

Ask HN: Review my start up www.Varely.com - michaelperalta

We just launched a little over a week ago and have gotten some good response to the actual content. We've seen an alright amount of traffic but haven't been able to get many sign ups so far. I am curious to see what everyones opinion is and any feedback you may have. Thanks!
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mnicole
Initial suggestions:

Summarize the contents from your "Why Varely?" section into a sentence or two
introduction for the top of the page that goes over a) what is this b) the
problem are you trying to solve and b) what can bloggers expect to gain from
using the service.

The layout puts emphasis on the navigation, not the content, which is a turn
off to both readers and writers. I'd also nix the logo/headline typeface
you're using; it's really unflattering and the antialiasing effects from
Photoshop don't help it. Bump up the size of the actual user content all
around.

It also looks as though if the blogger doesn't know how to format a post, it
will all end up being one big block of text, so look into a way to streamline
that (Redactor.js, Markdown, etc) so that they don't feel like there's a
learning curve. I'd also consider making the profile pages a little bit more
flashy/ego-friendly to make the authors feel better about contributing.

Hope that helps!

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michaelperalta
That definitely does help, I appreciate the tips. As far as the Why Varely
sentence at the top of the page do you mean like the home page where the
content is you think it should be at the top there?

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mnicole
Absolutely. Just a one or two sentence blurb or even just a relevant tagline
under the logo.

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michaelperalta
Gotcha, makes sense.

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hodder
I agree that incentivizing writers is the hard part about your site.

I assume the blog will be monetized with advertising. If so, have you thought
about a revenue sharing agreement with your writers based on ad clicks? Sort
of like Huffington post, but instead of paying the writers on articles
submitted (or nothing at all), you could pay them a piece of the ad revenue
they generate. Sites like squidoo.com and newsvine.com follow this model.

The revenue sharing article market appears crowded, but can turn out to be
lucrative if you differentiate in some way (like gurufocus).

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michaelperalta
That definitely is a monetization route and incentive that we've considered
using to attain users. Going forward with a larger user base that is
definitely something we can pursue. The goal is first to get to that user base
because obviously now that is the difficult part. Our main concern now is
gaining traction and a following. Thanks for the idea, I appreciate the help.

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ccheney
What's the incentive to put my blog content on your website?

You say you're trying to provide a platform that is maintenance free but what
about say, tumblr, twitter, blogger, reddit, and all-the-others? Maybe you
have more planned for a future release but I think you need to incentivise in
someway. The topic categories seem restrictive or too broad. Hope that helps,
good luck :)

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michaelperalta
yeah I agree I need to create more incentives, like you've mentioned I have
more coming in the future but the difficult part seems to be to get the
following necessary to make those things possible.

I would say some of the benefit, and again this comes more with scale is that
the content will be arranged mainly in two ways being by popularity and newest
which when compared to reddit is similar though the culture for reddit is more
of posting links and discussing other peoples content where I'd like original
content on Varely. Definitely do need to think of clearer incentives.

Also the topics are just popular ones but you can post about anything you'd
like and tag your post with it. I should also clear that up too. I really
appreciate the feedback!

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codegeek
For now, I will rather have your about page (<http://www.varely.com/about>) as
your landing page. The current homepage does not tell me anything about what
it does. I had to go to about page.

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michaelperalta
I was torn between doing that or just leading with the content to peak
interest and then having them inquire more about the concept. Thanks for the
help!

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codegeek
clickable <http://www.varely.com>

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eranation
Two major issues

Links on posts are not auto linkable

No mobile view

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michaelperalta
Those are two good suggestions, definitely will get to work changing that.
Thanks for the help, appreciate it!

