
Show HN: Mocksup, my mockup prototyping & review webapp - adamhowell
http://mocksup.com
======
bemmu
I signed up and was surprised to learn that all the mockups would need to be
created in an outside program. I guess that serves a purpose too, to be able
to create a clickable thing to show your colleagues, but it wasn't immediately
clear to me that an actual mockupping tool isn't included.

~~~
keefe
lol wait, what? I thought there was a wireframing tool included and I still
didn't get that far...

I think the home is a bit cluttered, I spent I'd say 5 minutes on the site
without a clear idea of what it was doing exactly. A video would have
helped...

It's really hard for me to see the benefit of spending $9/mo to upload HTML I
already created vs just dumping it on a server and discussing via email.

~~~
adamhowell
We used to have a video (<http://vimeo.com/9638301>) but the production
quality was so bad that I opted to take it down until we could do better. I'll
definitely keep your feedback in mind, thanks.

~~~
keefe
I dunno why you got a downmod, this site is downmod happy sometimes. Your
video is private though, stupid default vimeo setting. I've been using ffmpeg
on ubuntu with x264 encoding and I feel pretty good about the quality of the
output : <http://www.vimeo.com/12740202>

that video is some crude thing showing how I did my portfolio in couchdb...
maybe a crappy video like that does not deserve center placement, but if it's
on there somewhere then screencast whores like me will be more likely to get
involved :)

~~~
adamhowell
Ah, thanks, fixed the privacy settings.

And yep, it makes perfect sense for me to keep the text + screenshot approach
of the current tour (for those who hate watching videos, can't watch at work,
etc.) but to also couple it with a video for those who aren't in the mood to
read/click. Thanks again.

~~~
keefe
OK, after watching the video I think I grok the basic idea.

As an engineer, I didn't even think of designers providing images... I'm more
on the other end of write the server, hack out a UI, work with decently
competent front end folk to make it nice.

So, I would reduce some of the emphasis on the linking part. People understand
linking and it's not an area that differentiates you - basic html/imagemap can
be mastered by kids.

If it were my stuff... I'd make the mock video more about a few characters
rather than the tech. Here's developer,designer,ceo,investor and here's how
they use my tool to get something done, so you could focus on how it tightens
the feedback loop which seems to be your goal.

I think production quality was fine, but I've got a pronounced substance over
style attitude.

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michael_dorfman
This looks very slick.

I think you might be leaving some money on the table in terms of the pricing,
though-- I imagine that heavy users would be willing to pay more than
$19/month for the "Unlimited" plan.

~~~
adamhowell
Yeah, we released a huge update yesterday and are just now getting to the
point where we have enough features to make the unlimited plan compelling.

We undercut our competition by a good amount, so we've certainly been talking
about it.

~~~
paraschopra
Please don't undercut your competition on price. I remember a quote by Tony
Wright (of RescueTime) where he said that "Getting traffic on and off is okay
but for a business to survive, it needs a predictable source of potential
customers and leads". If you are selling your service for $19/month, you will
be forced to keep your cost of acquiring new customers less than that. Which
of course means less budget for marketing.

Note that mockups is not something that can go viral, so your marketing costs
will linearly scale with every new customer. $19/month looks great if service
is viral but for business apps like yours it can prove to be a growth
bottleneck.

Rambling aside, suppose 6 months from now when the hype around the _cool_ new
mockup tool has died, how do you plan to get new customers? (Hint: whichever
method you choose, chances are than you are going to pay for it and that will
come out of your revenues)

~~~
tnorthcutt
To be fair, $19/month only means that the cost of acquiring a new customer
must on average be less than the current value of $19/month multiplied by the
average time a customer remains a customer (at that price point). Obviously
that can't be known on the front end, of course. Any thoughts on what a
reasonable customer acquisition cost is for a service like this?

~~~
michael_dorfman
Well, you definitely want to make sure your LTV is at least 3x your CAC,
according to this post:

<http://www.startuplifeblog.com/tag/ltv/>

But personally, I try to keep my CAC below 15% of my LTV.

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Vistico
It looks great alot seems to be in place and it's obviously well thought out.
The two things I would consider is maybe re-wording the header, I think the
objective of that was to fill up the empty space with bigger words, and then
have the smaller text as a description. It seems most of the big text is just
fluff I think you so reword it to include a quick pitch of what it can do via
iphone/website/logo mockup-wise.

Furthermore maybe the process to go signup could be one click faster if here
was a signup button on the home page.. instead of a "login button/ see pricing
plans button" I mean the pricing plan button works as a sign up it just
doesn't say so.. maybe that is just me I clicked the login button at the top
right since usually the login/signup is at the top right.

Good luck with this project!

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qjz
The website promises "smarter versioning" but each of the examples have only a
single version, so there's no opportunity to review this feature.

~~~
adamhowell
Haha, I knew somebody was going to notice! Time constraints, hope to get to it
tonight.

------
richlittlehale
Great website - very simple + nice interface which is huge for a website like
this. I especially like the contributor's functionality where you can send out
the mockups for feedback. In the past, where I've been on teams that had to
send out jpgs of the designs plus maybe a surveymonkey survey, your website
puts it all together for the necessary feedback people need.

Even better is the create a "clickable" website part. I didn't really see that
until I made an account (though I just looked back and saw it on the
homepage). I think it's really important to have this functionality. I used to
copy jpgs into powerpoint to try to simulate this somewhat.

I agree with the comments about pricing above perhaps being a bit low. When I
saw this "Compare" page: <http://mocksup.com/compare>, it's obvious that
Mocksup has a lot more features, but is lot cheaper than the other services
(none of which I had heard of). I guess on the one hand low pricing is good,
but it's almost too low because it made me think, why would these others be
able to price so much higher? That almost made me want to go to the other
sites and compare, when I probably would have just signed up with yours right
away (I didn't though as I was really impressed with Mocksup). Great stuff
over all. I'm a new user.

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brosephius
I like the concept. it's not clear that you have to use an offline editor
though, I first thought you could do the mockup work in my browser. maybe I
missed this, but can you add notes to the mockups you put online, for example
to guide a user through the design? I noticed an "Add note" feature in the
screenshot of the editor, but it's not clear if those get copied to the online
shared version.

~~~
adamhowell
Yes, notes show up on the version of the mockup you're sharing. I'll try to
make that clearer, thanks.

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webwright
Not only do you not support 1024 wide, you do it with backgrounds on your "how
it works" page, so I can't even scroll sideways if I want to. Note: I'm a
design/product guy currently on a netbook (i.e. I'm your target market).

RescueTime, the company I just stepped down from, has about 8% of its users
visiting with 1024 screens. This percentage WAS trending down but has
flattened (Netbooks? iPads?).

~~~
adamhowell
Yes, there's one page that's too wide, thanks for pointing it out. Eventually
those background images will be images and text, I just didn't have time to
get it in before launch. I'll work on it.

~~~
xinsight
The content is also quite tight on an iPad. (e.g. The mockup logo is touching
the left side of the screen, or is maybe chopped by 1px.)

Also, the examples are blank for me. (not sure if that is an iPad or general
problem.)

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terrellm
Nice site and interesting app. It seems like more of a mockup organization
system than a tool for creating mockups (like Balsamiq or Mockingbird), which
was my initial thought looking at the name. Perhaps you can interface with
them somehow?

I'm not big on the product name though as my first thought was "oh cool
mockups" which then turned to "oh wait it's a typo / misspelling of mockups".
It's further confusing because you spell "mockups" correctly throughout your
site. You also run the risk of a competitor buying mockups.com and building
their own mockup software (logical development option).

You've put together a great tool and well designed site, don't sell it short
with a typo'ed product name.

------
k33n
Great site. I just use email to send mockups 99% of the time, and sometimes I
have them printed in hi-res. Good luck though! I'm sure there are plenty of
people looking for something like this.

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railsjedi
Nice. Another awesome RailsRumble project being fleshed out and productized.

Best of luck Adam! I'll definitely be using this tool to link together
photoshop comps to demo clients.

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city41
The site looks fantastic, great work. Have you looked into sketchflow? It's
kinda/sorta a competitor, and kinda/sorta something you could incorporate into
your site. I could see a demand for a nice, easy, secure place to host
sketchflow mockups. All they require is an html page and a silverlight xap
bundle. (sketchflow is bloody fantastic btw, I think it's going to make some
serious inroads into how people make mock ups)

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fjabre
Love the design and the idea seems solid but my first priority would be to put
up a video explaining how it works..

The pictures, while well designed and thought out seem a little laborious to
click through..

My attention span on the web is really short and I'm feeling lazy just now so
about the only thing that I'd consider doing to learn about a new
product/service like the one you're offering is to watch a video about it.

~~~
adamhowell
Great point. We should provide both ways to learn about the product, through
screenshots and text for people who hate videos or through video for people
who don't feel like reading right then.

I mentioned it above, but our old video was outdated and low production
quality so I decided to shelve it until we could get something better. I'll
get on it, thanks.

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bwag
Funny how "Not written in Flash" has become a feature.
<http://mocksup.com/compare>

~~~
adamhowell
Haha, that was just me having a little fun. Two of the competitors in the list
are, so it was just a slight jab ;)

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iworkforthem
One improvement you could consider;-

1\. there isn't a inbuilt mockup tool. you could provide some default
templates for different browsers, iphone, android, etc. that will really help
us developer get straight into mock up.

I like the simple, straightforward approach in the web app, just let me focus
on the mockup with its versioning & sharing features. Nice!

------
dharma1
Tell you what I've always wanted.. You know the awesome Skype screen sharing
function? Imagine everyone in on the call being able to draw and write on top
of the live screenshare.

It'd be a great way to annotate/draw on top of designs live, while
simultaneously talking about them with remote participants

~~~
balsamiq
You can do this today with Adobe ConnectNow.

~~~
dharma1
thanks tried it - seems a bit buggy. The screensharing starts feeding back for
instance.. the image quality could surely be better with h.264.. and I
couldn't find an obvious way of drawing directly on top of my screen, almost
like drawing on a transparency.

I have to say in terms of ease of use and speed, I prefer Skype's native code
to Connectnow's Flash/Flex by a long stretch

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duck
In IE7 I get a 406 error when trying to view the examples: This error (HTTP
406 Not Acceptable) means that Internet Explorer was able to receive
information from the website you visited, but the information was not in a
format that Internet Explorer can display.

~~~
adamhowell
Yes, sorry about that, we saw that last night and will hopefully fix it
tonight. Had never seen that error before and I think it only happens on IE7.

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iamjustlooking
That whole select box background change thing is slick! Very cool design.

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mtrimpe
An odd comment perhaps, but I initially thought the drop-down selection box
was broken and it took me a few seconds to realise that (unlike every other
drop-down) the top element stayed selected.

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adrianwaj
Perhaps contributors should be able to submit their mockups, that way people
can discuss the different ones from different people. Otherwise, I wouldn't
call them contributors, perhaps observers.

~~~
adamhowell
We're going to solve this problem instead with multiple admins. It's on our
short list.

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freshfey
Really cool project and a great design! I would limit the free version a
little more though (just 5 mockups, no iPhone support) to make the premium
features more compelling!

~~~
adamhowell
Good point. Our mobile support is brand new so once we see how users react to
it we'll probably refactor our plans.

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blackswan
Allowing such easy changing of the homepage is a great idea - it helps
contextualise what the app does into something that might be useful to a user
really fast. Good luck!

~~~
Timothee
I agree, though I'd do one change: once I go from "Band's website" to "new
iPhone game", put the third option in the second position, rather than
swapping the first two. That's just a gut feeling of course, but I feel that a
visitor who wants to see a second option would be interested in seeing the
three options as well. By just switching the first two options, you make the
third one just a bit harder to reach than the other two. (especially
considering the size of the control)

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jaspervdj
Something wrong with the font size/line height here. Browser is epiphany
2.30.2 using webkit 1.2.1.

<http://i.imgur.com/rK3gD.png>

~~~
adamhowell
Thanks for taking the screenshot. I honestly didn't even know there was a
browse called Epiphany. I'll see if I can tweak that.

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petervandijck
Like it. Good concept, well executed. Aimed at designers. Hope it works out
for you, good luck with the marketing!

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kadavy
Beautiful site - I want to click through to a demo and start playing with it
right away though.

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kirkR
Good Job! The site looks great.

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Sriki
HI THIS APP IS AMAZING

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terpua
Getting 500 error

