
Ask HN: Page99Test.com - Would you submit to YC? - LanceJones
After 10 weeks of very hard work for 3 co-founders and after reading literally hundreds of posts on HN about launching a new idea (and how to do it right), our site Page99Test.com is [hopefully] ready for prime time. It launches in earnest today, October 26th, and I am very excited to first present it to this community.<p>It's a very simple (and we hear eye-catching) website that lets new and established writers get immediate, unbiased feedback from readers on their published books and unpublished manuscripts -- all based on a single page (99!).<p>Other websites you already know about or have likely used that offer a similar 'rate your first impression' experience in different industries include Dribbble.com for graphic design, FiveSecondTest.com for home pages, and HotOrNot.com for photos of people (not so much anymore, but you get the idea).<p>We've been debating whether or not to submit a YC application, mainly because we're not sure about whether the idea is truly 'big enough' -- and what our eventual revenue model will be. We're hoping to get some feedback here to settle our little internal debate.<p>Thanks in advance for checking out our labor of love. And thanks for sharing all your tips on how to make it as an entrepreneur.<p>Lance
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PaulJoslin
I also agree with a few others. The fact that I clicked 'start reading' and
then got a login / sign up window appear - I instantly just shut the page
down. It really needs some form of demo for me to see what I will experience
before signing up.

An even better model would be to allow anyone to read, but limit only
registered users to be able to comment or rate. Allowing any visitor to browse
and read pages.

Although ultimately to get initial traction / users perhaps remove the need to
login at all unless you are submitting your work.

You speak of monetization and I would imagine the obvious routes would be
through affiliate schemes with the eventual book publishers or 'premium'
services for book publishers that want their book to get 'tested' by the most
people / essentially top of the list.

With both of those options there is no requirement for a typical 'visitor' who
is reading / ranking books to have to register or login at all.

~~~
anatari
Yeah, the landing page sold me on clicking "start reading", but was sorely
disappointed after I clicked. Too much friction just to read a page. To your
point about limiting anonymous access in order to create a community like HN.
HN doesn't require an account for reading. You are more likely to convert
users if you allow some kind of anonymous access.

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thewordpainter
good work, lance & co.

a couple initial thoughts:

-fivesecondtest was the first thing that came to mind when i checked it out (before reading your blurb) so glad to see you guys aware of the market.

-as opposed to "rating" initial impressions, i'd focus on the oft-used phrase, "initial impressions mean everything" as a part of the pitch.

-is there any way to delay the signup proces for after an initial look? i think a number of people who would otherwise be willing to check it out are turned off by having to sign up for another site off the bat (and i imagine a number of the HN community would agree with the sentiment)

-i think goodreads & lulu would provide great opportunities to leverage their existing communities...maybe future partnership with the latter?

hope that helps!

-adam

~~~
LanceJones
Great ideas and feedback! Thank you so much.

Regarding the sign-in... because we're building a community of readers and
writers who are really only interested in giving or getting feedback, we want
to ensure that users are committed to having an identity on the site -- which
at a minimum requires a display name and an email address.

Same goes for almost any popular blog -- and HN and Twitter... you cannot post
or submit comments without providing a few key personal details. We do like
the common suggestion here that perhaps we can implement a 'gradual
engagement' model, whereby people can read a few pages without rating them.

Thanks again.

~~~
toast76
I really love the idea (and the execution!), but I'm afraid I have to agree
with the GP on this one small point.

Your product isn't your website, although at the moment you may feel it is.
Your product is the people who are going to spend their time to do these
tests. The harder you make it for them to achieve that, the less "product" you
have to sell.

Your website is going to need the network effect of many viewers to make it
worth people signing up to submit their work. I don't think you can achieve
that with a signup for people just wanting to check it out. You're going to
get a lot of traffic from twitter, facebook and other social networks, and
those people aren't going to sign up just to "check it out".

To put that in perspective, our two biggest regular referrers for
Fivesecondtest.com (other than the occasional article write up) are Facebook
and Twitter (around 25-30% of traffic). Yet both combined account for less
than 6% of our signups. That's a lot of traffic that participate but have no
intention of signing up. Of course, we may be missing an opportunity there :)

The worst thing you can have is a situation where you have more tests than you
have testers. We've been keeping an eye on ClueApp (a direct copy of
Fivesecondtest.com) and they suck at this. Unless you tweet your test, you can
except to get zero results (and most people won't do this). The biggest
challenge you face is ensuring you have enough people doing tests to cover the
expected results. The first time a writer gets "zero" feedback after 24 hours,
they're gone never to return.

Aside from that, my main issue is that you have this big green call to action
that says, "start reading", and I have this expectation that I'm going to jump
right in. So I'm excited and ready to go; instead I'm shown that this is an
exclusive club that I need to be a member of. I'm not that committed. Ctrl+w.

Otherwise, love it!

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fleitz
Why are you debating about applying?

Just apply if you don't get accepted then you know that YC isn't interested,
maybe someone else is.

Feedback: Why do I need to sign up to start reading? The page IS stunning, but
it takes a long time to load. Instead of a feedback form, have you considered
just having a next page button?

~~~
LanceJones
ood point. We just missed the deadline for W2010, but there is always the next
round -- and we'll be that much farther along in the development of our site
and business.

The site was designed primarily as a reader feedback mechanism (not simply
reading -- which for one page just isn't that fun), and we want to ensure that
people who provide feedback are committed to having an identity on the site --
which at a minimum requires a display name and an email address. Same goes for
HN and Twitter... you cannot post without an account. Just like those
communities, we want to know who is part of our community.

Thanks for taking time to respond here!

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jamesteow
I have to give kudos to your designer. This is probably the most well-executed
web design I've seen on YC in the short time I've been participating. I like
all the small details. And the overall feel is the warmth of a book, something
that I think it really hard to execute on a digital medium without being
cheesy.

One tiny thing: On the sign up overlay, the input box margins seem tighter on
the right than the rest. This is what I mean: <http://i.imgur.com/iD8TL.png> I
wouldn't be so particular if I didn't think the rest of the wasn't already
looking so good.

It'd also be nice (though not overly essential) if the logos denoting where
you were mentioned were clickable so that I could read the writeups.

Otherwise, great work and I wish your team success.

~~~
LanceJones
Fantastic suggestions, and I am very excited to share your feedback with our
outsourced designer -- Worry Free Labs (<http://worryfreelabs.com/>).

Best regards, Lance

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gabrielmazzotti
I like the page: the design is cut and the idea is intresting but you have to
let people read the pages 99 without registering. This is what happends to me:
I read the idea and I like it so I say, ok, fun I will read, I click on read
the register modal appear and I close everything. The idea is great but no so
importan in anyones life to take a register, but if I had already read the
page 99 and I it´s vote time, then yes, I will register, I had invested some
time on your page and I like or not a page 99, I want to share that
experience, that´s my motivation for registering, without reading any page 99
I don´t have any motivation, so I close.

Regards

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decadentcactus
The thing that bugs me is the "As Written About By.." bit. This is more for
any site that does it and not yours in particular. But it just has a bunch of
logos there, I can't read what they said about it either. You could put any
logo there you want and I wouldn't be able to verify it. I checked for a
testimonials sorta page but there didn't seem to be one either.

Just a personal annoyance since I've seen a lot of sites do it, just show a
bunch of logos, or link to the homepage (say of the Guardian) without letting
me read the review.

~~~
LanceJones
We agree... and we haven't linked those logos simply because we're worried
about link breakage.

~~~
tnorthcutt
So link to a page on your site showing a screenshot of the article, or
copy/paste it and link to the original with a caveat that the link may break,
or something. Don't be held back by something as trivial as fear of link
breakage.

------
photon_off
This site is impressive, and through following your posts and progress you
definitely are committed. However, I don't think there's any way to find out
if you're yc-worthy without applying. I don't mean that in the sense of the
truism "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" but rather: none of us are
as familiar with the application pruning process as pg et al. They look at
thousands, and as legend has it, can spot an interesting team within minutes.

The founders themselves are said to be what yc invests in, primarily, and not
the idea. We'd probably need to know a bit more or see a video to give you any
sort of sensible answerhatTIehat being said, if I were you, I'd apply if it
seemed that yc was a good fit. If anything, the application process helps you
learn and internalize things about yourselves and what you have to offer.

One last thing about the "big idea" and monitization aspect. Most yc funded
things tend to be quite niche, and the vast majority aren't making money when
they apply. It's my personal take that determining an audience, how to best
pitch to them, and how to profit, are some of the core things that yc offers,
in addition to all that fund raising stuff. If your company lacks these
things, it seems like a good idea to apply. And demo day couldn't hurt, either
;)

Congrats and good luck! Keep us all updated.

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joshuacc
Beautiful site.

Unfortunately, the background took 45 seconds to download on a slowish DSL
connection, and was very distracting as it progressively loaded. That's not
surprising, considering that the PNG is 3MB. You can definitely improve the
responsiveness here.

I like the concept quite a bit, but wonder how useful it will be if used
according to the "page 99 rule." Unless you're wanting sentence or paragraph
level evaluation I'm not sure that the feedback would be all that helpful. By
page 99, any fuller evaluation would depend on knowing the contents of pages
1-98.

For instance, a reader sees page 99 full of things like "Thou art a despicable
knave, wench!" Reader sends feedback saying, "The language is really awkward,
even for a Tolkienesque fantasy." What the reader missed, though, is that page
99 is part of the school play written by a DnD fanatic teacher and is
absolutely hilarious in context.

I'm definitely not writing off the concept, but would hope that there is a way
to add more context to the page.

Also, the domain bugs me a bit. Is page99.com available? Seems more memorable
and less spammy to me.

~~~
lachyg
Heres the trick to the background: create a small portion, maybe 150px by
150px, and tile it. Simple :)

~~~
cloudwalking
And use JPG rather than PNG--the compression is designed for stuff like this.

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jpschorr
Looks great.

However, the login/registration does not allow the '+' symbol in email
addresses.

~~~
lylejohnson
Nor does it allow e-mail addresses from domains ending in ".name" (like mine).

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user24
> mainly because we're not sure about whether the idea is truly 'big enough'
> -- and what our eventual revenue model will be.

Don't worry about whether it's big enough. That's YC's job (as shitmydadsays
said: Let women figure out why they won't screw you, don't do it for them)

As far as rev model goes. At worst affiliate links and adverts, at best a paid
service; authors at all levels enjoy feedback. They'll pay for it if you can
provide it.

------
ashleyreddy
IMHO Ycombinator seems to be very founder centric. Tell us a little bit more
about yourselves to see if it makes sense to submit to YC. We applied in YC
2010 Fall. Did you look at the questions they ask? eg. how long have the
founders known each other, what other projects have they worked on.
Interesting stories. If I read PG correctly these seem to be more important
that the idea itself. Nice site BTW!

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davidedicillo
clickable <http://Page99Test.com>

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ig1
Have you checked out the legal implications for unpublished manuscripts ? -
often publishers have specific clause saying that no-part of the manuscript
may have previously made available to the public. Given you're only showing
one page, it probably won't matter too much, but it might be worth
investigating.

~~~
LanceJones
We have to some extent... we're relying largely on the legal owner of the
book/manuscript copyright to upload a page. We (the co-founders) have uploaded
several page 99s from classic books, but only for those that are actually out
of copyright.

Thanks for your feedback!

~~~
ig1
I meant in the context that if an author uploads a page to your site, they'll
need to declare that they've done so to any publishers they approach.

Standard contracts in publishing often tend to say something along the lines
of "the author confirms that no part of this manuscript has been previously
been made available to members of the public", presumably if a page has been
uploaded to your site they may not be able to make such a declaration.

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zinssmeister
Lance, the design looks great but as others mentioned before me, it takes a
very long time for the background to load. Also there should be more of a demo
before signup (that's something we also had to learn with our project)

BTW I tried to signup on the site and it wouldn't work (I'm using the newest
Chrome on a Mac)

~~~
LanceJones
Thanks for mentioning the technical issue -- our database was being grumpy
twice last night. Should be sorted now.

We agree with you about the background image and we'll get to work on
improving that.

And as for the demo, we have that near the top of our list.

Thanks for writing!

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suliamansaleh
i think its amazing, i love the name, with the quote that compliments it, the
design and the idea is unique and catchy, and with 3 co-founders, i think y
combinator will love you, they hate single founders, you see, definately
apply.

p.s. theres a huge market for authors on the web, as to what ive seen anway

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davidedicillo
I love everything about it: concept, design, execution. The only thing that
really bothers me is the domain.

~~~
suliamansaleh
in a way i agree and disagree with you, i think the name kind of says what the
web app deos, but at the same time its looks spammy, personally i dont like to
use numbers for app names, i dont know maybe im wrong.

~~~
LanceJones
Tell that to the folks at 37signals.com. :-) Seriously though, we did consider
your point prior to purchasing the domain name, but we liked how literal it
is.

Thanks for your feedback! Lance, Co-founder Page99Test.com

~~~
Elepsis
Have you considered registering p99t.com and p99test.com as well as nice
shortcuts? Both are available.

------
tpr1m
Great idea and killer design, to say to least.

~~~
1-2-3
surprisingly great

some thoughts

-Larger fonts would be nice

-request sign up after reading say three pages

-perhaps you could monetize by partnering with self publishers/d.i.y ebook services

-I think this month is national novel writing month- go to their forums and promote

Thanks for creating a good service

