
We put $200k into a site that sucks. Please destroy us with your criticism - stormen
http://www.listnerd.com
======
lawnchair_larry
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](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.

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
stormen
Thank you for your input!

------
downandout
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.

~~~
paul9290
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!

------
Partyfists
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.

~~~
lumpypua
_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!

~~~
Partyfists
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.

~~~
MaxGabriel
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.

~~~
Partyfists
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/why-your-sass-is-bad-and-you-
should-feel-bad)

[https://speakerdeck.com/liamdanger/what-if-css-was-object-
or...](https://speakerdeck.com/liamdanger/what-if-css-was-object-oriented)

[https://speakerdeck.com/benbayard/how-to-raise-a-code-
puppy](https://speakerdeck.com/benbayard/how-to-raise-a-code-puppy)

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

------
Flemlord
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.

~~~
tarr11
I doubt that any of this will move the needle in a meaningful way for this
site.

------
grey-area
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 :)

~~~
stormen
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.)

------
maxjus
Escape them inputs, dawg!

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

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

------
thejerz
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.

------
stormen
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.

~~~
tmikaeld
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.

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

------
nomedeplume
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.

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

------
ziyadb
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...](http://marketingstartups.com/2012/12/18/interview-with-listnerd/)
[2] [http://buzzfeed.com](http://buzzfeed.com)

~~~
stormen
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?

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

------
wlkr
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.

~~~
stormen
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 :)

------
icelancer
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.

~~~
stormen
You should never go to Dubai.

------
overgard
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".

~~~
overgard
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](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).

~~~
stormen
Thank you! :)

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

Honest question.

~~~
stormen
Yep. I really do:

[http://www.listnerd.com/erling.loken.andersen](http://www.listnerd.com/erling.loken.andersen)

------
fenier
Some things I noticed...

The homepage fails HTML validation. 32 Errors, 7 warnings

[http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.listnerd....](http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.listnerd.com%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0)

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

Login Overlay - can't escape to close.

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.

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

------
pairing
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.

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

------
andrewstuart
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?

~~~
stormen
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.

~~~
notduncansmith
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.

------
x1798DE
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.

------
m0nastic
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.

~~~
stormen
Thank you.

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

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

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

------
poopsintub
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.

------
pbhjpbhj
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.

------
DanBC
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.

~~~
stormen
Thank you, we'll fix that!

------
kctess5
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.

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

------
gwintrob
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.

~~~
stormen
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.

~~~
madaxe_again
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!

~~~
stormen
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.

------
mbell
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?

~~~
stormen
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.

------
m4nu
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

------
notdan
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.

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

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

~~~
stormen
Already answered this, just see my previous answers!

------
hosay123
How were you expecting to make money?

~~~
stormen
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)...

------
poopsintub
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.

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

~~~
stormen
Exactly.

~~~
poopsintub
You wasted a lot of time and money...

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ivionday
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.

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spanko_at_large
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.

~~~
stormen
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"?

------
sashanna
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.

~~~
stormen
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.)

------
jamesgagan
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?

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

------
general_failure
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.

~~~
stormen
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.

------
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
stormen
Thank you!

------
refrigerator
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.

~~~
stormen
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.

------
redeleven
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.

~~~
stormen
Thank you.

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

------
Lidador
Brilliant marketing stunt. Take my point.

~~~
stormen
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.

------
jseip
Why would I want to do this?

~~~
stormen
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.

