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Ask HN: Please review my new startup. [Free account for HN community]

customerfind.com

38 pointszackattack97 comments

Hey Zack, Firstly let me say that I love the idea. I can see it being very valuable. I am working on an idea myself, and I can definitely see us using this service once we are ready - who knows when that will be. I am sure you know how that process goes.

Secondly, I must also commend you for charging from the get-go. The price point seems good, what I was looking for though was a 'pricing page' that tells me what I am getting for my $20/mo and other plan options. I would also like to see other options, say only 3 or 5 keywords with a more limited account for $10/mo. Couple that with a 15-day free trial (7-days I think is too short) and you reduce the risk significantly for the customer. Imagine I am able to add a few new clients in the first 15 days...that's significant value-add.

Thirdly, I am sure you guys have thought about this already but I can see other things like 'recommended keywords' based on 'successful keywords' that the user has chosen. Those can be derived by finding a 'high correlation' between those keywords and other successful keywords chosen by other users for example.

Fourth, I am not too perturbed by your site design. You can always do a re-design, I would focus more on adding features to the $20 account, because it seems a little feature light at the moment.

That's all I can think of right now. Good job. I would love if when I am ready to use it (maybe a few months from now) I could get the 7-day free trial...or who knows maybe by then you have implemented a 15-day free trial on all accounts :)

One last thing...did you find the cofounder you were looking for and did you go it alone on this project? Would love a similar post to your hiphopgoblin post :)

> Thanks, keep me posted.

> Yeah, I agree. I'll consider changing it depending on how things go with this first round. The important thing is to demonstrate the value up-front.

> Actually, what I am planning on doing is mining the data from tweets of users who have followed-back. Then, looking for common bigrams...

> I guess I could make the "keyword suggest" account $30/month and a "light" account $15/month. I don't want to add features just for the sake of adding features, but I do agree that there should be multiple account options - c.f. the study of The Economist alluded to by Dan Ariely in _Predictably Irrational_

> Yes, that's possible but if not just email me: zackster@gmail.cøm

> Found a couple great candidates but geography seemed to be a problem for everyone. I am actually moving to NYC now and would be open to finding a cofounder there, with whom I could partner up on projects.

"Free account for HN community" should read "Free trial account for HN community" in my opinion, as the former is rather misleading.

Agreed. The OP might also consider a longer trial than 6 days. I'm not sure I can really evaluate the system in that time.

Some feedback: 1. It is not clear to me what happens after updating the keyword list. Would the program then go find people and follow them based on those keywords?

2. "People you have followed (controlpanel.php?p=following)" is empty. Shouldn't this fill up instantaneously?

The program then goes and finds people and follows them based on those keywords, yes. It does so periodically with a cron job so no, it would not fill up instantaneously.

How can I communicate this clearer?

Here is one problem: After I authenticated my twitter account, I got the following error message: """ You registered the Twitter screen name foobar but authenticated the Twitter screen name fooBar. """

I'm sure you know you should convert strings to lowercase before comparing them! :)

Whew. Fixed. Anyway, your free account has been activated

Seems like a great idea that would really give start ups a leg up when starting with the twitter world.

I wonder if the hubspot app has something like this? This is great because it takes one piece of functionality and lets users roll with it.

Just launched - will let you know how it goes. LiranBaron at gmail dot com

This lagged hardcore the first time for me. Pretty sure you are not supposed to hotlink this in production?

thanks... changed to google repository

I like this if only for the fact that the idea was born of necessity.

For me at least it seems the ideas always come when I'm busy building other projects.

It also seems pretty relevant to where online marketing is headed.

Best of luck

I would get rid of the horizontal bar.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5

Am I missing something or hasn't this already been done by others like Twittermass?

Great app, it seems. Just curious, what do you mean by "whitelisted by Twitter"?

Feedback: Let the user choose the language of the keywords.

I'd love to check it out: pete at carrotsticks dot com

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Registered alexanderdblom AT G MAIL

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Oh oh. Seems to be down now.

It's back up. I think my webhost just restarted apache or something.

Wow. Your website is a very blatant ripoff of Basecamp's design. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but yours is a little over the line.

Why in the world would my comment get down-voted? The layout and design elements are practically identical.

did you look at http://basecamphq.com ?

The only similarity is the top header black bar.

I did not downvote you. But I suspect its the tone in your feedback. Maybe you could have asked "Why did you choose to have a BC-like design?" then...

I downvoted you because I did not think it is a "blatant ripoff".

Go look at http://basecamphq.com/ again. The layout, fonts, and styling are all clearly pulled from the marketing website.

I'm sure he used their design as a template to get something somewhat presentable for the time being and that once he has some more time and traction, he'll give the design a bit more attention. Let's relax a bit and stop making this out to be some corporate scandal.

I wasn't saying it's a corporate scandal or that the creator was a bad person. The problem is that 37signals didn't offer their design as a template for re-use.

Everyone uses other designs as inspiration (myself included), I'm just saying you should put some distance between yourself and the original inspiration before showing it to others.

I just see a teeeny-bit of inspiration. Remove the top black bar and it will be hard to tell that he was even inspired by basecamp. Sorry but you are way off on your judgement for this one. Of course, IMO.

agreed, it's definitely cloned.

The simplest would be to ask if it is ok. I don't think they'd have a problem with it.

I have to agree, it's a bit overly similar (mostly because of the top bar). However, I trust that Zack will be going back to that design and updating it over the next few days. A design is a pretty easy thing to change, and I don't see anything morally wrong with using someone else's design as a starting point.

I noticed your company's site has a header too. It's just not colored black. There is not much difference between your site and CustomerFind in that sense.

In fact, your pricing page(http://agilezen.com/pricing) is clearly inspired by basecamp. Absolutely nothing wrong with it(I don't think it is in ripoff category). But for someone to have such stringent standards when evaluating others, it's odd.

Sure, our pricing page is inspired by Basecamp... and practically every other SaaS offering out there. As I said in another comment, everyone (including myself) takes inspiration from other designs, but there's a difference between taking inspiration and taking a stylesheet.

taking a stylesheet

Can you elaborate? That is a pretty huge accusation.

I'm not accusing the OP of anything. I was just pointing out that I took one look at the website and immediately recognized it as heavily inspired by Basecamp's design. That's all.

The colors and font of the header are identical, including the use of a single green link. The fonts used in the headers don't match the logo or the buttons, and have altered kerning just like on Basecamp's site.

I honestly couldn't give a shit either way. The OP asked for feedback, and I figured it was better he heard it from me than from 37signals' lawyers.

The OP asked for feedback, and I figured it was better he heard it from me than from 37signals' lawyers.

It doesn't look like 37 signals has trademarked that particular color scheme or design, and I don't see any evidence that they own or have an exclusive license to the font in question; so there really seems to be no legal concern here at all.

Yeah, it means the guy is smart and is borrowing strength from what he knows works. 37 Signals published their conversion rates from the highrise landing page for a reason. Goal at this stage is to see if people will sign up for the concept. Once he proves that out (i.e. customer development), I'm sure he'll invest in some of his own graphic identity, logo selection, color schemes, etc.

So you're saying that, until I have the time to invest in my own branding, I can just use the Coke logo instead?

No, he's saying you can imitate a design that is not protected by trademark; quite unlike the Coke logo.

They do declare copyright on the design, but that doesn't protect against designs that are merely similar.

Um, it's called a "design pattern" for a reason.

For more interesting discussions about where to draw the line on imitating others, you may want to check out a little company called Zynga.

You got it. I'm reading steve blank's book (slowly...it's tough) and trying to formulate my own unique way of applying it to web applications. This reminds me: I'm gonna go spend an hour reading.

jacob.coby at gmail.com

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fdcleary at gmail

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zgware@gmail.com. Excited to check it out.

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flooha at gmail

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liranbaron at gmail dot com thanks

uvince AT yahoo.com

thanks for the free account!

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austin [at] beatnex [dot] com

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ekpyrotic at gmail dot com

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contact at tallstreet.com

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tonyhuynh29 at gmail

STEPS TO GET YOUR PAID ACCOUNT

1. REGISTER ON THE WEBSITE

2. WHEN YOU GET TO "STEP 3", WHICH ASKS YOU FOR PAYMENT, POST IN THE THREAD WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

My new website is CustomerFind.com.

Remember my web app HipHopGoblin.com? Well, about a month ago, I wrote up a blog post detailing what I had learned and posted it up on HN [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824905]. In part, I explained how I had used Twitter to promote the website: I scanned for artists mentioning certain keywords, and then auto-followed them. This got me a lot of exposure, and a lot of gratitude from people who were glad to find the site.

Then I got contacted by the CEO of a web site, asking for me to sell him my scripts. "Sure," I said. "I can package them nicely and include the MySQL db-creating scripts."

"No, no," he refused. "I want a hosted solution." And thus was borne CustomerFind.com.

After a month or so of work, this is iteration #2 in my startup, this time having a paying customer from day 1. And I'm offering a 7-day free trial for all HN readers. Just reply to this post with your email address and I'll hook you up.

All feedback and criticism welcome, as well as suggestions for future directions of the product. I'm thinking of evolving it into a CRM tool, so you can communicate with the people who have followed you back (and are clearly interested in your product). But I don't want to write it unless I know that many will pay me for it ;)

Again, all comments welcome. Thanks for taking a look.

doesn't twitter ban people for doing this?

Good question. In my experience, no. There are many other apps that do the same thing, and this one is especially geared towards finding high-quality keywords. In fact, we only follow 25/day, so that we can slowly figure out which keywords work and which ones don't. The ultimate goal is to follow keywords that convert at 20%+, which is easily doable.

That being said, Twitter reserves the right to do whatever they want at any time. But this is non-aggressive, and we're discouraging "spammy" behavior.

zaid.farooqui at gmail

Would love to give it a shot!

You got it. Register, and then once you get to the "submit payment" screen (step 3/3) let me know and I'll update your account.

Done...I think? After submitting step 1 and giving your app permission, I was brought back to step1.

I now get "Error: that twitter account is already in use." I am using Chrome.

(To the dude downvoting this and other random comments of mine, stay classy!)

No, I meant try signing in, not re-creating the account

i'd like to try it too. email: twitter@emoticards.com thanks

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offtopic: I accessed your site and the fact that you framed facebook made me think it was some kind of phishing. my 2c.

it's a facebook page. we're a facebook app. but thanks :)

Registered.

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Nice, thanks :)

Thanks!

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This seems interested, I'd love to help you beta test.

jimengland at gmail

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Thanks!

you're welcome & activated

bart at customerfind.the-bart dot org

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Registered - shafqat at newscred dot com.

Great idea btw... look forward to trying it out.

activated, and thanks

prokhorenko at gmail.com and we'll see how this works out. :)

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Did you go through the registration process yet?

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activated!

thanks. Is it one twitter account per customerfind account? Also I would love to be able to avoid following certain twitter accounts. Do you think there is a possibility you could add a field to input twitter accounts we don't want to follow? It would be useful to have some fields to follow only twitter accounts tagged with certain locations too, for eg, London, Berkshire, Brighton etc.

Happy to add this feature for you if you're willing to purchase a paid account. If so, email zackster@gmail.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com