory: We run a media company and we've put more than $200k of our own savings into Listnerd - not counting the thousands of work hours we've also invested. It's a list blogging platform / social network centered around top lists. We're growing extremely slow, so after 1.5 years in the grind, we've come to the conclusion that our site sucks. Please help us out by destroying us with your criticism.

Just curious - what was your goal/perceived business opportunity with the site and idea? Advertising revenue or something else?

Well, our last really successful startup was called Biip.no. It was a social networking site very much like Facebook, only for Norwegian teenagers. We built a lot of traction, eventually grossing 10% of Norway's population as members, with a annual revenue of 3m USD - mostly from advertising and mobile payments. Then we had an exit of $12m USD. We started in the social media space pretty early (2004/2005), so we always regretted not going international earlier. Listnerd is kind of our shot at redemption; because I think social e-commerce is at the same stage today as social media was in 2004.

Agree on the last sentence (although it might be better to just say eCommerce and drop the "social") so I figured I would comment.

The site definitely reminds me of PG advice about made up startup ideas not solving an actual problem. Social networking sites helped users connect with their friends online easily. Not sure as a user why I should signup to your site and start building lists of knowledge unless I am getting something (business, revenue cut, etc).

You might look at instructables. People want to show off the things they build so they create tutorials about it. Pretty good community. There's probably room to sell the supplies in an e-commerce store and maybe give the authors a cut of the revenue. Seems much less forced than "build a list and share it with your friends!"

My own shot at this is in Halloween/Fall/Events. I envisioned some sort of way to find events, meet people and get the knowledge/stuff you need to attend. We are still in Facebook's "adding the course catalogs" stage though. Add dot com to my username and then let your imagination really run. We've spent around 10K but have put in a lot of sweat equity.

If social eCommerce becomes huge, I think it will transform Halloween costume sales online and we will be better positioned than a traditional costume shop. Can you say the same about listnerd? If no, then you need to pick a different area to start building a community.

Checked the site and watched the video.

First of all - when people visit a new site for the first time and see familiar stuff, instead of new and exciting stuff, they tend to leave before they even dig deeper on the site.

The design is fine, the layout is difficult - you should use rectangles of different sizes and backgrounds to make it easier for the visitor to focus on content that are more important, new or viral.

What is dangerous about the assumption that the most popular things are the most written about, are that you ignore new things that MIGHT get traction, what you'd need is a time-machine - list things before they get HOT HOT HOT! So that people who visit the site have a larger reason to do so.

And think about what kind of users you want, the middle-aged people that love lists? Or the lazy teenager who love trends but feel that lists are for shores.

Yes, exactly. My impression of this site is like one of those spam portal link farms. Uber-generic and worthless looking.

What did you spend $200K on? Just the design?

It seems like you have technical people on your team; so if you are not counting your time why is the number so high?

Even with design and team of two-three engineers consulting for a month or two that figure is extremely high.

Would also love to know where the money went specifically. Seems insane (also do you need another website built for 200k?)

Already answered this, but I'll comment because you bothered to. Sure :) We're basicly two founders that have done most of the design and project management of the site. In addition, we've outsourced some design and all of the programming to Ukraine, including the mobile version. The outsourced development itself runs into the 100k's over the stretch of 1.5 years, and in addition, we've done some marketing (40-50k) and had some administrative costs (lawyers, offices, etc.). I don't have an exact sum, but it's anywhere from 190-220k.

I'm a designer and previous developer myself, but the site is actually quite broad. There is a lot more than meets the eye, such as: - an administration area - caching and indexing mechanisms - web scraping robots - various other agents and robots to update user feeds, top lists, etc. - algorithms to calculate relevance and weight for the items on each list - Wordpress plugins, possibility to embed lists, etc. ...and so forth. It's a pretty big site.

It looks like you're a Norwegian company? Surely Norway has programmers who can handle this at equal or surpassing quality for less money? What was your rationale for outsourcing to begin with?

In Norway a dev starts at $100k a year; or you can pay roughly $250 an hour for freelancers. Labour laws in Norway are very strict, which means hiring someone is a big step. When we first started the project we didn't really foresee how big of a task it would end up as, so we went with outsourcing. If I had to do it again, I probably would have hired one in-house dev.

>In Norway a dev starts at $100k a year; or you can pay roughly $250 an hour for freelancers.

I still think you paid more than the site is worth but... you can get that kind of rate for freelancing PHP? I think I need to move to Norway.

You can definitely get that amount for freelancing PHP in the states.

Either you're joking, or I've wasted my career.

I'm not joking. In the right cities, the high cost of living will pull you that amount.

You and me both, i get 65$ an hour in Sweden.

It's funny to see many people giving their "expert" opinion about how expensive your web site was, just by looking the design. It is very easy to say when: 1. You are not the one developing the site, thus You have no commitment. 2. You ignore all the other project requirements (already mentioned above) just by looking to the presentation layer.

If the project was too expensive, blame also the founders , which may have asked for a MVP bigger then the necessary.

Sure, but from the looks of things this is a pretty generic web site. If you have been doing development for a while that figure would be an instant red flag. Not blaming either party.

The 'additional' requirements that were listed to justify this such as administration area, caching layer, feeds, etc are really basic items.

So unless they wrote their own web server I don't see any issues with flagging this.

For all you know that figure could have been made up.

Even with moderate padding; that price tag and time frame is a bit too high, especially if you outsourced this to a team of multiple developers.

Just a general observation, I don't know much about your architecture.

I clicked the Create a list text on your homepage instinctively. That's how people use the web. It should be hyperlinked.

I like the idea of making lists because it speaks to my passion for process. I want to be able to bookmark lists as well as monetize and own my content. If I can run my own ads on the site, then I'm less scared of creating original content through that venue. Your terms of use sucks and is not favorable.

Thank you.

Yup, I clicked that green 'Create a list area' at the top several times.

After having a look and reading your interview with marketingstartups[1], it is quite an interesting idea.

It strikes me as an evolved incarnation of Buzzfeed[2] in that the entirety of its content is user-generated, whereas this wasn't the case with Buzzfeed until recently, and even now, I believe user submissions are subject to moderation.

I don't think you should give up yet. I wouldn't. I would start by simplifying the design (sure, it looks nice, but it feels over-ornamented), defining stricter guidelines for posting (e.g. encourage "Top/Best X" type posts in lieu of general free-form lists, and figure out other ways to start driving traffic to it.

I wish you guys the very best and again, don't give up yet.

PS: Please get in touch if you'd like to talk more.

[1] http://marketingstartups.com/2012/12/18/interview-with-listn... [2] http://buzzfeed.com

Thank you very much for your input :)

That's exactly what we're trying to make; a kind of Buzzfeed 2.0, where the "2.0" stands for improved functionality and quality of lists. That's our vision anyway.

I saw your site, looks very cool. Perhaps I could mail you our story?

Sure Eric! Shoot me an email: ziyad at buildingof.com and let's do it :)

I like the idea but my first impression is that the front page is a tad overwhelming. I didn't actually read the top green pane until after looking at the images, which may say something about how users look at the content.

Perhaps interestingly, my first click was to Browse Top Lists, only to find that Porn Actresses, Page 3 Models and Hentai artists all feature in the top 5 and 4/9 trending lists have the same pink handbag image, even for the Best Web Apps list. You need an adult category which you can hide the NSFW lists in and then not display this to logged out users. As already noted, I think the content is your biggest problem; I may not be your target audience but regardless there's little there to be encouraged to comment on or find inspiration from for new lists.

Thank you. We're cleaning up the frontpage now. The lists you talk about are actually the most popular lists in regards to traffic, but yes, I agree - we should move them to a NSFW category :)

This is what people spend thousands of hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars on. Building a goddamned new LIST site.

Sigh. There. That's your criticism. Shameful.

You should never go to Dubai.

The colors and font scream "Barney" (like, the old kids TV show). I think they could work if you desaturated one or both of them a bit and went with a font that was a bit less "fun".

Btw just to give a little bit of context, I thought I'd make a small mockup of what I mean: http://imgur.com/XqkMzUB

Basically, desaturated the two header colors a lot (still not perfect, but at least maybe it gives some contrast. I also ripped out the orange buttons and the redundant search box because they were garish and really hard to read. I also tweaked the fonts a little bit.

(Disclaimer: I am not a professional designer, these are just ideas so you can at least see what it would look like in an alternate universe).

Thank you! :)

I agree. We'll do it.

Do you use your site? I mean, do you enjoy making and reading lists?

Honest question.

Yep. I really do:

http://www.listnerd.com/erling.loken.andersen

Some things I noticed...

The homepage fails HTML validation. 32 Errors, 7 warnings

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.listnerd....

Homepage isn't being cached (intended?, in fact you have quite a few elements that have no caching set. Run PageSpeed Insights perhaps?

Seems I can create a list without signing up? At least, that's what the button click seems to indicate (I didn't go through the entire process).

None of the "Create a List, Share It, See It" images actually do anything.

Doing a Search on "Select *" resulted in your following page taking 12.06 seconds to process before returning No results found. Searching for "Random" took 10.24 seconds. You have a major bottleneck in your search system.

The blog takes you to a totally different layout. This is jarring.

Homepage returns quickly, but the "Best Tracks in Mario Kart 8" took twice as long to return. If I had to guess, you are fully rebuilding the page each load? If that's true, did you scale that out against the database?

The trending lists block on the bottom of each list page is much larger then the content beside it, consider including fewer items in the list.

Thank you for all of this! Duely noted on our todo list.

Hey Eric,

I thought Listnerd sounded familiar. You helped me out with SEO last year with your Offer HN, so I'll try to give some useful advice back. Sorry to hear that Listnerd is struggling.

Listnerd doesn't really grab my attention upon first visit. Maybe I'm not the target market but upon opening it up I'm not interested in making a list. Making a list sounds like work. Why should I spend part of my weekend doing work on some random site? I think you haven't demonstrated a value to your visitors.

It also seems to bland to me. It doesn't really differentiate itself from the more established list sites like BuzzFeed. Why should I read ListNerd over BuzzFeed or Reddit? What features, angle, or value does ListNerd bring to the table that those sites do not?

Some nitpicks: You should update your copyright in the footer to 2014, and the gold/yellow color on some buttons doesn't seem to match the rest of the color scheme.

Positives: I like the name. I like the create list process from a ui and design perspective.

Edit: I like the video on the homepage but it is hidden away. Make it more prominent.

Thank you for your input :) We'll look into all of these things, including making the video more prominent!

I rather like it but how the heck did you manage to spend $200K on it? Would you mind opening up about exactly how the money was spent?

Sure :) We're basicly two founders that have done most of the design and project management of the site. In addition, we've outsourced some design and all of the programming to Ukraine, including the mobile version. The outsourced development itself runs into the 100k's over the stretch of 1.5 years, and in addition, we've done some marketing (40-50k) and had some administrative costs (lawyers, offices, etc.). I don't have an exact sum, but it's anywhere from 190-220k.

Hope you don't mind me being frank, but you got screwed. Perhaps there's some complexity that I'm missing here, but this looks like maybe a 200-hour gig, so at 150 USD/hr (you can get real quality talent for that in the US), you'd be looking at 30k. Maybe more if you wanted to put extra time into the mobile experience, but I doubt you'd need more than 40 extra hours for that. Certainly not 100k worth of work here.

EDIT after reading more comments: looks like I did miss a lot of complexity. Still, it's hard to believe all that stuff was necessary. Need more content? Pay some schmuck $7/hr to make content (or outsource on Mechanical Turk, etc). Or stay extra-lean and do it yourself. Admin area? Probably don't need something terribly advanced. Caching? Not unless you're getting a ton of traffic, which it doesn't sound like you are. Wordpress integration? Doesn't sound terribly useful or relevant, but I could be wrong given that I don't know the target market (if there is one?) very well. Maybe you had tens of support emails a day asking for it - but I doubt it.

Giving my feedback about the big things I care about:

The biggest problem I see is that you have no HTTPS support for this site. There are very good reasons for having HTTPS even if you aren't transmitting something you would consider "secret". With modern 64-bit processors and session caching, there's really no excuse for not having HTTPS available on every page. That said, you don't even have HTTPS support during login, which means that password information will be completely sniffable. It's not at all clear from the login popup that this will be the case.

Additionally, the actually design degrades nicely with Javascript turned off, which is commendable, but logging in/signing up is still Javascript-only. Ideally you'd want a site that keeps all the functionality that it can have without Javascript with Javascript enabled. It might look slick for people using Javascript, but you really don't need an in-tab popup for login/signup.

After clicking around on some of the lists to get a sense of what the intended content is, I think it suffers from a little bit of an identity crisis.

By which I mean that the base, bottom-feeding type lists are already supremely well-covered by every other slideshow/listicle media property (Buzzfeed, the "suggested" stories at the bottom of every news site), so it would probably be difficult to attract any meaningful marketshare.

Whereas the curated lists of items, or recommendations are all things I'd use Pinterest for. Being able to organize and customize the item information seems like it could be a competitive advantage for you (Basically on Pinterest, your options are: Make a board, put pins on it, maybe comment on the individual pins; there's no sense of "ranking").

And it sounds like you're sort of looking at Pinterest's revenue model, but their user growth is kind of crazy, so they might end up sucking up all the air of that particular vertical.

Thank you.

I would be very interested to hear more about the user Listnerd http://www.listnerd.com/Listnerd#lists and how Listnerd has created 492,988 lists and received 3,072,466 votes!

Probably related to the "web scrapers" they spent some of that 200k on.

Absolutely, and you cannot build a business upon scraping. Maybe for some seeding, but not to this extend.

I think it's hard to say why one thing takes off like Reddit, then something else, very similar doesn't. If you have SEO and decent organic traffic and it doesn't take off, look to sell it and move on to another good idea. You shouldn't continue wasting time and money unless you feel you're not wasting it.

A. Why would people post their own lists to your site? What benefit do they have for doing this? No karma, raffle for free...gas or video games, nothing.

B. 4 long steps to create a list? Ok, fair enough. . . but I guess that brings me back to A.

C. You don't provide anything different or beneficial than the current top 'list' sites like pinterest and reddit provide. I think you provide less.

For some reason I arrived at the bottom of the page for the homepage and the auxillary pages I clicked to (the technology lists, then the "top webpages" lists).

I didn't realise until reading comments here about clicking the "make list" button; then when I went back and looked I realised I was scrolled to the bottom on page entry. Bizarre, never seen that before, presumably a bug.

[FF30.0 on Ubuntu]

Now looking at the main page I'm trying to click on the big "create a list" element ... but no the button is at the top of the page, you need an arrow pointing to the button and/or to activate the "create a list" element IMO.

I clicked a list. It had a list of ten little images. I clicked an image - I expected a bigger version of that image. I got the same tiny image and some text. I don't need the text; i do need bigger images.

Thank you, we'll fix that!

You seem to be resizing the footer in javascript (I haven't looked at the code so could be off base) and sometimes it seems to go a little crazy. When I first scrolled to the bottom there was a huge empty space below the "blog browse about... " stuff. About 800 pixels I would estimate. It seemed to go away when I refreshed and resized the page, but something caused it to happen at least one time, so under the same conditions it will happen again.

In general it looks nice, I agree with most of what other people are saying so I won't elaborate too much.

Thank you for your input :) We'll look into that footer issue.

Why the self-deprecating title? You could've said "Show HN: List blogging with Listnerd". This makes me wonder how you spent $200k and why you're so unhappy with the result.

Well, a good site is supposed to grow, right? At the same time, our site isn't really growing - which makes me think there's something wrong with it, somewhere. I have tremendous respect for the people on Hacker News, and I think we need honest advice from intelligent people. Showing HN usually doesn't muster really, really tough criticism.

> Well, a good site is supposed to grow, right?

Why, precisely?

Hmm... Because if it's "good", it's of some use to people - and you would think they would start spreading word about the site and its benefits?

I wouldn't think that. But that's because over ten years of listening to people talk about how companies, markets, and entrepreneurship function have drilled it into me that that's not how reality works.

1. Who is "people"? Who comes to your site? Where do they come from? Why are they here? How many came because a friend told them it was useful?

2. How many "visitors" become "users"? How do you define that? How many of your users find your site useful? How can you tell?

3. How many of those people are telling their friends? How much success are they having? How many of those friends actually become users?

Answering these questions, and improving the answers over time, is called "marketing". Most successful web companies have marketers. In your case, what you probably want is a high Net Promoter Score [1]. You should know what yours is. You shouldn't be asking HN for advice; you should be asking your customers what it would take to make them spread the word. (This is essentially what gwintrob's comment above is suggesting. You should do that.)

Do you need to give them better features? Do you need to make it less buggy? Do you need to streamline the workflow? Do you need to give them help in explaining it to others? Do you need to suggest ways they can promote you?

Maybe what you need is a better site. That's possible. But you need to know.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Promoter

Got it. It's OK to be honest that things aren't growing without feeling like the site "sucks".

Have you tried having a 15 minute Skype conversation with your 10 most passionate users? They can tell you loads about what they love/hate. You'll get some good clues about how to find more people like them and convince them to share it with others.

Technically the site seems just fine. For your $200k I hope it has a robust back-end, as unless I'm missing something, it's functionally simple.

Your mobile interface is good - needs a tiny bit of polish around things like the vote counts being cut off on the "list of lists" view. Your featured lists suck. Greatest presidents? What's the utility, other than "oh look"?

Find a niche and cram yourself in there, saturate it, then look at other verticals. Right now you're putting the onus on the user to find a use for your service. Don't make them think. Give them a use.

Given the extant decent mobile interface, and the general clumsiness/info-overload of the ilk of trip advisor, sculpting for travel lists might be a good niche to push into - best places to eat, stay, see, etc. Cheap to experiment with this and other verticals.

Anyway, that's my $0.02, and fwiw I've steered several startups (from a dev/consult for equity corner) to successful exits - just not my own!

Thank you very much for this input. Your comment - and others - made us rethink our positioning. I think we're going to steer more towards gaming-, movies- and TV-oriented lists from now on; because that is really where the traction is coming from.

> from intelligent people

Dude, the intellectual level of the content on "listnerd" appears to be about 11 years old. I couldn't give a crap about any of that and I tried.

How about having an "old folks" section with lists about vitamins, exercises, home improvement tips and plots of long-forgotten stories that deal with emotional complexities...

...You know, stuff people with functioning brain lobes like.

Letting people know that you're absolutely OK with them taking a huge dump on your work is sometimes a good way to invite cogent criticism, when you don't have to defend your credibility for social reasons.

I don't think people on HN feel like they need permission to ask for harsh feedback.

I'll take a different tilt:

Your biggest problem is that you have 4 people listed on your team page yet there are two with the title 'Project Manager'. From what I can tell from playing with the site, it just lets you build 'top 10' style lists and allows people to vote/comment on them. Frankly, this is a weekend project for a good developer or for a better outcome, a good developer/designer pair. What exactly are the project managers doing?

Could not agree more, I believe the site actually shows signs of top-heavy product design.

There is a lot more work to a startup than just design. We have 4 content creators, we do SEO, marketing, customer support, product development, legal and economic issues, bug fixes, etc. If you think Listnerd is a "weekend project", then you're either inexperienced or simply don't see the full picture. Building something like good admin backend can take 1-3 months for a project alone.

Nice try but all you'll get from HN is a bump on your analytic graphs and I bet not one real user.

Anyhow I wonder how you came into pouring 200k into this idea (or maybe this is a catch number to get HN attention). Did you do any sort of validation prior to that? FYI I'd built this whole site for 5% of that budget

Get rid of 'beta' on the site header, there is no need for that and just makes you look cheap. I also dislike ratings on 1-10 scale (instead of 1-5, for example). What's the difference between a 2 and a 3, for example, or 8 and 9? It take too much thought.

Thank you! We added 10 stars for granularity, but we'll rethink it.

What's the breakdown for $200k on a site like that? Can you tell us what's the tech stack?

Already answered this, just see my previous answers!

How were you expecting to make money?

The business model is divided in two:

1. affiliate revenue from product sales, tracked via Viglinks.com (usually 6% commision off one sale; and remember, our lists are basicly shopping guides - or well, they should be)

2. straight up advertising, Google Adsense to begin, then setting up our own sales team (if we succeed, that is)...

I feel like I could have programmed this site in 40hrs, tops. Let's say someone with a few years experience charged $50/hr, that would be $2,000. You could probably at least halve that hourly rate on odesk if you wanted to.

Development doesn't work like this. You are assuming they knew exactly what they wanted in a fair amount of detail up-front.

Development can work that way or I can keep charging you for changes and stuff you have no idea if you will actually use because you have no game plan. But anyway, that's pretty much my point. The two founders are designers and one was also a developer of some sort. They spent 1.5 years outsourcing development, when if they knew what they wanted, someone could have pushed out their designs and functionality in a week, maybe two. Since he did mention other mechanisms such as indexing and scraping code, wordpress plugins, etc... (simple stuff). That would might add maybe a second week to my 1 week prediction.

Exactly.

You wasted a lot of time and money...

1. Maybe the lists themselves should be ranked. I'd like to downvote "top 8 tracks in Mario Kart."

2. The 3-panel header interferes with swipe gestures for page navigation, like, a lot. Try not to break common interactions like that.

When the list first loads, it is not visible on the screen but instead pushed down by a large margin. Also I believe many of your hits will come from google searches vs friend shares. Maybe make 100 SOE lists in house.

Hey, what page is this? I'm trying to reproduce the issue, but I can't? (I even installed a slow-loading plugin for Chrome, to mimic a slow browser to see if it was a CSS issue) :)

Also, what is a "SOE list"?

I can't decide whether this is trying to be a lightweight meme site, a high quality luxury magazine product review site or some evil spin off of Facebook that my friends are just going to share ads with me.

Haha... That's a great way of viewing it. And that's one of our problems too. Perhaps we're biting off too much? At the same time, sites like Pinterest have success going for a pretty wide market (interiors, fashion, infographics, nature pictures, etc.)

You have a very good page rank and alexa traffic numbers (yes, taken with a grain of salt) so you must be doing something right. Have you been around for awhile, or did you buy an existing, older domain?

No, we just work as SEO consultants (to cover costs), and the Alexa traffic numbers are mainly because of this - the SEO traffic.

I think HN is the wrong kind of audience to seek feedback from for your specific site. It appears to be pop-culture/teen culture focused, which you won't find here in HN.

To some extent, I agree with you. At the same time, there are a lot of smart people on here, who might be able to give solid advice anyway. And I've gotten lots of really good stuff already, we really have our work cut out for us now.

Visually it's pretty ugly, but concept and functionality seem very sound. I liked it against my will, so just give it a makeover and you've likely got a winner.

Thank you!

I think the idea is great - I actually had the same idea last summer and built www.curate.im which ended up getting absolutely nowhere (log in with username 'test' and pw 'test' if you wanna see inside).

In terms of your actual site, the focus seems to be less on the content itself and more on sharing/commenting on things, almost trying to force people to interact with the site. Not a huge fan of the content on there right now either - a lot of it is quite trivial Buzzfeed-esque. This isn't inherently 'bad', but it's just that there are plenty of sites where you can find that kind of content.

Thank you very much for your comments :) A lot of people mention Buzzfeed like it's a bad thing, but I think it should be remembered that we're talking about one of the biggest sites in the world. But, as you say, there are plenty of sites where you can find that kind of content. We might target a niché more specifically from this point on, perhaps doing more gaming-related lists and focusing on that target audience.

Nice idea but the design is a little dated. I don't know if that's intentional but people are fickle, and pretty / obvious always wins.

Thank you.

$200k for that site is a ridiculous considering you could have learned to implement it your self and hired out the design.

Brilliant marketing stunt. Take my point.

We weren't trying to get marketing, I promise. But we were trying to agitate some of the brightest brains in tech into giving us extremely valid and honest feedback, and we succeeded at that.

Why would I want to do this?

A lot of people enjoy creating content. Look at Tumblr (blogs), Wordpress.com (blogs), Instagram (pictures), etc. We believe Listnerd could fit in there (lists). I don't know about you though; depends on what you hobby or passion is. That's usually what people make lists about.

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