

 Review my startup (background job monitoring as a service)  - barttenbrinke
https://snooze.io

======
marshally
Why do I have to be an EU Citizen to use snooze? I tried to sign up for a
trial account, but was blockaded. :(

Value Prop: Your value prop is clean and simple and I think you do a good job
of explaining it. For improvements, you might try telling a story to build an
emotional connection with the reader. I think your sales pitch is kind of
feature driven, when you really want benefits. Your video might be more
effective if you show how Snooze can save your ass in a story driven way.

Layout Suggestions: The class "text-3" explination bits are too tiny compared
to the headline on the front page. Text is also too small to read on the Tour
page.

Video Suggestions the video's placement on the homepage is jarring. especially
at the start of the presentation. can you make the background of the video's
splash page blend in more with the existing HTML/CSS? It currently feels kind
of Picture in Picture. IMO Vimeo does a better job of removing the player's
chrome (play pause stop buttons) and getting out of the way of your content.

CLI Suggestions

Read from/manipulate the crontab itself from inside your cli. Even people who
love cron hate writing crontab entries. If you could turn some of that into
plain english, many people would be more excited about using your service. I
think many of the parsing issues here are handled in other rubygems like
whenever.

example:

snooze cron - would list all of the crontabs snooze cron monitored - would
list all of the crontabs that are already monitored

etc.

Good luck!

~~~
barttenbrinke
This is currently because of insurance reasons. After I get some customers,
I'll get that sorted out ASAP.

------
struppi
I like the overall design of the app, but I don't think the stock images fit
well in there. It's just generic people, nothing I can relate to your app.

A little bit more text to explain what your product does would have helped me.
I had to watch half of the video to really get it. I still don't know how your
product is better than traditional monitoring, though. Unfortunately the tour
does not really help me here (but I am a devops-noob): For example, what does
this mean: "Snooze tries to fill the gap between cron mailing you and setting
up and Icinga stack to monitor all the scheduled tasks in your network." I had
to google "Icinga" to even understand what you mean. And the scenario you use
before is very technical - Might be hard to read for a non-programmer.

If you did not know it yet, have a look at this post (and the linked info
graphic): [http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-
copy/](http://copyhackers.com/2013/04/long-copy/) \- I would take this route
for adding more text to the home page, if I were you.

Don't get me wrong, overall I like what you did here. I think this product
would be useful for me if I ran a SAAS application. But you have not totally
convinced me yet...

~~~
barttenbrinke
Thank you for the feedback. The choice for stock-photos is one of budget. I'm
currently bootstrapping myself and thought this was a good tradeoff.

~~~
jeffclark
Don't worry about the stock photos. If you weren't asking for specific
feedback, nobody would have mentioned it.

~~~
struppi
Yes, the stock photos are a really minor issue. But, if you can draw a little
diagram that explains your service on a white board, I would prefer that to
the lady who has nothing to do with your startup...

~~~
barttenbrinke
I'd like that, but drawing a diagram for this is hard :)

------
barttenbrinke
Hi, I'm particularly looking for feedback about how to explain the product
better (aka creating a better sales pitch). Somehow I find it very hard to
explain a simple product :).

