

Critique our startup: HeavyInk.com - tjic
http://heavyink.com
Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other goodies thrown in.  <p>The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296</a>), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways.  <p>There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).<p>So: please check out the site, and give your feedback, either here, or in the HeavyInk forums (<a href="http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1" rel="nofollow">http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1</a> )<p>We really do take all feedback seriously, and have prioritized various features and bug fixes based on customer comments.<p>
Thanks!

======
tjic
Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy /
half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in
Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books
(individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to
graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I
know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other
goodies thrown in.

The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of
research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296>), we concluded that the existing
firms all failed in major ways.

There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out
details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text
descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).

So: please check out the site, and give your feedback, either here, or in the
HeavyInk forums (<http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1> )

We really do take all feedback seriously, and have prioritized various
features and bug fixes based on customer comments.

Thanks!

------
oditogre
I like the site overall, but here's some initial gripes:

"20% off Everything and Free Shipping on All Orders"

Could probably stand to qualify this with 'Special Offer' or if it's something
you always do, 'We always offer...' or something. Maybe it's just me, but the
way it just sits there right now, my first thought was something like, "Is
this place going out of business?"

Search results page is a bit confusing, and it would be really nice to have an
advanced search so I could exclude fields (first search I tried was for Priest
(example: [http://www.amazon.com/Priest-VOL-3-Min-woo-
Hyung/dp/15918201...](http://www.amazon.com/Priest-VOL-3-Min-woo-
Hyung/dp/1591820103/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-0865395-6261467?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194565489&sr=1-2)
\- if somebody can tell me how to make a link into a single word on N.YC I'll
clean this up). It doesn't appear you have the series anyways, but it would
have been nice to specify that I was searching for a Title and get a 'No
Results' page instead of browsing through 3 pages of 'Not What I'm Looking
For'.

If buttons (like 'Subscribe To Issues') aren't going to be an actual link
(i.e., your pointer doesn't turn into a hand when you hover over it), there
should be some sort of mouseover effect to indicate it's not just a dead link
(and maybe a click effect, too, for people with slower computers / connections
that won't load the next page straight away.)

~~~
tyler
Yeah, I agree regarding the search results being confusing. It didn't turn out
exactly as I wanted, but its on my ever-growing list of tasks to improve it.

------
mattmaroon
Well, I don't know anything about the size or statistics of your industry. I
don't read comments, so I can't really buy anything.

Your design is ok, but why not make it a little more comic-bookish? Maybe get
a designer to give you something similar to the cover of Amory Wars you have
at the top there.

In retail your success is going to come down to things we YC denizens can't
see from a glance. Prices, selection, service.

~~~
tjic
The market is about $500 million/year. We're not going to get VC funding,
because there's no chance to become a billion dollar player. However, we'd be
more than happy to get 2% of the market, and make a 10% profit!

As far as why the design isn't overly comic-booky: we did a ton of customer
and competitor research before we picked the feature list or started writing
the code, or doing the design, and we found that one objection many people
have to comic book stores is that they feel like ghettos: they're perceived as
not welcoming if you're not already part of the subculture. With that in mind,
we consciously chose a design that was fresh and exciting, but didn't echo the
super-hero motifs and stylings that many other comic book websites use.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
For what it's worth, I like the design a lot. Was there some kind of process
you went through to get it looking like this? Did you prototype and show
users, do some sketches, photoshop, etc?

~~~
tjic
Thanks!

You can read a lot more about our design process on our old blog (
<http://heavyink.com/blog/> ), but the short version is:

1) come up with basic idea for website 2) put up a survey 3) ping comic
bloggers; get 400 people to take survey 4) narrow down feature list 5) get a
UI consultant to help us design how the features get spread across the various
pages (lots of "scenario" stuff: "say that you're a young woman shopping for
manga. What do you type? Where do you click?"). 6) hand the "wireframes" from
the UI consultant off to our graphic designer 7) review the sketches; decide
to pick a new graphic designer 8) get sketches back from second graphic
designer; tell him "No, make the color scheme more like Netflix". Repeat this
last step in 100 different steps: feedback on size of elements, etc. The
engineering team provided the feedback, the graphic designer provided the
expertise with fonts, layout, etc. 9) done!

...well, actually, nothing is every done. We've got to revamp the tabbed
navigation, the RSS customization buttons, and a ton of other stuff...but it
was well enough done to go live!

~~~
rms
Cool. This and the salaries for your employees were all self funded from your
other venture without debt?

~~~
tjic
Pretty much.

SmartFlix is profitable, but it has debt.

All of the salaries, rent, startup inventory, consultant fees, trademark fees,
legal fees, etc. for HeavyInk were payed for by profits from SmartFlix.

That said, SmartFlix itself has debt. Why? Because it's really capital
intensive. If a given DVD rents out once every 60 days, and we make $4 in
profit on a rental, and the DVD costs $60, then an upfront investment of $60
breaks even two years later. So: SmartFlix has incurred a bit of debt (half of
it real debt owed to banks and other small lendors, and half of it paper debt,
in the form of promissory notes to engineers who were on half salary for six
months, etc.).

The capital intensive nature of SmartFlix was fine, but it means that it's
hard to grow past a certain size - in the absence of VCs rushing to give us $1
or $5 million (and, frankly, they're right not to - SmartFlix isn't going to
have the return that they're looking for), then growth slows to the rate at
which we can purchase inventory with profits.

...which is one of the reasons that we looked for a second startup idea that
leveraged a lot of our core competencies (ecommerce, fulfillment, datamining,
etc.) but did not require nearly as much cash tied up in inventory.

------
natrius
Instead of having that huge arrow to get people to install the OpenSearch
plugin (or at least in addition to the arrow), you should use OpenSearch
autodiscovery. When you go to a site with autodiscovery implemented, the logo
box of the search bar glows blue. Go to Wikipedia and look at your search bar
to get an idea of what happens.

Most users probably either don't notice or don't know what the blue glow
means, so I can understand keeping the arrow, but you might as well add the
autodiscovery too. Someone might do something nifty someday by crawling the
web and scraping those autodiscovery links to build some sort of meta-search
engine... that still wouldn't be as useful as Google, but it'd still be nifty.

[http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#Auto...](http://www.opensearch.org/Specifications/OpenSearch/1.1#Autodiscovery_in_HTML.2FXHTML)

~~~
breck
I really really liked the yellow search bar, but I think you should make it
point to something more useful than adding a firefox search. I personally
don't use that for anything but very major searches(google, ebay, occasionally
wikipedia). what if you used that bar to point to a sales special or something
that can drive revenue or would be really appealing to users.

------
ALee
You're in a pretty cool area. Like I said from a previous post though, I would
suggest that you either talk to the guys from ComicVine (to see what they did
wrong- they're now working on a another startup even though ComicVine is doing
fabulously well) or figure out a way to beat them (I would suggest cribbing
the stuff you like from them and then just making it better)..

As someone who read too many comic books when young, the digital comic
phenomenon is really gaining serious steam. If you could let people upload
their fan drawings and do licensing with the major publishers, you could
really get a better in. Comicvine did not have that and as a result was never
approached by Marvel or DC to acquire (the two companies just were pissed).

------
Tichy
Good luck! The days when I bought comic books are long past, but your site is
inspiring. Perhaps I'll find something new worthy of buying.

~~~
tyler
Thats awesome. If you sign up and rate the kind of stuff you used to like, as
well as stuff you specifically don't like... the recommendation system should
give you some decent suggestions. (If it doesn't, I suck.) They're not as good
as they will be, because our data set is still fairly limited, but its getting
better daily.

------
danielha
The website looks slick and I'm a big superhero/comics geek. I signed up and
will poke around when I get a chance.

~~~
strider
Awesome, thanks!

Go rate a few of your favorite comics, and then click the "recommendations"
tab up top - we've been getting a lot of compliments on this feature.

~~~
Tichy
Can you get recommendations without having to log in, too?

~~~
tjic
Not personalized recommendations, no.

A question for YC-ers: does this sound like a valuable feature? My inclination
is to think "no", but I might be wrong...

~~~
marcus
Use the current session history to do personal recommendations to users that
aren't logged in. As a user browses through the comics he will generally click
the things that interest him and a single great on the spot recommendation can
be a deal sealer for a new user browsing your site.

------
rms
[http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/08/heavyinkcom-a-
mashup.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/08/heavyinkcom-a-mashup.html)

Boing Boing! Congratulations. The pagerank gods have smiled upon you. Let us
know how much traffic/repeat traffic _that_ gets you.

~~~
tjic
My personal blog once got linked by BoingBoing.

The machine glowed fiery red, just before it caught fire and died. :-)

Hopefully the fact that we've got a dedicated box with extra memory for
HeavyInk will stop a repeat of that story...

------
mwerty
It's clean but I feel it looks too much like netflix. Suggestion: Put the
black splotch on red effect to one or both of the sides.

------
ubelt
When you're browsing for titles, it would be nice to put page navigation links
at the bottom too aside fromt he ones at the top.

------
german
Looks good, just one thing, in my browser (firefox 2.0.0.8 on linux) the
signup button display is funny.

~~~
strider
Yep. It worked fine in 2.0.0.7 on linux (that's what we used during devel),
and then Firefox released 2.0.0.8, which regressed a bit, and reintroduced an
old Firefox bug. There was uproar (we weren't the only site that looked bad in
2.0.0.8) and the Firefox team expedited the release of 2.0.0.9, and the site
looks great again.

We actually held off on the announcement until 2.0.0.9 was ut!

So: consider upgrading Firefox right now, and give it another shot!

~~~
tyler
Problem is that Ubuntu hasn't updated Firefox to 2.0.0.9 in the repositories
yet.

------
Fuca
I like the idea but I think you need a designer

Good Luck

------
alaskamiller
the ratings don't work in firefox 2 on osx.

~~~
tyler
Interesting. Its been a while since I did any testing on the MacBook. Thanks.

