

ASK HN: Feedback on my 9,356th attempt at a niche business. - apsurd
http://aplanofattack.com

======
mechanical_fish
A. Fewer words, more action or pictures. You've heard this already.

B. Wordsmithing. You need a copy editor, with a degree in English or its moral
equivalent, to go over every line of this with you. Let's take apart just the
third sentence:

 _Probably depends on how good of a designer you are!_

"How good of a [X]" is a very awkward phrase in print. It might work in very
casual spoken English, but in print it looks amateurish. Starting a sentence
with "probably" is likewise too casual. Your customer base is made of
designers. They often care about such details.

You should also consider avoiding the exclamation point. Heed the words of
Elmore Leonard: "You are allowed no more than two or three exclamation points
per 100,000 words of prose."

Now, having marginally improved the sentence by changing it to something like:

 _It probably depends on how talented a designer you are._

...you should delete this sentence altogether, because it is an _awful_ sales
pitch. You are, literally, questioning the skill of your prospective customer.
Let me translate this opening:

 _If people aren't paying you $200 to $500 to design simple things, you
probably suck!_

Guess what? Your prospective customer is probably _not_ currently being paid
$200 to $500 for custom Facebook pages. If your customer already knew how to
build these pages, he or she would not be shopping for your product. So your
opening pitch can be further distilled to:

 _Dear customer: You suck!_

Ouch. Get the whole thing off the page and replace it with something more like
this:

 _Customers will pay you $200 to $500 for custom-designed Facebook pages, and
you can build them in minutes with this tool._

Only with fewer words.

C. For a product that offers to simplify a complicated process, the home page
looks awfully complicated. Too much technical jargon. Don't write things like
this:

 _Forget about learning XFBML, FBML, FBJS, FQL._

You are trying to convince your customer that they need not learn or even
_think_ about these acronyms. So don't name-drop them. That's like trying to
sell a Caribbean vacation by saying:

 _Forget about sharks, food poisoning, skin cancer, or pickpockets._

Make the prose on the page be as easy and soothing as the product is meant to
be. Speak to your audience. Don't use any technical terms except those that
your customers need to know: "HTML" and "CSS". If a subset of your customers
needs to know about the XFBML, put it in the FAQ.

D. The name. I hate to have to say it, it's like picking on someone's kids,
but "A Plan Of Attack" is not a good product name. It doesn't suggest
Facebook, it doesn't suggest design, it doesn't sound like the name of an
application or product, it contains too many words, and it starts with an "A"
which will turn your word-of-mouth recommendations into an Abbott and Costello
sketch:

    
    
      A: "What should I use for my simple Facebook pages?"
      B: "'A Plan Of Attack'"
      A: "Which plan of attack?"
      B: "No, that's a spreadsheet. Use 'A Plan Of Attack'"
      A: "Did you even hear my question?"
      B: "Third base!"
    

E. A/B testing. Clearly you should not accept my word for any of this. I have
no idea how to sell your product. All I have are hypotheses. So be sure you
have a method for testing and winnowing hypotheses.

Good luck! If I ever need a custom Facebook page I will be sure to try your
product.

~~~
profgubler
Most English majors cannot write copy, unless they are trained to. Advertising
and promotional copy are very different beasts than English. Find a copy
writer instead and not some random English major.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Hee hee. No sooner did I press "submit" and head out the door than I thought
"oops, someone is going to take me literally about that 'English major' line
which I tossed off half-seriously. Maybe I should have phrased that
differently."

I agree with you, of course.

Moral: everyone could use a copy editor. ;)

------
todayiamme
One of the things that I've noticed is that you have too much text on your
home page. The fact that I had to scroll down isn't a good thing. You have to
make a sale FAST to an internet user. Trust me they have extremely short
attention spans. How about this?

Are you a designer forced to dance to FBs tune? Use aplanofattack to deploy
hassle free and concentrate on what matters the most; beautiful, seamless
design.

Wanna learn more? Check it out.

I would chip away those lines again and again until it sounds like the voice
in their head is saying it to them.

Also, have you thought of making it an intermediate thing? As you've replied
in the comments something like this already exists for non-technical users,
and you want to target developers, but why don't you target them both?

It's a matter of UI design. You can just about recess the less commonly used,
and more complex functions out of sight, or make different views like WP has a
visual compose mode and a HTML mode that works pretty well. Also, it would be
awesome for a developer short on time to jump into modes for that good enough
mockup.

~~~
apsurd
_Are you a designer forced to dance to FBs tune? Use aplanofattack to deploy
hassle free and concentrate on what matters the most; beautiful, seamless
design._

I like that! Thanks for your input. I definitely hear you on the "show don't
tell" aspect. Ideally I'd have a catchy line like the one you made and then a
slideshow of beautifully designed Facebook pages with a link to the actual
live FB instance.

My goal here is to validate the core concept, hopefully gain some useful
contacts/help and of course get some beta users.

As for the intermediate thing, definitely. If I can grab a couple of
interested users, it would not be too difficult to build upon the
functionality. My concern as of now is just to laser focus on my own unique
angle. Pagemodo is really not something I'd want to emulate personally, but
having easy wysiwyg templates is definitely useful.

I appreciate your feedback. Do you mind if I try to implement your phrasing?

~~~
todayiamme
>>>I like that! Thanks for your input. I definitely hear you on the "show
don't tell" aspect. Ideally I'd have a catchy line like the one you made and
then a slideshow of beautifully designed Facebook pages with a link to the
actual live FB instance.<<<

Don't do a slideshow either. It takes too long to load on a slower internet
connection and people tend to lose interest by that time. Instead photoshop
something like coverflow with 3 beautiful pages. I am not telling you to rip
off coverflow. Don't do that. Your customers are very sensitive to such things

Make a draft layout on paper and play with it. Cut out pieces of paper and
move it around on your desk.

>>>My goal here is to validate the core concept, hopefully gain some useful
contacts/help and of course get some beta users.<<<

I can understand that, but they are humans too and humans tend to get bored if
they aren't engaged within those first 20-30 seconds. I am not asking you to
make a fluff piece. No, I am asking you to make a hook to pull users in.

>>>As for the intermediate thing, definitely. If I can grab a couple of
interested users, it would not be too difficult to build upon the
functionality. My concern as of now is just to laser focus on my own unique
angle. Pagemodo is really not something I'd want to emulate personally, but
having easy wysiwyg templates is definitely useful.<<<

That sounds wise, but be careful not to box yourself in. I wish I could advise
you more, but I haven't done any serious software development. So, I have no
clue what challenges it brings on this side.

>>>I appreciate your feedback. Do you mind if I try to implement your
phrasing?<<<

Of course not! I'll be honored if you do so. :)

If you think that I can help you in anyway at all then don't hesitate to
contact me at yesthisisananonymousid at googlemail

P.S.- Do I get a free account? :p

------
carbocation
This is what I see:

<http://www.uploadscreenshot.com/image/91811/1706063>

Are the boxes intentionally gray placeholders that you'll replace with
screenshots or the like?

~~~
apsurd
Sorry, you are correct, they will be samples of Facebook pages made by the
service. Sorry that it is unclear, I just felt it important to get feedback.
Everything works though, the admin is functional and you can use the demo
account provided on the sign up page.

~~~
cj
I clicked out of the page and didn't even try it when I couldn't find an
example page created by the service. Screenshot/examples are essential.

~~~
apsurd
Thanks, that is surely first on my list: "show don't tell." Since I probably
couldn't make compelling enough designs, I'll have to find some designers to
work with.

------
pclark
Instant impressions: Page loads too slowly. Too much text. Dislike the name.

The text in the yellow is hard to read, why are certain words in an even more
yellow background?

The secondary marketing line isn't quite english:

"Probably depends on how good of a designer you are!"

I'd change that top bit to say:

> Create facebook pages for your clients with our WYSIWYG editor.

> A simple one page promotion page on Facebook is easily worth $500 for your
> clients. Design and sell them with A Plan of Attack today!

The problem with _your_ text is that it's challenging and instills doubt. Am I
good enough of a designer? Maybe not, oh well lets not bother. You want to
say: Is a simple one page promotion page worth $500 to your clients companies?
_fuck yes_ \- and we let you make them trivially!

"sell" is a bad word - especially to designers. Maybe "earn $500 by making
your clients facebook landing pages" if that doesn't sound too dodgy.

The images on the right are just grey boxes, the login link should be top
right. Let me create a page without signing up. (make the demo account auto
login and obvious)

The sign up button should probably be on the right hand side of the page, i
dislike how it turns red (too jarring)

The "Aplanofattack is in beta..." paragraph should be added on the sign up
page, if not later. Sounds too sketchy on the first page.

Reiterate the service is free - on the sign up button.

Stick a contact button more obviously on the home page.

Kudos for saying "benefits at a glance" and not "Features at a glance" but now
remove 80% of the words below that header.

------
apsurd
Any and all feedback is welcome.

Hacker News has pretty much been my cofounder, investor, mentor and friend all
rolled into one. So as always, thanks everyone.

If you like the concept please feel free to "Like" my application here:
[http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=129421017095...](http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=129421017095211)

This will help me do some customer development and also get my Facebook url
(without the identifer).

------
edo
If this really is your 93th attempt, I must commend you on your persistence,
yet at the same time urge you to learn a little about lean startupping. It
might save you another 100 failed attempts ;-)

------
tlack
First off, and most importantly: the business idea itself is sound. I'm saying
that as a guy who's transitioning into doing a lot of stuff on FB, and it's a
frustrating process. This factor is more important than anything else.

The homepage is a good start, but could be slimmed down and needs to be more
visual, as others have already said.

The actual admin though (I signed up) is a bit chaotic. The list of widgets is
only one widget and I don't really understand how it all works together. The
code editor looks great: I'd suggest having some sort of drag and drop
interface that pulls the widget UI and the code editing UI together.

------
lionhearted
Serious question - what went wrong with the other 9,355 business attempts?

Where did things not come together - unable to get traffic, to get
conversions, to get sales, to monetize...? How much did you work at it in the
past before giving up and moving on? If you've had problems at a similar area
each time , there might be a blind spot or mistake in how you do things around
there that needs specific refinement, as opposed to general feedback.

~~~
apsurd
It's not exactly "giving up" per say, the path is more like continuous
seemingly unrelated (but really related) iterations for the sake of finally
gaining traction (with something, anything) but more concretely becoming a
better and better and better developer in the meanwhile.

I have tried a lot of times not _only_ because nothing worked (to my liking)
but _overwhelmingly_ because I learn by doing. So here goes.

I used to print t-shirts. I learned the entire t-shirt printing process from
studying online. Not just hobby stuff, I actually grew to a warehouse with
professional-grade equipment.

I decided I would try and create a website for my t-shirt printing business.

1) I built a complete back-end php/mysql system to manage and process orders.
My dream was to have it fully automated on-line but that was pretty damned
hard. So I just used it internally.

2) I decided to make an ecommerce website that sold my own t-shirt designs.
Thinking I could design, produce, and fulfill tshirt orders from my own
custom-made ecommerce system (not to mention actually marketing it online to
you know ... get sales) is pretty damned hard.

3) A while later I realized it would be great if I could sell custom "tackle
twill" hoodies online because most people don't realize how insanely great a
tackle twill hoody can look. Everyone is used to seeing boring solid color
College type hoodies. (i also did embroidery). I set out on building this
great system that let customers design their hoodies online from a set of pre-
defined fonts, colors, patterns, and apparel choices. It was GREAT for the
level of developer I was at the time, but needless to say... it wasn't that
great. Never finished it because it was too complex and not nearly on par with
the competition.

I was doing all this as a hobby since I spent all my time printing shirts.
Then after a couple years I decided to go full-time web developing.

4) Took a year to _seriously_ learn how to code, learned kohana and jquery and
built a website that created websites. Pretty much like weebly, but a thousand
times more complex (which is really bad!). It works pretty well and powers
<http://larasgift.com> (I have a couple of clients). But all in all, making
websites for people is a huge pain in the ass.

5) Created a website that was to be an improvement to wikipedia. It is/was a
cool idea, but obviously who the hell am i kidding with that idea ... (how do
i make money?)

6) Created <http://pluspanda.com> because through building the weebly clone, I
realized local businesses don't really _need_ whole entire websites. The
internet is about word-of-mouth, referrals, and ... testimonials! (that's
still live, just having trouble finding an acute market)

Here I learned that my coding was getting better but my productivity was
suffering. Too much time wasted on stupid things. So after some deliberation I
commited to learning Rails. I couldn't get Rails to work in Windows so what
the hell, installed Ubuntu and become a command-line zen-master.

So now I'm riding the Rails on Ubuntu, source-controlling it with git so that
i can deploy via capistrano and loving life chilling with the Linode
production server.

7) <http://tastyink.com> was my first rails app that I built to learn Rails. I
think this is a SOLID idea that I'm still working on but it's too complex of
an idea to sell so I figured I needed a more dead simple IN to these local
businesses which led to ...

8) <http://aplanofattack.com>

These are the main projects that I've actually commited to trying, there are a
handful of other projects not worth mentioning and of course freelance work
every now and then.

    
    
      The point is ......
    

I know I have an endless journey to become half as good as lots of people here
on HN, but at the same time, I think I'm a pretty damned good developer
nowadays =). I can sit inside a command line, configure a VPS, understand git,
ruby, php, mysql, javascript, css etc. Not bad ...

Everyone tells me all the time "just stick to one project and stop abandoning
everything"! I know that is sound advice. I know it! I just don't think of it
as abandonment. I think of it as refinement. All of my projects have actually
been perfectly inline with a core concept: Helping local businesses leverage
the interent. It started at as some massively and painfully overcomplex
website building engine 2000 (never make your apps complex!!) and slowly,
slowly, I've iterated to very core and very simple "services" that business
can use and understand quickly and easily.

I'm getting there!

Hope this helps.

~~~
webwright
Funny thing about most niche businesses is that they are about 10% software
and 90% "the rest" (distribution, honing funnels, etc). Many/most software
entrepreneurs fail because they really (when it comes down to it) just want to
build stuff.

Nowadays (as an entrepreneur between projects), I'm pretty ruthless about
avoiding any idea where I don't have 2-3 GREAT ideas on how I'm going to get
customers for free/cheap.

If you're concentrating on small businesses, you have a tough road. They are
notoriously hard to reach in a cost-effective way (many investors run away
screaming if you say that your target market is SMBs-- with good reason).

------
Grinnmarr
I can't really comment on the viability/marketability of your product concept,
but I will offer this very important, if not somewhat trite, piece of advice.
If you are going to try to sell something to designers and use words like
aesthetics in your sales copy, you will most likely fail if your own
presentation is not aesthetically pleasing. Others have given some great
suggestions below. I just want to emphasize that before you work to send any
traffic to your site you should greatly enhance the look.

------
vaksel
the page needs to be designed better

you are trying to sell design services...your sales page should show the high
quality of your product

~~~
apsurd
Thanks. I am not a designer per say so if anyone can help out with designing a
couple sample facebook pages (for local businesses possibly), email me with a
rate and/or we can work out some other agreement!

------
mickeyben
Not exactly the same service, but worth a look : <http://tigerlilyapps.com/>

~~~
apsurd
Thanks, that is helpful as I didn't find that one during my research.

I know of <http://northsocial.com/> which is nicely done.

Also this writeup on <http://pagemodo.com> @
[http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/04/facebook-tab-creator-
pagemo...](http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/04/facebook-tab-creator-pagemodo/)
lists some services in the comments.

The services I've seen focus on freemium and "ease of use" relative to non-
developers/designers. Specifically pagemodo is a template generator.

I'm positioning aplanofattack as a service for designers/developers to use on
behalf of their clients as a means to add to their product offering.

Pretty much exactly what <http://campaignmonitor.com> is for email
newsletters. It gives freelancers and extra product to offer, without the
infrastructure headache.

Thanks for your help.

------
piwebplus
pretty good. I am wondering what are the three grey boxes doing in the
sidebar? I am also interested in your other 92attempts.... that sounds a lot!~

------
jeb
Seriously? You've failed 92 times? If so, perhaps you should try something
else?

~~~
apsurd
Haha, I would have thought 93 was an outrageously big enough number so as to
be an obvious exaggeration.

What I mean is that I am an aspiring web developer that happened to come from
a non-related previous background. I chose not to go to college and after
deciding to be a web developer, I just taught myself by building and building
and building and building. I learned how to program horribly in PHP, and then
I found Kohana and jquery which helped me code decently, and about 2 months
ago I committed to learning Rails, built 3 Rails apps (including this one) and
now I'd like to believe I'm pretty good!

Don't feel bad for me, because I love it! Thanks

~~~
jeb
It's not high enough, change it to 930th and it would be an obvious
exaggeration.

~~~
apsurd
You know, I think there is a lot of value in what you are saying. I mean
literally what you are saying... "93 is believable". And you know what, you
are right! I think that's a great startup lesson... 93 is believable!

I like that! I will take your advice.

