

Curating Email Newsletters Sucked – So We Built Goodbits - chancancode
http://blog.goodbits.io/2014/04/15/we-built-goodbits

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dang
This post set off the voting ring detector. We sometimes waive that penalty
for good original work. In this case, though, I think it would be better to
wait until the product is ready for people to try, not just sign up for. Then
it will make a good Show HN post, and those are widely agreed to be the best
things on Hacker News.

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kalv
I'm one of the founders of Goodbits. Thanks for the note on this. We just
wanted to share our story with this blog post and agree that it's not the
right time to do a 'Show HN'. We didn't expect it to trigger any voting ring
detector.

We can't open up to all users right now as we're making sure we don't create a
tool for spammers, so we're letting in people slowly and making sure our
vetting process works well.

~~~
dang
Of course! I just wanted to invite you to submit this as a Show HN when the
time is right.

All: because the front page has so few slots, we generally don't allow reposts
within a year. It's in your interest to wait until your cool new thing can be
posted as a "Show HN"—that is, as something people can play with—rather than
when you're at the email-address-gathering (or crowdfunding) stage.

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entangld
Very cool tool, but I wish this was explained better. Your tagline should
read:

"Build your newsletter as you browse the web" or something to that effect.
Another might be "Build your newsletter in minutes as you browse the web".

Somewhere after that should be an easy to understand explanation of how you
fulfill the value prop. Right now there is a big gap between your opinion of
how long newsletters should take "should take minutes..." and how a person
could quickly build a newsletter.

I will need this tool soon, but it took me a while to understand what service
you were providing.

Sorry to seem overtly critical, but startup copywriting is always
frustratingly opaque to me.

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kalv
Don't apologize! Copy writing is hard and we're still trying to get our
messaging right on this product. Being primarily developers we always fall
into the trap of talking to other developers, we'll try harder to get better
at this.

