Show HN: Real-time Online Market for Services

The first issue with your name is, the phrase "Yellow Pages" is actually trademarked in many countries, although not in the U.S.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages

  In many countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia,
  and elsewhere, "Yellow Pages" (and/or any applicable local
  translations), as well as the "Walking Fingers" logo first introduced
  in the 1970s by the Bell System-era AT&T, are registered trademarks,
  though the owner varies from country to country, usually being held by
  the main national telephone company (or a subsidiary or spinoff
  thereof).[1][2] However, in the United States, neither the name nor
  the logo were registered as trademarks by AT&T, and are freely used by
  several publishers.

Since the trademarks exist in some other countries, you can still face foreign legal challenges (or threats) from other countries. Sadly, this kind of nonsense really does happen:

http://www.anecdote.com/2007/08/yellow-pages-registered-trad...

The second issue with your name is, no one will remember it. The phrase "Yellow Pages" is known and descriptive, but in the US it is over-used since a lot of companies use it due to the lack of a trademark. It fails to be distinct. From a branding and marketing perspective, being plain and generic is a death knell.

For your sake, I hope my concerns on the name are unwarranted since changing it would be a ton of work.

Your video was excellent! The animation is fantastic, and the voice-over is clear and preformed well. With that said, it's too long to be the first thing people see/experience on your site. It's 2 minutes and 48 seconds but nowhere are we told its length, so watching your video might be a two hour investment, or worse. --Your pitch is "Save Time" so expecting someone to sit and watch a video is counter productive.

I'd put your form first, top and center, then put the video below or as a link to another page. It might just be my own old habits, but I'd label the form input fields clearly. The "title=" attributes on the form inputs are good (and helpful for accessibility), but unlike labels, they require javascript or mouse hovering to be displayed. Labeling the input fields with plain text solves this accessibility issue.

  "broadcast your search request to ALL matching local businesses."

You need to realize what you're competing with, namely someone saying two words like "local plumber" into their mobile phone.

To make the site more useful to users searching for services, on submit also provide a list of the local businesses you are contacting on their behalf, along with the sites and/or contact info of the businesses. This helps to establish and increase trust, as well as makes the site usable anonymously.

It was great to see you have "Privacy" and "Terms" clearly listed.

The text (copy) on the "About" page reads well regarding what your company and site does. Having a bit more general information about your company like history might be a worthy addition. The "What We Do" of your company should be concisely expressed on your main home page along with the search form.

Grey text on a white(ish) background is very common (like here on hn) but it's a terrible choice and is a well known accessibility issue. It makes your about, privacy, terms, and other pages are hard to read for people with even minor vision deficiencies.

Your "Team" page lists one person, Lou Pereira. He might be a one-man army, but until you have a team of people, I'd skip having a team page. On your team page, your html source has a commented "angela.jpg" image, which you may or may not want to remove.

Though not on your main home page, html source (and php) on the team page has a very common issue; you used a text editor or IDE that's configured improperly so you are unable to see the trailing whitespace on lines, and you're unable to see when you're mixing tab and spaces characters on indenting. --How would I know? Well, I spent too many years botching indents and line endings with characters I couldn't see, until finally one day I configured vim to highlight my mistakes. ;-)

Lastly, you've got a form checkbox to allow a phone number input so searchers can receive text messages, so I wondered if another checkbox to allow users to have their email and phone sent directly to the businesses would be worthwhile?

As always, writing up feedback for "Show HN" posts is a tough balancing act since the criticisms always tend to stand out a lot more than the compliments. I think you're doing good, so I hope the above is written well enough to avoid seeming overly-critical.

I got no takers on either side - no one submitted videos and, if they had, I had no businesses interested in viewing them. These marketplace ideas seem like better businesses than they are. I'm convinced that the only successful ones will be those that are hyper-focused on a single niche. "Oh that's the app/site I open if I need X" instead of "I can get anything I need from this app/site". It seems that consumers just don't like having too many options from a single source (with a few notable exceptions, but it is effectively impossible to become one).

Good luck with yours though - I am just sharing my experience.

This may just be me, but for some reason, the landing page turned me off - I think the call to action may look too similar to a website that costs money, or signs me up for a 'trial'? I'm not really sure, but I figured I'd mention it. Some other people might want to chime in here in case this is a personal thing.