

Review my app please - teyc
http://www.seotomata.com/
It's a public holiday (Labour day) and I built this quickly. Please try it out, tell me what's wrong with it, and I'll iterate.<p>Thanks!
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wdewind
It seems like HN echo chamber response to me. People are never going to tell
you a potential solution works or doesn't. HNers will give you high level, and
if the app is done will often go through it and nit-pick, but they are NOT
anywhere close to paying customers for a vast majority of people (as valuable
as their advice is).

As for the regular users (the ones who would be your clients' potential
customers on the site), quite frankly they don't have the ability to
extrapolate from a picture or even an alpha version if the product will serve
their needs.

This seems a lot like feedback army at best.

What I would like to see instead: Feedback army has the informal aspect of
this market tackled pretty well. I'd like to see something a little closer to
focus groups. My major issue with feedback army was that of the 25 reviews I
got I think all but 2 were "yes this is good, yes I would use it, yes this was
easy to use" - they have no stake in the project and often times seemed to be
trying to tell me what I wanted to hear. Of the 95% or so who would
"definitely" use the site, not a single one continued (no shock, but makes me
question the validity of their responses).

What I would like to see is a way to pick 15-30 people as "evangelist testers"
or something, people who you would perhaps pay, or would be offered some other
kind of incentive to really think about the problem they are trying to solve
and how your app fits into it. This would give those 15-30 people a real way
to be involved in the app's creation process, and the app creator much more
high quality feedback. But the focus has to be on quality not quantity IMO. I
would be willing to pay a monthly fee for that.

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teyc
The use case I'm thinking of is when you want a low-profile way to survey
potential users, perhaps through ads on facebook, or linked in.

Have a play with it. Here's a url to set up your own survey:

<http://www.seotomata.com/beta.php>

If this doesn't really help you with your startup, tell me what would, and
I'll pivot.

By the way, since all the comments are coming from HNers, it's only fair to
share their comments here:

<http://www.seotomata.com/response.php?code=ab3kc>

~~~
patcoll
The problem for me was that the example you gave (yourself) was way too meta
for the typical end user. It needs to be more obvious what the problem is. For
this reason "Does this solve your problem?" is a horrible opener.

Here's the process: (1) State the problem, (2) Propose your solution, then (3)
ask for feedback.

Overall: Don't make me think. You're never going to get replies otherwise. A
big textbox is daunting.

I imagine this almost as a streamlined "proposal" process. Lets say you get an
RFP from Widgetia, a company that creates and sells widgets. You get the RFP
(problem), then you write a proposal (comprehensive or not) to address the the
problem. Because this is on the web, you can use text, photos, video,
whatever. Just communicate the solution as efficiently as possible.

Then your job is to ask people to identify. "Does this sound like you?" "Would
this work for you?" Don't put just one textbox. Put a couple -- in strategic
spots in your presentation. You'll gather better contextual feedback as well
as gather analytics on when/where people are commenting to gauge how effective
your presentation was.

HTH. Good luck.

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davidw
Why would I use your app instead of Hacker News?

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petervandijck
Yea that is a good question.

One answer: The built-in structure (the questions). I would make it so that
there are 3 pre-built questions, with the option of adding more, but that all
apps use those 3 questions. Or 3 questions and an open comment field. And then
make it easier to answer them, and to go from product idea to the next product
idea (so I can give feedback on 5 products in a minute).

But the main answer will be if you get some traction, ie. launch with a bunch
of apps in there (email people who are building apps) and a bunch of people
ready to review. I think that should be possible, loads of people love to
opine on startup ideas.

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dmix
If I can create an app, I can create a simple landing page to gauge users
feedback on a video or screenshots.

The question is, how many non-technical people are creating online businesses
AND would _need_ a service to help test their idea?

Also, isn't this a similar problem KISSMetrics is trying to tackle?

~~~
teyc
I stumbled across this years ago: <http://askdatabase.com/>

But I wanted to focus this specifically on answering Steve Blank's questions
in the "4 steps to Epiphany"

Update: Regarding KISSMetrics, I've been paying attention to Hiten's startup.
They started off with tracking David McClure's conversion funnel, I thought
I'd tackle it from the other end, using Steve Blank's customer development
questions.

One thing I've learnt is that a rough mockup is not going to do to solicit
good quality feedback. I'm going sleep on this and try something different.

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chaostheory
Where's the app?

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AmberShah
I like the idea but I already know about wufoo.com and askyourtargetmarket.com
so you'd have to beat them somehow in order to be interesting to me.

