

Ask HN: Review my startup, http://UpOut.com - martinshen

My room mate and I started on this website in mid February whenever we weren’t working on client stuff and/or school. For the past two weeks, we’ve really put our best effort to release a second/better version. It’s called UpOut and it’s a city guide built by users. We make it super easy to post awesome stuff pulling maps and pictures for you.<p>As an avid HN reader, I’d love to get some feedback! Please take a look at http://www.UpOut.com or to learn more http://www.UpOut.com/about<p>I’ll also be on Convore for as long as I can.<p>EDIT: Please try out the logged in portion. Either create your own acct (super easy) or use username:teststeve pass:testing999
We specifically want to see if the form is easy enough to use and that the profile editor is also easy.
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paraschopra
Great work! Though I have couple of suggestions from SEO perspective.

* Please, please, please change your URL from <http://upout.com/a/YRlIYk> to <http://upout.com/new-york/candle-vegan-food> (you can't imagine how important URLs are)

* Please include the city name in page title. So, your title "Candle Vegan Food | UpOut" becomes "Candle Vegan Food in New York"

* Add related activities tab and list activities there to build strong interlinking between various pages

* Give a small widget on the page so people can embed these activities on their blogs/websites so you get backlinks from there

Rest looks awesome! Good luck.

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martinshen
Thanks so much for the advice, this is really helpful. We are planning on
SEOing our website sometime soon. We originally did the random short YR1YK for
short URLs but we're realizing now how useless that is. Users can currently
change the URLs too themselves!

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bemmu
<http://UpOut.com>

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zyfo
Downvoted by mistake. Sorry.

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suking
Serious question - how do you downvote? Do you mean flag?

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warwick
Some features of HN are karma limited. You need to have several hundred points
to down vote.

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suking
Ahh - thanks!

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sage
On the signup screen, I typed in my email address, then reflexively hit 'tab'
before looking at the next field. That cleared the field and I didn't know
what field I was in. I had to tab out and back in to figure out it was the
password field.

Otherwise, it looks pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to having a Chicago
version.

~~~
martinshen
Thanks. We'll be doing more cities as soon as NYC is done right.

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mtw
I love this!

How do you get the listed places? had a similar idea once (for a different
market though) but we couldn't find a way to get them. Or you've got a person
phoning all local businesses?

As for feedback:

* your urls are not SEO friendly

* so when I find an experience, where do I go from there? I think you should have a hard look at monetization. One easy way is to just let people click a big orange button "I am interested!" and then you can sell that qualified lead to the business. Lots of $$$ to be made there and you also get satisfied users.

~~~
martinshen
That's funny because it's kind of the purpose of the orange like button below.
We played around with a lot of different words for that... would "I'm
interested" be a lot better.

As far as turning that into a qualified lead... we plan to do this soon
especially when we enable sponsored listings.

~~~
zmmz
"I'm interested" sounds a lot better than "Like this" to me. Like this
suggests either: facebook, or that you would like to see more results like
this.

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imechura
This is probably not what you are going after but consider solving the problem
of... What can me, my wife and young kids do for fun this weekend.

That is something I would pay money for.

~~~
martinshen
Everything on this site is user generated and tagged. Users can create their
own tags like we have one called #family. You can consequently follow those
tags to get a custom list of things to do for families. Alternatively, click
#family then filter to this weekend (not many items yet but send me an email
at martin at up out.com and ill send you stuff to myself)

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volandovengo
Great idea + execution. I'm always looking for a simple answer for what there
is to do. I have been surprised that the net really hasn't answered the
question in a simple manner :)>

~~~
volandovengo
Small nits: \- clicking on nyc pops up a pop up that it isn't easy to get rid
of \- I would suggest defaulting all views to today, rather than forcing a
person to based upon date on the left hand side

Large nit: I see in your about page: "Deal/coupon aggregation and maps.
Integration with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla.Local
Questions/Answers. Mobile application." - I would suggest to do one thing and
do it well. I think just answering the question what is going on in town is a
tough one to answer but answering it will make you a useful service. Trying to
do everything at this stage will probably mean you don't do any of them that
well...

~~~
martinshen
Thanks... I appreciate the advice. QandA is a big thing for us because (if you
register) you can see a question at the top of your profile page that asks
"What's awesome to do in NYC?". In the upcoming weeks, we'll pose questions
ourselves/directly to users in that space like "What's your fave sushi
place?". Eventually, other users can ask questions too.

Deal aggregation can get us some affiliate revenues to help pay for food and
we've almost completed it. Integration with the social networks is just to
help increase user sign ups and shouldn't be too difficult (at least for FB).

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MatthewB
Speaking about the UI/UX only...great job. The site is very slick and easy
enough to use. There's some cleaning up you have to do but mostly it works
very well.

~~~
martinshen
Thanks. Any specifics as far as clean up?

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sawyer
Lovely site, the UI is very easy on the eyes and I love the filter style.

My only complaint is with content really; it seems like a large percentage of
the activities are already just business listings (mostly restaurants). How do
you intend to weed out the hundreds of simple business listings that will crop
up and make the site look like the Yellow Pages?

~~~
martinshen
The main idea is that things should get sorted by tags. So for example #random
[http://upout.com/at?v=g&st=t&s=Random](http://upout.com/at?v=g&st=t&s=Random)
has more things to do rather than just restaurants. You can consequently
follow #random or users who post your type of events and you'll get a stream
of those related ones.

~~~
sawyer
Great, I can see that working; thanks for the reply!

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bdclimber14
I tried to submit my city, but it didn't do anything. I checked for JS errors,
but surprisingly there were none.

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autalpha
@martinshen Great job on the site. Congrats. It looks very slick. Here's a few
things that could probably help make it even more awesome:

1\. Rich text editing capability for description--at least with <p> tag so it
can be more readable than just a big block of text. 2\.
<http://upout.com/auth/s_profile> and <http://upout.com/auth/s_customize>
don't seem to add the "active" class correctly 3\. <http://blog.upout.com/>
make the logo go back to upout.com rather than the blog root

What are the technologies behind this? Again, good luck!

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guynamedloren
Wow, this looks great! I love the concept, as well as the design/UI/layout. I
didn't login, but I can tell that you put lots of thought into every inch of
the user interface. The entire site is pleasant to use and easy to navigate.
Best of luck with this!

~~~
martinshen
Thanks! If you logged in, you'd see our killer form that doesn't even make you
upload an image (we pull them from Flickr)

~~~
martinshen
No, this site does not use any frameworks. We only use jQuery I suppose...

~~~
plainspace
Only use jQuery? Would love to hear more about the tech stack.

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zackola
Hey looks very nice! Do you have/will you provide RSS or an API to get at this
data? I would love to include it in a small side project (mobile app for kid-
friendly activities and restaurants in NYC), of course with proper
crediting/linking, etc.

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bdclimber14
This is more of a question, but how do you know which state a city that a user
submits is for? I guess you don't really care about the limited city
submissions for small cities as much as the metro areas, e.g. Phoenix vs.
Tempe.

~~~
martinshen
We just added the city picker last night and honestly could have put more
effort into it (like making it work). We're fixing it now and will probably
make it more functional.

~~~
bdclimber14
No problem, working correctly is overrated :)

~~~
martinshen
We're pushing city request now so that it works.

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ianl
Interesting idea, do you have a mobile application? This seems perfect for the
mobile market.

I can imagine sitting in a pub after a meal with friends wondering whats next
and perhaps using an application similar to this one.

~~~
martinshen
A mobile application is under development (aka starting tomorrow). The best we
have right now is a map view.

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wcchandler
I've been working on a similar project in my spare time. I have a different
mentality to it, but similar concept. I wish you the best of luck, while
secretly hoping for your demise. Muahahaha! But seriously, good job!

~~~
martinshen
Thanks! There are a lot (like a lot) of people in this space.. It still hasn't
been conquered yet!

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amackera
Get the hipsters on your side and you're all set.

I'm serious.

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layzphil
Nice domain.

I don't instantly get that it is user-powered, although that is clear on the
/about page.

Perhaps consider using social sign-in rather than standard account creation.

~~~
martinshen
That's exactly what's next. We figured that most users would just want to
browse than post but we provide a small call to action for every user at the
bottom of the page to sign up (or learn more). Please try posting something...
we tried to make it easy to post incorporating the Flickr and Gmaps APIs

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JonLim
Cool! You guys don't have Toronto yet, but your signup form for other cities
doesn't seem to be working.

Let me know when it works, or when you have Toronto! :)

~~~
martinshen
Thanks. As a Toronto born kid.. it was my #1 choice but we settled on NYC

~~~
JonLim
Traitor!

Kidding. What's this written in?

Also, not sure if you noticed, but the signup for city form is broken. Not
sure why.

~~~
martinshen
It should work now...

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playhard
This is awesome!! Killer idea!! Going to be big! concentrate on what you good
at! Enabling people to discover (things to do). Less on social aspects!..

~~~
martinshen
We want to be more city guide than ANOTHER FACEBOOK. That being said.. I want
people to be able to send each other their top things to do in a city. As in
if you were coming to NYC, go to UpOut.com/ini (ini is my username) to get my
stuff to do.

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cabalamat
As well as listing events, I suggest you allow people to collaboratively write
articles about things to do with the city in question, Wikipedia-style.

~~~
martinshen
This is a good idea but has issues as people have huge variance in opinions
about different places.. We're trying to find an elegant solution to
duplicates.

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plainspace
Awesome. Love the name/domain. Beautiful UI that will clearly keep getting
more so. Couple of thoughts re design: 'Love sharing great things to do?' box
should line up on the right side with the right side of the boxes above (using
Safari.) I'd also try making the width of the sign up bar at the bottom the
same as the footer bar (Home | What is This?, etc.) Keep up the sharp work.

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vellum
Your UI looks good. I would change those black icons at the top, though. It's
not immediately apparent that the marker icon = map view.

~~~
martinshen
Thanks. I'm debating between words or tooltips. What do you suggest?

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kongqiu
Wow. Well done -- the Filtering UI is awesome. Two minor things:

 _The "map view"/"tile view"/"large screen view" were not intuitive to me.

_ How tough would it be to make the selections persistent, so that if I've
selected "Thursday Morning, Family" and then want to see what a different
category offers on Thursday Morning, the filter didn't re-set?

T

~~~
martinshen
That's a great idea! I was thinking about implementing something along the
lines of <http://www.equipster.com/> to have saved or common searches.

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zsouthboy
Signing up to be notified of "my city" doesn't seem to work in Opera 11 or
Chrome latest on Windows.

~~~
martinshen
Thanks for letting us know. We're fixing this as we speak.

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dpcan
This is great, I want to get in there and add my small town (it's raining and
snowing here, so I can't really do it now) but when it gets nicer, I'm all
over it.

Where's your FEEDBACK button???? I would like to send in some typos I found in
your tutorial images.

~~~
martinshen
The feedback button is to the right side (on nearly every page other than
About which we'll add). We use UserVoice for Feedback

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aaronblohowiak
Why UserVoice instead of GetSatisfaction or Ideaffect?

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martinshen
UV is cheaper than Get Satisfaction and is nicer than Ideaffect.

EDIT: Just checked GetSatisfaction again... that's not necessarily true.

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joshuarudd
Interesting side-note: UserVoice just rolled out per-admin pricing on all
plans, so premium features that were $589/month now start at $95/admin (lower
plans start from free to $5/admin).

<http://uservoice.com/plans>

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martinshen
We made a quick demo video for the accelerators we applied to.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izo08tV45cI>

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moonsu
There is no way to close the "Currently available cities". You should add an X
or allow it to disappear when the user presses Esc or clicks outside

Really great site though!

~~~
martinshen
Yeah.. we need to fix that part up. We'll make it a lot better esp. when we
have more cities. Thanks for the feedback though!

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abbasmehdi
This is an excellent idea! I have been wishing for something like this for LA.
Let people post cool spots in real-time (maybe you do), so I know whats going
down! :-)

~~~
martinshen
This is exactly what we're doing for UpOut. We'll hopefully push LA by mid-
summer (I have a few friends who want it there). You can follow the specific
tags/users (like #indieconcerts or #sushi) that you're interested in to get a
stream of the best stuff to do.

~~~
abbasmehdi
You need it more in LA than any place else, why: sprawl = time and effort
invested in getting anywhere around the city is the highest. NYC, you get up
and move 2 blocks, on foot, LA you gotta drive, pay for parking everywhere,
deal with traffic and cops if you drink, and then find out the spot sucks. I
travel b/w NYC and LA a lot, and in NYC its a nice-to-have (don't like this
spot go necxt door, or next or next... or take a $10 cab and go across town),
in LA its a must-have (no walkable areas except 2 blocks and we just have 3 or
4 of those in a city that is HUGE).

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start123
Its 11 pm here and the Homepage asks me to Get up, Go out!

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RoadRunner_23
???? Sorry. We aren't compatible with IE yet. ????

~~~
martinshen
Sorry... minimum viable product. We didn't have the time to do IE
compatibility. We will probably work on this in a few days.

~~~
bkaid
Odd you would completely block all IE users (not just IE6) instead of letting
them see a site that may have some issues but still mostly works.

~~~
there
you make that sound like ie6 is the only browser that ever had compatibility
issues.

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nickfrost
Follow UpOut's profile on StartupList! <http://startupli.st/up_out>

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mildavw
Great execution! I did immediately look at your domain name and think "you
pout". Was I the only one?

~~~
martinshen
I agree that the name does have its faults. We tried to focus on UpOut by
capitalizing the U and O as well as distinguishing Up from out in our logo. We
liked the name because it kind of explained what we did and was short/easy to
spell even as upout (you pout)

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mindotus
Looking good, hope it takes off!!

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dhenzel
Great job! I will use it when I am in NY for blogworld expo:)

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white_devil
OK, and how do you make money with this?

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Gvillin
They could go along the same path as Foursquare and get as many users as
possible and worry about monetization later. Although I think ianl is right,
adding an intuitive mobile app with a killer UI is essential for your
success/adoption. I would be down to use an app that had the activity list of
TripAdvisor (with more unique user provided up to date options) integrated
with the geo/social characteristics of Foursquare. I feel like you can’t
underestimate people’s narcissism. If I am doing cool stuff all the time it
would be great for people to be able to recognize it and make me, or someone
cool (sticking with the Foursquare reference) "mayor" of awesome stuff to do.
You could also look at the whole coupon based concept once you go mobile.
Something like: "Awesomeness going on at location x come within the next hour
and get ½ off amazingness!" I will keep an eye out for an app.

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Papirola
yelp clone?

~~~
martinshen
We're trying to focus more on "What's fun to do?" (aka a city guide). We hope
to integrate Yelp and other review sites as part of the tabs where comments
are (if they'll let us). We're more trying to compete with TimeOut and other
city guides.

~~~
allanscu
I like it. The only problem is getting people to submit content. You may want
to focus on one tech savvy city, troll Craiglist for events, go to REI to get
events, go to StubHub for events, etc.

~~~
martinshen
This is an issue we're trying to address. We figured we need about 5% of our
users to post stuff. We've also made it absurdly easy to post where we get the
images, tags and maps for you. Try it!

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drivebyacct2
Your page is too wide. At least with the scribbled text on the left hand side
that distracted me.

