
Ask HN: Review my Startup - Preceden - matt1
http://www.preceden.com
======
Vindexus
I really like the design. Good choice for the logo, looks great.

I really think the Timeline editing page could use some Ajax/Dialogs. Instead
of going to a new page for "Add Event" and "Add Layer", I think a dialog box
popping up with the form in there would be great.

The top padding on your buttons seems to be off. I'm using FireFox 3.5.7 and
the text seems to be down by about 5 pixels too many. I changed padding-top
from 15 to 10 and height from 30 to 35 to get the button on the right in this
screenshot: <http://imgur.com/FouGq> The one on the left is the original that
you have now.

When scrolling through the timeline it would be nice to see if there are any
events to the left or right. Maybe even stop scrolling if there are no more
events back that far. I kept scrolling back to the 1800s on one timeline
because I didn't know I'd already seen everything :P

The yellow helper text at the top is really good for helping me get started. I
like that you've put thought into blankstate pages.

I am also curious how you'll monetize this. Any ideas?

I was looking at your FAQ page and noticed this line: "This FAQ page is a work
in progress. Chances are if you have a question, others have it too. On that
note, please email us if anything is unclear". I'd like to completely
selfishly point out my FAQ app, BreezyFAQ.com that would let you manage these
easier. There's an "Ask a Question" form on the FAQ page and any asked
questions get put into a queue that you can answer, and/or add to your FAQ
page.

~~~
matt1
Great feedback.

Regarding the logo, I used CrowdSpring to run a design contest. In total, it
costed $230. I'm really happy with it. I originally was leaning towards a
different one, but HN helped set me straight
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075>).

I just fixed the centering issue--it should render correctly now across all
browsers. Thank you.

I think I will add some sort of note or maybe color the years differently when
there is nothing before or after the area you're scrolling. It confused a few
other folks too.

I ran a bunch of tests using FeedbackArmy, which sits on top of Mechanical
Turk, and found a lot of people were confused when they got to the dashboard.
I added those instructions, which improved the successfully-added-event
conversion rate a lot. It's easy to forget that what's clear to you as the
creator is not clear to new visitors.

Monetization TBD.

BreezyFAQ seems really useful. I might just roll my own to allow greater
customization, but you're absolutely right in that it could be a lot better.

Appreciate your thoughtful feedback. Let me know if you ever need any testing
for your projects.

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bmelton
This looks VERY nice. My only question that I don't see an immediate answer to
is whether or not these timelines are embeddable from another site?

~~~
matt1
Not yet -- this is a minimum viable product of sorts. Once I get the kinks
worked out, that's one of the first things I want to do.

~~~
tbgvi
+1 to being able to embed. That would be a really nice feature to have and
would build awareness for what you're working on. Every time someone embedded
a timeline in their blog (or wherever) it would be free advertising.

Looks great, good luck!

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Concours
That's awesome , it should fairly become popular. I've tried something like
this a while ago based on an opensource calendar system, a kind of Win-project
for normal folk, I just at some point set the project on standby but this is
awesome. Just leave it as simple as it is, maybe an api and allow people to
embed, that'll be fine.

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thinkbohemian
I see you went with my favorite icon choice! looks good.

~~~
matt1
He's referencing this:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1059075>

And yeah, it was a great choice.

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djb_hackernews
Definitely a cool little webapp, and I can see it being more popular as an
embeddable widget.

Head scratcher how to monetize, because I don't see your website being a
hangout so you can't go with ad supported, and I don't know if it is useful
enough to pay for.

You could sell it to evite, meetup etc. maybe. Or some type of project
planning community for Gantt charts.

~~~
matt1
Imagine a timeline for every major event that ever happened in the history of
the universe. I wonder if that would be valuable? :)

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bgraves
I'm not sure if you've done this, but I'm interested in some of the details on
your venture.

1\. What technologies are you using?

2\. How long did it take you to code?

3\. Is this your full time gig or just a side project that you hope takes off?

4\. Do you plan to do any additional marketing/advertising?

5\. What are some of the results from your split testing?

~~~
matt1
Briefly:

1\. Ruby on Rails/Heroku/jQuery

2\. 3 months. See <http://preceden.com/timelines/5-preceden>

3\. Nights and weekends

4\. I'm using AdWords at the moment, not necessarily because I'm hoping it
will bring in a lot of users, mostly because I want to learn about AdWords.

5\. Too early to tell; just started and haven't received enough traffic for
the results to be meaningful.

I have a blog (see profile) and I'll write extensively about these things over
the coming weeks.

~~~
bgraves
Thank you for the responses. I look forward to reading more details on your
blog.

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jknupp
A couple of questions:

-The time-line on the front page seems to mark major life events. Why would I need a web site to remember when I got married or was in college?

-In hindsight, it's easy to see what events were important (at any level of granularity) but much more difficult as things are happening. How do I know when something is sufficiently important to put it on a timeline?

-What useful information are users supposed to be able to glean from this type of presentation of the data they enter? The example on the front page should show events that are interrelated and the copy should draw interesting conclusions from this. Right now, it seems like each time-line is totally orthogonal, which I can't really figure out the value of.

~~~
matt1
Hey, good questions:

\- You might not be interested in making an biographical timeline for
yourself, but consider making for your father or grandfather. If you're like
me, you probably don't have a good idea of what they were doing and where they
were when they were young. With these timelines, you can get a much better
idea of how the events in their lives ultimately led to you.

\- And that's just biographical timelines. I'd like to see someone do a Y
Combinator timeline, where companies are along the side and the spans of time
represent their existence. It's very flexible and I think there's dozens of
use cases.

\- The level of detail depends on what you want to discover.

\- Visualizing time is very hard. For example, imagine a timeline of World War
II. There were a lot of moving pieces and simply by reading a block of text,
it's not easy to get a feel for how they all relate to each other in time.
Timelines, and especially these timelines, make it much easier. My hope is
that people will build and discover timelines that make them go "Ah, I get it
now."

~~~
jknupp
Your last example is exactly the type of thing that should be on your front
page (see the end of my third question above). If you're trying to show how
the service would be useful, present a time-line of something that would be
difficult to understand or appreciate if presented another way. Most people (I
assume) are pretty intimately familiar with their personal time-line.

~~~
matt1
I'm waiting for someone to build it so I can feature it on the front page. In
time...

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mbrubeck
Awesome! But the "length of time" displayed is always "NaNy NaNm NaNd"
(Chromium for Linux).

~~~
matt1
Fixed -- thanks.

~~~
bmelton
I see that in Chromium on Linux, but I do NOT see it with Chrome on Windows 7.

~~~
iaskwhy
I see the same NaNy on Chrome 4, Windows 7.

It's an excellent idea, good work!

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danskil
I don't see any prices. How much will this cost, and what structure are you
using? Freemium?

~~~
matt1
Free for now, likely some sort of freemium model in the future depending on
how things go. It's too early to say for sure.

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dangoldin
This looks great. I can see this being used as a new resume format.

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Shamiq
Sweet, can I use this to build a resume?

~~~
matt1
You can use it for whatever you want.*

* Assuming its legal.

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bmelton
One slight correction: on the FAQ for "What is Preceden", your answer includes
the word "let's", which should be "lets".

Also, on "Are They Private", you use the word "this'll", which I get as
vernacular, but isn't a recognized conjunction in any of the dictionaries I
checked.

~~~
matt1
Got it. Thanks.

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chime
Looks awesome! I need to be able to zoom in/out though. It would make for
awesome Gantt charts.

~~~
matt1
Eventually the dates will be dynamic, so you can base the start of one event
on the start or end of another event, which opens up a lot of possibilities.

------
FreeRadical
I've been looking for a timeline app over the last few days, but something
with an API.

~~~
matt1
API down the road for sure.

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diN0bot
chrome, mac 10.5 : i wish i could scroll horizontally using my macbook's
mousepad (two fingers moving horizontally). i assume this doesn't work with a
mouse wheel either, but i'm not sure. the click-and-drag method is less good,
plus whenever my mouse leaves the square, unclicking does nothing...

~~~
diN0bot
also, it would be great if i could edit each event right on the timeline. that
is, i want a single page for quick edits. the form could be below the
timeline, activated whenever i click on an event or layer. whatever. if things
take to long to edit to make right, this will waste too much time.

ps - i do like it. always a pleasure playing with data viz.

API? would love to incorporate this in my own time tracking projects.

~~~
matt1
Don't worry about it. Your feedback is perfect. The fact you're thinking about
these types of things is a really good thing.

A few other folks have mentioned editing right on the timeline too. My
question in response is: how often are you going to be editing an event? If
the answer is not often, I think that the clutter that will result from
integrating it directly into the timeline will outweigh the benefits from
being able to edit it a bit quicker. That being said, it may be possible to do
it in a clean, simple way that doesn't confuse people.

API -- in the future, definitely.

~~~
diN0bot
true, but what happened to me was that i was off by a bit on my times and i
wanted to change that.... and then i had to change all four events. what if i
wanted to go back and change colors for everything. you know, being a nerd i
want everything to be exact and meaningful ;-) it's not a big deal, but you do
want to reduce activation energy as much as possible for your users.

also, i wanted to see the times of events already up there to help me enter
new event times.

i only know this is important because i went from using project management
tools like xplanner <http://www.xplanner.org/> to pivotal tracker
pivotaltracker.com/ i had to use the xplanner, etc tools for a few months to
realize how much they sucked. i immediately loved pivotal tracker, wrote rave
reviews, and recommended it to all my friends (i even got my sister using it
for thesis writing, which isn't a dev project management use at all). one big
win for PT is putting the view and editing all on a single page. i didn't
realize how great that was until i used it. might not be right for you, and
you definitely have to work out how to make it _not_ confusing.

~~~
matt1
_i wanted to see the times of events already up there to help me enter new
event times._

I want the same thing. I was waiting for someone else to validate it. Thank
you.

I'm not sure if its a good or a bad thing, but I haven't played with any other
timeline software yet. I'll check those out, note the strengths, and go from
there. Appreciate it.

------
Shamiq
Interesting, I've always assumed the long form of "Jen" was spelled "Jennifer"
rather than "Jeniffer".

~~~
matt1
I've seen it both ways, but I changed it just for you.

~~~
Shamiq
<3

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sunkencity
Looks great!

