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Ask HN: Review My Minimal Viable Product.

pluspanda.com

48 pointsapsurd31 comments

I like it. The web is full of people who aren't really programmers who are using it to make money. That's how I got into programming a decade ago.

They'll learn to make a rating system if they really feel the need (making a reasonable one is not rocket science) but offer them a slick one that's easy to integrate on the webpage where they're selling their e-books or vinyls or whatever and I imagine they'd pay for the usage.

There are a few problems that I see here, but two of the big ones:

1. As a visitor to a random website, I'm skeptical of reviews I see on that site. If your brand gets big enough that people see "Comments powered by PlusPanda" and think "Oh, ok...I can trust this", then maybe, but that seems like a pretty lofty goal to have to reach before your business model really clicks.

2. The bigger problem is self-selection bias. If I run a great business, of course I'd love more people talking me up on my site. If I run a crappy business, I'll have no reviews or reviews that I can filter, shape, and control. 3rd party review sites remove the power to have and control reviews from the business owner, and that's kind of the whole point.

EDIT: I just read this and I realized that I sound really negative. Let me point out that I only bothered to go through the site, think the issue out, and write a comment because I think what you're doing is genuinely interesting and has a lot of potential. I just wanted to point out some issues I'm sure you've thought through, and I'd like to know what your view is.

I think #1 is one of those things that everyone thinks, but is generally untrue, much like "advertising has no effect on me". Carefully selected customer testimonials are a time-honored tradition, and an effective one. Oftentimes you see a major product with glowing reviews posted in its advertising. Of course on an intellectual level you know that any terrible product could probably pull that off, and that it really means nothing, but on an emotional level its still effective.

So at the very worst, this service will be just as good as the hand-selected testimonials the advertising agent puts in every magazine ad. That's still a net positive. Even more likely some of the reviews won't be fully glowing endorsements which in and of itself will lend credibility.

Hi Ryan, yes yes I do appreciate you taking the time to highlight some concerns.

1) Yes, ideally our brand would be "trusted". But as of now I don't think it necessarily requires our brand to be well-known. I'd like to think that a "These reviews managed and verified by <link>PlusPanda</link>" would be sufficient enough as a research tool for concerned customers to be able to click on and read a short description of our program policy.

2) I agree in that a service like this entails that the customer actually commit and put in effort, in order for it to actually do its job. It's not something you necessarily set and forget. So if your business is poor, this isn't any type of remedy in and of itself. I am taking your point to be that relative to feedback, pluspanda suffers from self-selection bias. But actually the whole secret-sauce of customer reviews is actually mainly for marketing purposes, which are two fold:

1. Customers always believe 3rd party opinions over 1st party opinions. So even if they are less likely to believe in the full-validity of reviews on your site, they'd still likely believe them more than they would any first-party marketing copy on the site. And as stated by others, at worst, your reviews wouldn't be so much as "reviews" but "testimonials" (i.e. they are all praise) which tons of sites successfully employ.

2. Customer Relationship Management via email marketing. Simply put, everyone that bothers enough to leave a review, has a stake in your business, and you should be communicating with them, thanking them, giving them loyalty rewards, rectifying poor experiences, and encouraging repeat-business, and word-of-mouth etc. So customer reviews is really just a way to manage an effective email marketing campaign. It's a "platform".

This is the angle from which I am basing my value proposition. Any thoughts are appreciated. Thanks again for your time.

I think the "self-selection" comment was referring to the businesses, not the customers. An analogy is those "customer forums" that many companies setup, thinking, "Customers can support themselves!" but then realize that it's more about "Customers can learn how crap our company is!" and they take it down. So, crappy businesses won't want your service.

But even a well-run business will be cautious about letting some random internet stranger post comments to their homepage. You need to make sure that comments aren't from competitors, people don't post multiple times and most importantly: That the company can respond to criticisms.

On the add review widget, maybe the default rating should be 5, or at least not 1. Maybe use one of those star widgets instead of the combo box? I think business using this would prefer a higher default rating, rather than have their products get lots of 1s by mistake.

It's also not clear in the demo why users have to have to give a name and email to submit a review - do you need that extra friction?

Very good point. I would definitely go with no default rating. Any default at all taints results.

Would you give any weight to a testimonial from 'anonymous'?

Email is probably a toss up. Are there legal requirements if the business wants to use the reviews in, say, advertisements? Perhaps some contact information is necessary.

Thanks for your feedback. Good suggestion. After reading some more, I think the best thing would be to have the default be null, and then cause an error if its unchanged. That way the user is forced to consciously select a rating. Thanks for pointing that out!

As for the email, aside from anon reviews being implicitly less valuable, the secret-sauce of gathering customer reviews is so you can engage with customers loyal/concerned enough to leave reviews!

I've used the rollover star system before (similar to how iTunes does it.) It's easier, sexier and more intuitive.

But yes, definitely default to "no stars" and require that a rating of 1 to 5 is given.

The summary "Now you can manage reviews on your website just like http://yelp.com but completely branded by you, all with just two lines of code." is confusing. It hints at why someone would want this, but it's not clear how it works (e.g. whether its a service or a library). Also, "two lines of code" may be easy, but it probably won't sound that way to many people. The rest of the front page explains the benefits of your service, but never clearly explains what it does and how it works.

Your demo should look like a real site, using PlusPanda for a real purpose.

Thanks Shawn, I'll definitely put that on my priority list. I wanted to get the mvp out to my HN buddies as a pre-cursor to enlisting some feedback out in the wild. As soon as possible, I'll be trying to get some real-life use cases going on, and I'll be able to show "real" demos =). Thanks again.

You could always just create a very simple fake site. Set up a site at pandaplus.com/pandabooks or pandabooks.pandaplus.com and make a fake site for a used bookstore. Banner, navigation (that doesn't work), and your review plugin.

Very nice.

3 issues:

1) What are the 2 lines of code?

2) I took about 5 seconds to find the "Add review" form, as it was hidden behind some button.

3) I your site design, but not the title font size (too big, or too many points) and the pitch text. It's good for consumers, but I find it a bit dumbed down.

Your target customers appear to be sophisticated website owners (after all, your first paragraph reads "Now you can manage reviews on your website just like http://yelp.com but completely branded by you, all with just two lines of code", and you use words like "utilize").

Instead of "big headers and lots of text, for consumers", you might try something like:

Customer Reviews Work.

Amazon.com, Apple, Borders books, Best Buy, Walmart and other big-box retailers use customer reviews on their websites, because it works. With Plus Panda, you can do the same, with just 2 lines of code, and for a very low cost.

Don't take our word for it. Read our reviews and then Get Started Now!

With just 2 lines of code, you can:

* Build trust and credibility with new customers.

* Encourage customers to give you feedback.

* Respond quickly and openly to customer complaints.

* Promote new products (WTF, is that a COMING SOON feature??)

* Help customers spread the word through Twitter, Facebook and Myspace (coming soon??).

A world class customer review system (like Amazon's system, yelp or Panda Plus) could take months to build if you started from scratch. But all this, and more (including a 90 day guarantee, and a data export API) is available from just (What does it cost??? Don't you know yet? OK cool.). How cool is that?

Anyway, it's a nice site and a cool product idea.

Thanks for taking the time to revise my marketing copy! It is definitely something to consider. I feel that I will need to a/b test a more basic explanatory version with are more content-rich to-the-point advanced version that you've whipped up.

As for the "comming soon" features, haha, yes, I got ahead of myself there, its not available in the mvp but at its core much of the "benefits" of the review system would be through the ability to email and communicate with the reviewers. So things like promoting new products, and enabling word-of-mouth would be mostly through email marketing campaigns. Things like twitter/facebook integration would start out as a simple fb connect feature or submission via a dedicated twitter handle.

As for pricing, as much as possible of course, but I'd like to believe around ~$20/month =P

Thanks again, And I will seriously probably be a/b testing your concise marketing copy!

p.s. The 2 lines of code is just a div wrapper with a unique id, and a script tag that loads all the assets. It appends a link tag to the main css, fetches the html as a js object, and then injects the raw review data via jsonp.

You might include a link to a popup of the two lines as well. "...all with just <link>two lines of code.</link>"

Thanks in advance for the feedback my dear HN crew.

Customer reviews are in a sense the framework for online word-of-mouth, and word-of-mouth marketing is ...Gold. Pluspanda.com is the MVP toward this end.

The marketing site and the product functionality is clearly still pretty raw, so ideal feedback would be on concept implementation execution, possible avenues, and feature must-haves etc.

Also any designers that can style the widget , please email me!!

Thanks!

I think your real goal is not immediately obvious. At first it looks like you're just providing a way for businesses to get feedback, but I see that is not it at all. It is, however, a great pitch.

I would put a little more on the home page about the trust aspect (which to me seems to be the real goal).

I think you are almost certainly going to be dealing with the issue of owners wanting to delete reviews for a very long time, but I think your position, once properly understood, makes sense. When I first read it, however, I was taken aback, so I think some warning (in the form of a few comments about the trust aspect) on the front page would help prepare users for this.

Really, I think you have an awesome product and idea here. This is the kind of the thing that once it was established, customers would start to expect and even judge sites based on whether or not they had it (think Carfax).

Daniel, thanks for taking the time to leave feedback. I am all for becoming as necessary as a Carfax =]. Also I will take you up on that idea of dedicating some copy to highlight what trust means and how its managed from and to owner and customer. Thanks again.

Will these have your branding on them? Because if they don't, then how will people confirm the credibility of the reviews? Kind of defeats the purpose of open honest reviews and not letting owners delete reviews if users don't know that.

With yelp, people know that these are reviews on a third-party site.

Also, I'd like to add that since users are embedding these reviews on their own sites', visitors will not know if owners tamper with the reviews with additional javascript. Having reviews on a third party site has its advantages.

I don't know what you've read about Yelp, but they certainly are not a model of credibility. Between rampant self-reviews (restaurateurs have been caught using dozens of fake accounts to give themselves glowing endorsements) and their protection racket sales tactic,s Yelp is no more credible than the customer testimonials in every PR article.

Any advantages that could possibly come from the reviews being on a third-party site are outweighed tenfold by the inconvenience of having to go there.

Thanks Chris for your feedback. Yes I plan to have a small logo for that exact reason, which would be linkable not to my home page, but to a clear outline of the program policy and assurance of at least "intended" credibility.

Matt addressed some of the concerns about why relying on yelp is probably getting to be a bad idea. I do not intend to outright accuse yelp of anything since I don't have empirical evidence, but whether or not its true at least brings up the potential drawbacks in letting another company manage your reputation.

Matt also brought up that its a tougher sell to have users give you feedback on a third-party site which IMO is especially true of yelp. Yelp is actually a reviewing "community" so you have to set up and account and jump through the usual hoops. Not all businesses cater to web-savvy "i-want-to-be-a-prolific-reviewer-online-" types of people. There are plenty of traditional businesses who's customers rarely go online, but if asked to submit a review through an email, would probably be ok do doing it. Hard to see an older 50-80 year old demographic signup for a "yelp" account, yes?

The digg link doesn't have a hover effect, also consider using sprites with a background-position for those social media links on the homepage because then you won't get the wait while the hover image loads.

The write a review form should probably always be visible as that is the core feature of the product, also the solid colours are a little loud.

Hi, Didnt read previous comments so someone may have said this or addressed it already.

Design looks a little bit to bland for me. Almost like a off the shelf wordpress theme.

Focus on your strong points:

Easy Setup List major benefits ( Increase sales, search traffic, etc. ) Easy Administration Analytics

Cool idea though.

I like this. I would use visual stars as well, which will bring reviews to life better than numbers only. Also, I think the PlusPanda branding could work well, and although the current logo is okay, I might shoot for something cuter/happier. Pandas give the perfect opportunity for that.

Take a look at your tab order, it goes from the review field to the name field, skipping the email field. Also, it isn't very clear to me how it will look at my own website. Do I embed the big box? what about customizing to fit my layout? etc.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. The tab order is semantically incorrect because I floated the two fields in opposite directions! Thanks for the catch, I'll update it.

The css is sent separately so it is fully configurable and can be "professionally" skinned, but there will also be some basic themes to select from and alter basic color schemes. As of now this is the MVP so theming is not addressed!

Do I embed the big box?

If I understand that correctly, no, the code you would embed is just a div wrapper and then a script tag. The script tag loads everything via javascript, and then builds it on the page within the wrapper. If javascript is disabled, a link is displayed to your "standalone" version which actually works completely without any javascript =)

Hope this answers your questions and actually if you have any requests regarding being able to customize it to fit your website, I'd love to hear them from a users perspective. Please email me! Thanks again.

Looks nice, and a good idea. I'd consider using this if I had a need for it (and I may in the future).

I did notice that tabbing order goes review body->name->email->submit, which doesn't match their visual layout.

Thanks for your comment. Ah yes I checked and its because I floated the fields in the opposite directions! I'll fix that. Thanks.

There's a typo in the front page : "A Powerful, Easy Customer Communicaton System."

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