

Ask HN: Review My Startup - KickoffLabs.com - swatermasysk

http://www.kickofflabs.com<p>We are building KickoffLabs to help business owners (or would be business owners) get an idea launched. The basic premise is that starting is hard and most people either over think the start or ignore it all together.<p>We recently released the first version of the product and would like to solicit some feedback from the community.<p>Thanks,
Scott
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athst
In my opinion, the entry-level pricing plan is too expensive. $10 for just one
site? I guess it depends on how much functionality you provide. Also, once
someone has a potential customer list, will you make it easy to integrate with
services like Mailchimp?

But on a higher level, has anyone shown that lean-startup launch pages like
this and Launchrock actually work? To me, the whole practice seems a little
anti-consumer - saying you're going to launch something before actually
putting any real effort into launching it. If one person does it, yeah it's
clever, but if _everyone_ does it, we're going to have this environment where
people won't know if they can trust sign-up pages because half of the time
they'll be for non-existent products.

And can putting up a launch page without a product to back it up really
produce a significant volume of data? Getting people interested enough to sign
up _with_ a product seems like a difficult enough task.

To me, if you have an idea, you should have more conviction to put at least
some effort into it. If you're just indifferent and throwing ideas out there
to see what sticks, are you really going to be passionate about the idea that
gets interest?

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swatermasysk
> Integrate with Mailchimp?

We are certainly going to make it easy to export and import your data.

One of the things we have tried to do is minimize the need to use third party
services. You are certainly welcome to use something like Mailchimp (we do
today), but hopefully we can provide simple alternatives to get you going at
the beginning.

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luffy
Once someone gets their site set up, what is the plan for actually getting
eyeballs on it? If you can figure that out then you are on to something.

I see that you are using social networking with Twitter/FB, etc, but that is a
chicken/egg problem. To use social networking to advertise your site, you need
to actually have an audience to begin with. In which case, you probably
wouldn't be interested in this type of product.

What would be really valuable, I think, is a way to get people you have no
social networking connection with on the site, ie, via AdWords. Using AdWords
is some kind of alchemy - find a way to simplify and integrate with that, and
that is a fine product.

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swatermasysk
Agreed there is a huge opportunity in solving the "eye ball" problem.
Unfortunately the days of 1 to 5 cent clicks on Adwords is a thing of the
past.

I still think there is more we can do to help the organic stuff, but getting
started today still requires rolling up your sleeves and doing real work.

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taphangum
<http://www.kickofflabs.com>

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deville
I've got to agree that the pricing is too high. The free plan is useless to
me, because 50 signups is basically planning for failure, to me.

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taphangum
I will definitely be using this. Great job. My only advice would be to add
features slowly. It's great right now because it is simple.

~~~
swatermasysk
Thanks. If you have suggestions, please drop us a note at
support@kickofflabs.com.

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thewizz
Nice job thinking of the little guy!

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cobrabyte
Yep, this is great. We signed up!

