
Ask HN: Review our startup (www.chuwe.com) - sgrove
Programmers have stack overflow, but what about more general startup-questions? Or question regarding running a small business in general? That's Chuwe.<p>You can probably figure out the rest from there, but I'll add one more bit. To make it a little more interesting, there's a community-funded pot that'll be dished out to the most interesting question and answer (according to an open vote count) at the end of each month. We'll always start it at $30, so that'll be the minimum.<p>We have a pretty solid plan for where we're going, but this seemed like a good place to start and get some feedback from everyone..<p>Thanks for checking it out.<p>www.chuwe.com<p>edit: Thanks to #startups for all of their feedback while getting this up and running!
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sjs382
I gave some criticism in IRC and sgrove asked me to post it here, too. So here
goes:

I think the entire design leaves a lot to be desired. The color scheme is
distracting. The green draws your eyes directly to a less-important item. The
question should be the most important item. (Possibly followed by whether
there are answers or not?)

The "answers" should be given at least thesame weight and importance as
"votes",

"2 days ago" should probably be removed for the near future. Why would someone
participate in a community that has such little activity? You could always put
it back if things liven up.

The icons are completely unclear. You explained that the "tag" icon was a
hand, but I still dont see it. And even so, not sure how that relates to
"tags". And the word bubble is usually used to represent comments not answers.

~~~
sgrove
Thanks, and upvoted.

1.) The point about green being distracting is a great point, something we
hadn't thought of. We're working on implementing a gray-to-green bit that
corresponds to points (similar to hn) and just stuck it at green for now.
We'll be sure to make it to the eyes are drawn to the titles, and not the
points.

And yes, the answers are equally important as the questions. Working on a
redesign right now.

2.) Good point about the reference time. It's always there, so I somewhat
assumed it should always be there, but it may serve as a deterrent to new
people entering into the community. Removed until it's less depressing :D

3.) Icons. Got it. The tag icon was an open hand, just like "tagging" someone.
We'll change it to something more traditional (being cute like that probably
is a bad idea), and adjust the other icon as well - any suggestions?

~~~
gfodor
Just to play devil's advocate, I'd punt as much as you can on the design aside
from a few tweaks here or there. You'll always have people saying they don't
like this or that about the design, but at the end of the day if that's all
they are complaining about you are doing the right thing. If not, prioritze
other complaints first. Content is still king.

The main goal of the site should be to get good content in the door and get it
distributed to the users. Additionally, before you make any user interface
changes from feedback such as the OP, definitely do a few ad-hoc user tests
with friends or random people off the street as a sanity check. It's cheap and
really helpful.

~~~
sjs382
"The main goal of the site should be to get good content in the door and get
it distributed to the users."

Part of getting good user content is removing friction.

~~~
sgrove
I think you're right, but gfodor is right as well. The goal is to get good
content, and we have to remove anything that stands in the way.

It's just a matter of prioritizing and focusing your energy on the right area.
That seems to be one of the key ingredients of success.

------
alain94040
Good luck to you. We're in the same business, so here's some advice. The first
questions on the home page will determine the tone of the subsequent users.

Currently, when I visited, question #2 was how to start a brothel in Nevada.
If you are not careful, you'll end up like Cambrian House, with projects like
"congress is corrupt, help me get rid of congress". And then what?

Do not hesitate to moderate by yourself.

~~~
sgrove
That's a very good point. Personally, when I saw this (about two hours after
we opened it up), I assumed it was a prank.

There were two choices - delete it, and it goes away, no harm done, but
nothing gained. Or try to turn it to our advantage a bit. I decided to
actually research it and come up with the best answer I could (having never
considered anything brothel-related).

Turns out it is legal in Nevada, and there are a number of stipulations
covering it similar to New Zealand. I had no idea before. And that'll come up
if someone searches for prostitution :D

I think you're ultimately right, we really have to approach this in the right
way to get the highest-content possible. Unfortunately, Cambrian House turned
into vencorps before I had a chance to actually use them.

To that end, I'm searching for people who can seed the site with high-quality
questions and answers - I hope this was a high quality answer, but I have to
admit it wasn't a high quality question.

I'll have to take a more in-depth look at fairbusiness! Thanks for your
advice.

------
timcederman
The inconsistent use of "Chuwe" versus "ChuWe" was the first thing I noticed.

The other thing I noticed immediately was the way the green box didn't line up
with the question title. Another minor gripe I know...

How're you planning to seed this? Stack Overflow (from memory) had a private
beta seeding period with invited beta testers who made sure that when the
general public hit it, they had a great first impression of the amount of
content. At the moment you're probably losing a lot of people who drop in, see
how little traffic there is, and don't bother posting a question.

If you're going to allow anonymous answers, you should probably have some
community spam protection ("Flag this"). Also if you're not logged in, I would
put in voting controls as a call to action and to try and get people to
register.

~~~
sgrove
Thanks for your feedback - we'll make sure everything is consistent in the
next couple of minutes (or so I hope!)

Design gripe noted.

It's an interesting point about content, perhaps we should revert back to some
"closed beta" system while we build up a reasonable amount of content?

And we'll work on getting the flag bits in, it was up next anyway. I had
hidden the voting, but it's true it should be there as a call to action.

Thanks tons!

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pj
I think this is a great idea. Startups need a place to talk. But I question,
is this really a startup? By that I mean, is this a potential business that
will employ people or is it more of an online forum where people can talk
about startup stuff?

~~~
sgrove
Fair question. We don't see much revenue coming from this, it's just the first
part that we wanted to open up for public use. As we develop the community and
site, we have some plans for monetization, certainly.

For the time being, we're cockroaches - living cheap until we can make it to
ramen profitable.

------
hotpockets
1\. I'm not sure what the numbers in the green box indicates. Are they upvotes
from users indicating that the question is a good one? Are they the number of
replies? The number of views? Perhaps frequenters of social voting sites may
know this but even sites like digg say "87 diggs" in the little box.

2\. Make the concept of the money pot more prominent. I think its the most
important piece of information to display. Try to rework the layout to put it
at the top, perhaps next to the logo.

3\. Consider asking more questions with your account, then looking up the
answer online and answering it. Consider it your personal notebook of business
info. I haven't thought about this rigorously, but I would at least give it
thought. It would make your site seem more accurate.

4\. Users don't want to answer the same types of questions over and over.
Consider making a startup 101 page that tries to lay out the very basics of
startups that some people seem to be asking. Then users can just point people
to that page.

------
bbuffone
How do I page through the questions? Seems like this could be offered with a
modified version of wordpress and you would get way more functionality. Just
change blog to question and comments to answers.

~~~
sgrove
Paging - We just launched two hours ago, so just a few questions. Content will
of course be our Achilles heel, but we're thinking of ways around this right
now.

Using a blog seems like a fair enough suggestion, but this should grow in a
pretty unblog direction, so we're building it up right now.

We'll likely opensource this part in the near future as well.

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ciscoriordan
Typo in emails sent out when questions are answered: .come instead of .com

Widen the text inputs on the sign up page, right now they're really narrow.

~~~
sgrove
Fixed the typo, thank you very much. We'll put the forms through a major
redesign - after the green for votes, that seems to be the second main
complaint.

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vaksel
Well the first thing you should do, is change the font for the answers. Light
gray that strains the eyes = epic fail

~~~
sgrove
Epic fail...harsh. But welcome :D

Changed from gray to black. How is that?

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riso
One thing that I find confusing is the dotted line that separates the question
from the tags. At first (and second) glance it seems that the tags belong to
the question below. To be honest I never realized I was mismatching the items
until I saw the last question on the page.

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raptrex
theres too much white space in the green box? you gonna fill it up? also i was
able to reply to a post without an account, use captcha or something to
prevent spam

~~~
sgrove
Well, for the spam, we'll work on it manually for the time being. We want to
make it as easy as possible to join in at first, kind of zero barriers-of-
entry (would you have posted a reply without having to make an account? What
if you got the captcha wrong twice?). No captchas right now, no email required
for an account, etc.

As spam becomes unmanageable, we'll implement captchas for anonymous accounts.
They're ready to be flipped on with a switch!

The white space in the green box is for the voting arrows, but I think you're
quite right. Everyone has mentioned those, so we'll have to work on them.

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ajkirwin
The design has a whole needs to be more consistent. Several visual elements
seem to be working against each other, like the green that was mentioned.

Also, I think the area that is used for questions needs to have more width to
it.

~~~
sgrove
Green is top on our hitlist. It's goin' down.

Do you mean the content div should be wider?

~~~
ajkirwin
Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

