Ask HN: Please review my startup. theBuzz.at | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please review my startup. theBuzz.at

12 pointspmjoyce31 comments

The idea is straightforward. Digg (or HN) style voting for local bars and restaurants, see what's popular now.

All vote's are upvotes, there are no stars and a vote means "I'd go here again". Users can vote for the same place weekly. Content is submitted by users, not pre-populated but I've integrated the Google Search API to make searching for and adding venues easier.

I've finally managed to get a demo out for testing - it's London only at the moment (split into 150+ neighbourhoods) and there's still lots to do. That said, I'd be interested to get your impressions and thoughts on the idea and execution at this stage.

Obviously there will be a critical mass issue but right now I'm concentrating on making a product worthy of mass consumption.

http://www.thebuzz.at/

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I'm a little confused as to the workflow. Here's what i did, assuming I wanted to vote on a place I like:

1. Enter "fernandez & wells" into the name box. Hit search. 2. Two results are shown. Both have what look like votes already (+4, +5 icons). But my only action is "add this place." Where do I vote? 3. When I click to add the place, I'm presented with a big form, which I don't care about. I click "add place" anyway, and after clicking a couple of times with nothing happening, i realize it's trying to get me to select a category. I select a category (restaurant), click add again, and get an error "invalid username or userid in get_avatar"

So... hiccups aside, seems like a good idea. Execution-wise, streamline, streamline, streamline.

OK - this is a product of it being somewhat rushed to get something out the door.

The workflow does need to be trimmed, let me explain a little of what went on there.

1) You entered "fernandez & wells" we check our DB, found nothing then went off to check Google 2) The 2 results were from Google. The +4 icon is confusing here, it's a half implemented feature. It's actually there to show how much Karma a user would get by adding it. 3) I should make the error more prominent. As for "invalid username or userid in get_avatar" - basically you shouldn't have got to this screen to be able to add a venue without being logged in. I'll make the user check early and redirect to the login/registration screen.

Thanks for the feedback.

Good luck with this.

Suggestion: hire someone to pre-populate/categorize your database with the top 500 or 1000 spots in London you want people to rate. It doesn't have to be perfect. You can use inexpensive labor or even Amazon's mechanical turk. If the goal of your site is to get people voting, you can improve your adoption by lessening the focus on data entry, which will be a turn-off for most of your potential useres.

At the moment I'm steering away from the idea of pre-population. My reason is that if I can streamline, streamline, streamline (as you rightly suggest) the process of adding a site it it hopefully won't be too much of a burden for the user. The very process might help venue submitters feel a greater sense of ownership over the site content which won't be full of the excess clutter of what I deem to be 1000 top spots in London. I don't want to be one person dictating the tone of the site to the users, only they, as a collective, should feel totally free to do that.

I like it! I wish you had my city (Los Angeles). I'd suggest adding downvotes, but instead of having upvotes and downvotes affect a single score, like Digg/Bury, maybe have 2 scores, one for Buzz, and another for Kill, so we can see a particular bar had, say, 20 Buzzes, and 5 Kills.

Also, do the Buzz counts wear off after a certain amount of time? I couldn't tell if they did, but it would be useful to see that a bar had 20 Buzzes last week, and only 10 this week.

Thanks. I hope to roll out to more cities (including Los Angeles) pretty quickly once the initial phase of ironing out kinks has passed.

The idea of displaying up and down votes is something I had thought about and I can certainly see some of the benefits. However, it is at odds with the driving force behind the site which was was to simplfy the criteria by which venues are "rated". That said, if it turns out that it's something the user base really want... well, everything is flexible :)

Buzzes don't wear off after time although the default view is "most recently popular". I like the idea of displaying buzzes by time. I might develop on that. Thanks.

Very well done in terms of UI. I like the concept. The problem comes down to: why will I come back on a fairly regular basis? Not sure if that is every week, every month,etc. but it should be fairly regularly.

The reason I see to return regularly, say every week, would be to check out the places gaining traction now. This is a reasonably fast moving area, bars open and close, go in and out of vouge on a fairly regularly.

Regualr users might go out for food or drinks on a fairly regualr basis - whether it's an area they know and want to see if there's anything new/hot or they're going out in a new neighbourhood - I see both as valid reaons to check out the site.

Nice concept and great implementation for an Alpha version... some suggestions

1. I searched for Curry and got 4 restaurants. If possible, you might wanna change the labels design on the map, they don't stand out on the map

2. People visiting your site might also wanna search for restaurants of specific cuisine. So you can think about changing the label name "Place Name"

3. You can put the tag "Discover and share new places" on the top

All the best :)

1. That was a concern of mine. I think I should make them I little bigger also.

2. I saw the search as a way of finding a specific venue. Say you went to a great restaurant and you wanted to buzz it, you put the place name in the search, if it's already there you can buzz it, if it's not you can add it. If you want to narrow down all Indian restaurants in a specific area use the black venue category band (hover over restaurants to see the sub-categories).

3) [Edit] Do you think this strap line does an acceptable job of explaining what the site is about?

Thanks for the feedback.

Guess you can start with "Discover and Share Great Places" and then test it out with some folks to whom you have not explained what the site is about

True - it's better than nothing.

(UX point of view comment)

Hmm, the design is inspired by www.kontain.com? It's well done though. A few UX quirks here and there, but most of it is fine.

Maybe that nice image and copy on the login/register page should be on the homepage when a user isn't logged in? I'm thinking it could convert more in some way. (though the content is also good, you'd have to sacrifice some other part of the page)

Spot on, the site was inspired by Kontain.com. The actual design work was carried out by Brighton (UK) agency http://www.builtbybuffalo.com.

I'd be interested to see a service like this track what is happening real time. So, imagine a user goes to a bar and texts/emails/iPhone app, whatever, that would buzz up that local for the night. Then users could look to see what is going on in real time. That may be what you are doing here, if so, I would make it more clear. As it is, it seems like a review site, almost like Urbanspoon.

A mobile interaction is necessary, I agree. Without it we're left showing you what popular in the past day/week/month/all time as we have at the moment.

Yeah I think the ussage would really benefit from tailor made mobile apps.

I'd like to see a feature where people could at photos from those buzzed locations. Integrate with twitter, facebook etc.

Great idea - I also want to add Facebook Connect functionality to remove a barrier to entry for signup.

Question, if a restaurant gets on it once, will it ever be able to get on again?

If there's a "buzz" at a restaurant, there will be a lot of people there, and it will be harder to find a seat. Of course, it'll be a good sign if you have this problem, but it may be something to watch out for.

If you're asking whether a restaurant can appear on the front page more than once the answer is yes. People can vote for a place multiple times (once per week). So if the restaurant is voted on enough it can appear near the top of the list lots. I could do a better job of communicating what, precisely, the list of venues represents.

Like it. The header part is to big in my opinion. You should come up with a nice slogan or a line to describe what your project is about.

How do you do approach new customers? What is the business model behind it?

I'm having a little difficulty coming up with a tagline for the site that isn't "It's Digg for Places". Any suggestions on this front would be hugely appreciated. As would suggestions of strategies for approaching new customers. It's brand new at the moment, I'm still working out some problems but once it's ready I want to be in a position to grow reasonably quickly.

Re. the business model - I have a few ideas in mind right now, particularly in the arena of local advertising/coupons/offers. Nothing fleshed out yet.

perhaps something like: "Tell us which places _you_ like most"

buzzd.com seems to do something similar - although they focus mainly on the mobile platform. They determine which place is 'buzzing' based on twitter updates, direct buzzes etc for a bar/restaurant.

I think the idea has potential - A couple of suggestions that might seem redundant since some have already been suggested above - make it more streamlined (workflow) & integrate fb connect. Twitter integration will also be great to buzz places automatically via Twitter. Any plans for mobiles ? Additionally, check if you use yelp api to populate places - dont know if it will violate their ToS, but no harm in checking.

edit: You could also add relative scores - ie, a bar/restaurant that was in the top position has down by x percentage etc.

this absolutely has to be a mobile app--the only time im ever looking for a place to go to is when im already out and the present venue is lame. for 20-somethings, venue is rarely planned ahead of time, and we usually hit multiple venues.

as far as venue discovery, again, its something that is gonna come up in conversation--"oh hey let me check my iphone!" Though, I might allow you to send me weekly spam of hot spots and their specials, correlated with your value add. hey, that's a nice business model...

"the only time im ever looking for a place to go to is when im already out and the present venue is lame"

That's pretty much the exact reason that drove me to create the site. I've been in the same situation more times than I care to remember and I couldn't find anything to suit my requirements - that is: to narrow down a couple of places that might be interesting in my immediate vicinity... now. Agreed it needs to be mobile.

Nice idea and nice design. It would also be nice if you could show people stuff from their own city (IP geolocation maybe?).

Of course - that's the plan. We're London only for now as we work things out. Once it's fairly stable we should be able to roll out to other cities pretty rapidly.

I wanted to add a couple of nightclubs in my town (Kiev, Ukraine) but I was limited to London?

OP said it was London only at the moment while he's testing it.

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