

Ask HN:  Please provide feedback for fonefu.com - comatose_kid
http://www.fonefu.com

======
JacobAldridge
Firstly, as always, congrats for making this happen so far. Two things pop out
for me:

1) The brand, url etc is all about Phones and nothing about Books. Do you plan
to expand the service into other areas? Because right now it sounds like it
will cut your phone bill in half, not your next Malcolm Gladwell purchase.

2) As phones evolve, will your target market be dwindling. Can I go online
with my current phone and look up Amazon while I'm in the bookstore? If I can,
why would I call you? If I can't, surely it won't be long before I can - and
then, why would I call you?

But hey, you've got a revenue model, so who am I to question the niche you
seem to be servicing.

~~~
comatose_kid
Jacob, thanks for the comments.

1) Yes, that was intentional. I'd like to take this to serve different types
of media, and possibly extend to UPC (although the haphazard ways that UPCs
are assigned makes this task difficult). If there is any way I could make the
purpose clearer short of changing all of my branding, I'm open to suggestions.

2) Yeah, for sure. This isn't necessarily for the early adopter crowd. That
said, there are many people without smart phones who have no idea this service
exists.

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tesseract
I like the idea. I am probably a member of your exact target market: I often
wander into a bookstore or library to kill time, but don't always have a
notepad with me to jot down titles that look interesting. If I had an iPhone
I'd use Amazon's app, but I don't.

I could barely understand the synthesized voice (there was a lot of hissing
and other artifacts when I called; I'm nearly certain they weren't on my end
of the connection).

I tried a few ISBN's of books I recently purchased on Amazon and fonefu found
all 3 titles, but it only gave a price on the one that was available directly
from Amazon. I don't know if this is intentional on your part, or a limitation
of whatever Amazon API you are using, or what. At any rate perhaps you could
make the limitation more clear?

When I went back to the website, I typed my phone number in the 555-555-5555
format like the example. However my login attempt was rejected a few times
before I thought to try 5555555555 instead.

As a non-Friendfeed user I am left wondering why Amazon wishlists aren't also
supported as an export target. Maybe another API limitation (not your fault)?

I'm going to add the 877 number to my phonebook - if the voice becomes easier
to understand I may become a regular user.

~~~
comatose_kid
You are totally my target audience - I had better make you a regular user :)

The synth voice is less than ideal, I'm looking at other options, but they get
expensive quickly. One possibility is to use a better codec on the web server.
Added to the 'todo' list.

The number - That is a strange bug, I thought I had fixed it a while back.
I'll correct it soon.

I'll have to look into wishlists - exporting them is a neat idea, and probably
won't be a lot of work if the API support it.

Thanks for your thoughts. As you continue to use it, please feel free to give
me feedback: ajay@fonefu.com.

~~~
jo
You could at least have a greeting and some options read by a real person.

------
sobriquet
I enjoyed being able to clearly learn what your product does in 4 easy steps.

However, step 1 (No registration required) is not a step. It told me what not
to do, which is confusing. I recommend making it "how it works" in 3 steps,
with a bubble or callout saying "no registration required!"

Also, step 4 made me think I should buy the books in the store, which is
exactly what you don't want them to do... The icon (books in shopping cart)
and words "Purchase your books" don't clearly tell me to drive home empty
handed.

I like the concept, would definitely check it out if I was more of a frugal
shopper, but I often just buy in store to have the instant gratification.

congrats on getting this out there! That's a great accomplishment in itself

~~~
comatose_kid
Good points on the copy. 3 steps + a 'no reg' badge or something makes sense.

One point of fonefu beyond just the cost savings is the ability to keep a
record of books you might be interested in buying later - things you lookup
are stored on fonefu.com or your friendfeed.

------
Angostura
Just an idea. Could you extend this so that I could send a text with an ISBN
number or numbers and you would return a text with the prices.

I hate the idea of trying to hear a robotic voice in a busy store and then
having to write the price down on the back of my hand while holding the phone
in my third hand.

~~~
comatose_kid
Yeah, good idea, and that's one service we definitely plan to offer.
Meanwhile, one thing I might add is the ability to enter an email address and
have the service email you.

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lincolnq
Initial thought: I like this idea. I might actually use it.

I tried it out. The robot voice is a bit hard to understand, but I doubt
there's much you can do about it.

I signed on at the website and tried to enter the phone number in the format
XXX-XXX-XXXX and it failed to log me in. When I removed the dashes it worked
fine. Weird?

Also, on Firefox 3/Ubuntu, the 'add to cart' link goes onto the second line
(overlapping 'delete') and didn't seem to do anything when I clicked it.

When I deleted an item, it was gone and there's no obvious way to get it back.

You might want to allow people to add items to their cart from the web
interface somehow (paste link to Amazon page?)

The website's favicon is very weird.

Cool idea!

~~~
comatose_kid
I'll have to look at FF3 on Linux. Thanks for the pointers. The phone number
parsing has a bug - I'll fix it soon.

Thanks for all of the feedback.

------
fiaz
Great concept!!!

This is exactly the type of thing that I would use given that I do not have an
iPhone (or something similar). Even if I did have an iPhone, I think the
convenience of punching in the ISBN and getting a direct answer trumps having
to launch Safari, navigate to Amazon.com, do a search, select the title, pinch
(zoom in/out), etc.

I'm definitely going to try this one out (and this is coming from a hard core
skeptic!).

I would suggest adding an SMS interface. Also, if I could get an email
reminder of the books I was looking for then that would be pretty cool as
well. Also, if I could get some information about discounted bundles then it
would be a sure thing for me to actually use regularly.

I agree with JAcobAldridge's comment about a dwindling market. My suggestion
in response to this would be to build an iPhone/Android/[whatever] app next
and keep all channels open.

~~~
khafra
FWIW, Amazon has an iPhone app that makes it pretty easy to look up books and
other merchandise, including a team of mechanical turks that'll look up photos
of unidentified products to find info on 'em.

------
durana
Congrats on launching a service that should be very useful to lots of people.

Have you seen Amazon's TextBuyIt?
[https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/productsServices?sn=te...](https://payments.amazon.com/sdui/sdui/productsServices?sn=textbuyit/o)

What are your plans for the future of this service? Anything that would make
me want to use it over Amazon's service?

~~~
durana
Since it wasn't clear in my previous comment, Amazon's TextBuyIt is the exact
same service but via SMS and you can purchase via SMS too.

------
kulkarnic
Two thoughts: 1\. You might want to tell the user of other books similar to
the one she queried for (this could be a reason to call, simply because the
user wants to see more books of th esame kind in the store).

2\. There should be a reverse service too; which lets you browse books at the
store depending on what you looked at Amazon from home.

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tptacek
There are retail places where I am price-sensitive when shopping. Borders
isn't one of them. I'd worry that the positive comments you're getting here
are very biased towards the HN audience.

The place where I'm most price-sensitive when shopping is probably Best Buy.

------
_pius
Very cool.

A little recommendation would be for you to create a sample account using the
"555-555-5555" number you default to in the login field. That way, curious
people who are interested in the interface can click through and see what
they're going to get.

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comatose_kid
Hi everyone,

Thanks a lot for the comments! - all of the feedback is insightful.

I will let the community know when I make the updates.

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aston
This seems like just the type of app Twilio was built to be built upon. Are
you guys using their API, or something you rolled on your own?

~~~
comatose_kid
Rolled our own - we started this before we knew of Twilio.

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cmars232
Looking fwd to trying this out next time I'm in a bookstore. Very interesting!

------
wmli
First thought about the name: Phone-f*ck-you

~~~
comatose_kid
Hmm, if my current idea doesn't work out, I could just fonefu.com as a site to
complain about cell phone contracts :)

