

Show HN: Review our public website? - bradhe

Before I tell you what we're trying to do, please take a look and see if you can figure it out for yourself -- after all, that's what our public website is for isn't it?<p>http://salesathand.com/ (Why isn't this becoming a link?)<p>Okay, back? If you didn't get it from our website we are doing mobile point of sale and electronic menus for restaurants, cafes, vendors, and retailers.<p>We have the prototype done and we have some initial customers that are really interested in what we're doing but we want to try to bring more people on board and generate that elusive buzz with our public website. We just "launched" (lol) the public website yesterday and we're getting good traffic from Ad Words on a campaign we're only running locally (Seattle, WA and Portland, OR).<p><i>What kinds of things can we do to improve our public website?</i> I know the markup is pretty gross but we didn't think that was necessarily pertinent to our target audience. Will this impact SEO? Is the message clear? What kinds of things would you like to see on a home page?<p>If there's any interest I can show off our prototype, too! I really respect the opinion of most of the people on HN so any feedback that you guys can give will be amazing!<p><i>Edit: Wow, lots of good feedback. We actually posted a demo on our site, if you click the "Try for yourself" button on the home page it sends you directly to the prototype and logs you in and everything! So, if you have feedback on that it would be appreciated!</i>
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thaumaturgy
Great! I've been looking forward to someone doing exactly this.

As for your website:

1\. Lose the top bar. You have to know your market; every single restaurant I
work with is run by people that don't use Twitter, Facebook, etc., they don't
know what those icons are, and it doesn't help them. You could move "Blog"
down to your tabs, de-duplicate the "Contact Us", and shift your entire page
up a bit, cleaning it up in the process.

2\. Likewise, I'm the I.T. guy for these restaurants, so I'm also part of your
market. I'm more likely to hear about your product before the restaurant does,
and I'll evaluate it on their behalf. If I think it could work for them, I'll
pitch it to them. But, I _hate_ "Register for a free trial". All I need is a
product tour. Screenshots and reasonably explanatory text works just fine.
Video is nice too, but I would tend to look at screenshots+text first if both
are available.

3\. Please please please post a price. Do not ask me to contact your for a
quote. That tells me that you intend to charge unfairly. I don't want to have
to haggle with you. And, if I'm going to pitch your product to my clients, I
want to be able to tell them what it's going to cost them. They're busy
people. They're trying to manage a restaurant. They don't want their tech guy
coming by and saying, "I think I might have found a great replacement system
for your restaurant's point of sale, but we're going to have to waste some
time together because I have no idea what it costs."

4\. Restaurants are very sensitive about being distinctive, especially the
ones that are most likely to purchase a handful of iPads to run a system like
this. (And I know a couple of those.) Is your menu customizable? Can they add
pictures? Custom fonts?

5\. And, the big granddaddy question of all: they've invested a ton of money
in their current POS, and they hate it. How much work will it take for them to
move away from it? Can they use their line printers? Do they have to re-enter
their entire menu by hand?

6\. How do you expect iPads to hold up to grease, spills, and other
foodstuffs? What about being dropped?

Thanks for the great work so far.

~~~
bradhe
Wow, this is excellent -- you're just the kind of person we were hoping to
hear from! This is really exciting.

Thanks for all the feedback. Interesting re: social media + restaurateurs. We
will roll that in immediately.

We didn't realize pricing would be so important at this stage but so far the
three people we've heard from on this site have all mentioned price! We will
get that up ASAP.

We will also stress the customization aspect -- yes, the app is completely
customizable right now and we're in process working on the pictures, reviews,
product details, etc.

Regarding existing data, we're also working on data import methods to help on
board people more quickly...but this is proving to be difficult so far and
dependent on what other people are currently using so will have to be on a
per-account basis at least at first I think. If you have any suggestions on
good ways to do that we'd love to hear them!

And finally, re: iPads, we're not tied specifically to a device -- we're a web
app so we work on anything that is HTML5 capable. We're trying to find the
right case for iPads to make them more resilient, but we're also trying to
find some cheaper devices such that it's not such a big deal if they get
dirty...

Again, thanks for the feedback and hopefully we can talk again sometime. Like
I said, you're exactly the guy that I want to talk to, any chance I could pick
your brain at some point?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Absolutely, please do contact me. Email's in my user profile. I'd love nothing
more than to get a few of my clients off of their horrible POS.

Being solely web-based might be an issue, though maybe you've already figured
this out. In all of the restaurants I work with (just a few, and they're all
independent), orders from their point-of-sale systems get automatically
printed in their food prep areas. It's kind of a must-have.

I'm not trying to raise problems for you, I'd really love to see some new tech
in this industry. :-)

------
weel
Before I get to see the demo, I must look at two other screens.

The first has two photographs, one of an iPad running nothing in particular,
and another of some people futzing around with iPads in a coffee shop. Do you
sell iPads?

Also on the first page are a number of features of your product, but none of
those tell me what the product is. Take the first phrase: mobile point of
sale. Last I checked, "point of sale" was the way in which retail people refer
to a cash register. So I when I see "mobile point of sale," I think "portable
cash register." I have seen those in restaurants in Europe. The portable cash
register is ready when I am -- I sure hope so.

Since I am going to "drive product sales with pictures and descriptions." But
this is a cash register, no? Aren't those typically used in places where you
can see the very product with your own eyes?

But then comes the confusion. Take orders from anywhere? Why would I want to
take orders from, say, France while I have the cash register frob in my hands
and I am talking to a customer? Ah wait, maybe you mean that I can take orders
_anywhere_ (as opposed to _from_ anywhere) because, after all, I can be
anywhere (modulo the cost of plane tickets and such) and carry your widget!

Then, I think some more, and I piece it together. Logically, what you are
selling must be a device for traveling sales reps. Wherever the sales rep is
is the point of sale, and thus the device is a point of sale device. And the
sales rep carries a... catalog! An electronic catalog! I see.

So you're not selling a portable cash register at all.

The second screen, which shows up when I click the demo button, tells me that
I can indeed view the demo, if I click another button.

And then comes the demo, which should have been first. Except when I try to do
the demo, all I get is a countdown timer.

(I know the above sounds a little acerbic. I don't mean your idea is bad. It
may very well be great. I am just trying to be up front about how you should
not squander the eyeballs you attract to your site.)

------
secret
\- The first question I would have is about pricing. What's the point of a
free trial (for you and your users) if they won't pay afterward?

\- I would change the generic iPad home screen to one showing your app.

\- Also, I was going to comment on how you had a typo, but I see that the
product is name MnuBox. Not sure how I feel about that.

\- I second what SHOwnsYou says, especially about creating a product tour.

~~~
bradhe
Thanks for taking a look!

Can you elaborate on the name issue you had? Does the intentional typo turn
you off?

Product tour sounds like a cool thing to have -- I'm talking with my BP right
now on how to put that together...we're also adding a "Demo" tab that will
just auto login to the prototype so people can poke around at it.

~~~
secret
I'm not adverse to creative spellings, but it just looked like a typo as
opposed to being intentional (which I realized after seeing it in a few
places). Just my gut reaction.

Overall it seems cool. I just got an iPad myself and think there is a ton of
growth in store for tablet apps.

------
SHOwnsYou
Create a video tour.

Add a contact form at Contact Us instead of a mailto link.

On the homepage, in the right column next to the MnuBox explanation, I would
include a contact us form (but say it is for purchase/information inquiries)
OR a quick registration form.

Remove "Products" page with only 1 thing on it and replace it with a Tour or
Pricing page.

~~~
bradhe
Excellent, thanks for the feedback! We will incorporate this.

Edit: What would you like to see, exactly, in a product tour? Do you have a
particular example of a product tour that you like or dislike?

~~~
SHOwnsYou
I'm not sure. But your website does not really tell me what exactly the
product does.

A video tour (or a working flash example) would show me in more concrete terms
what it does/what it looks like.

~~~
bradhe
Okay, great -- thanks again for the feedback! We've incorporated a lot of it
already, including providing a demo. We're working on a video (that shit ain't
easy as it turns out).

------
ektimo
Clickable link: <http://salesathand.com/>

~~~
bradhe
ah, thanks, I should have done this earlier!

