

Ask HN: Please review my web app to help startups get free PR - ryanwaggoner
http://prmanna.com/

======
ryanwaggoner
A bit of backstory: I signed up for <http://www.helpareporter.com/> back when
it was a huge mailing list sending out tons of PR requests every day. I liked
the service, but got tired of digging through 200 requests every day, so I
built 95% of this awhile back. A couple days ago, I decided to finish it up
and launch it.

Unfortunately, I took a look at HARO today and they've apparently launched
something very similar, rather than just the old mailing list that I was
competing against. So what do you think of this? Should I just drop it or
should I add features to make it more valuable? Alternatively, is there
something else I could use it for?

~~~
kbrower
I have been thinking about this same problem. I get the HARO newsletters, but
3 times a day is just too much to sift through when 9/10 there is nothing
remotely relevant.

I want something half way between google alerts and HARO. I monitor a few
keywords and whenever there is a reporter asking for something that includes
that keyword, I get an email.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Agreed, and keyword alerts is one of the next features I'll be adding. I
skipped for launch for simplicity.

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Vindexus
This is pretty cool. If you're afraid you can't compete with HOAR, maybe you
could aim for a specific niche?

I'd work on scanability on the home page. I'd make the unordered lists larger,
with a bolder font to draw my attention to them. I'm having trouble coming up
with good copy for those areas, but you should see if you can reduce the text.
There's that rule from "Don't Make me Think" that goes "Get rid of half the
words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left."

I think it would be nice to have some more categories and/or subcategories. I
see that I can subscribe to requests for "Technology", but I know nothing
about hardware, or phones. It would be nice to only get requests for "Web
Design" or "Web Sites".

The UI is pretty plain at the moment. Nothing really wrong with that, but it
looks a certain professional polish.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Thanks so much for the feedback! I really appreciate it. I do plan on adding
keyword alerts at some point, so that you can just follow super targeted
stuff, as well as search. I may add some more granularity in the categories,
but I don't want it to get too overwhelming to post or subscribe.

In terms of a niche, I haven't spent much time thinking about it, but when it
comes down to it, this is essentially a general anonymous message board like
Craigslist, so I'm sure there are tons of niche applications. I'd love to hear
more ideas from folks.

~~~
eagleal
I don't know about your "social" position on the web, or better in the real
world. But if you can link some known great engineers, angels, VCs,
entrepreneurs, and _independent_ journalists with non-backed (not funded only)
startups, that will be great. Perhaps linking a startup with a strict small
group of top people.

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lsemel
How are you going to get journalists to discover and pay attention to this?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
That's a fantastic question that I don't have the full answer to. I figured
I'd use it myself, ping bloggers and journalists I know, post in here,
leverage Twitter, maybe do some Facebook ads. I'm open to suggestions.

------
cullenking
I went to checkout prmanna, and was turned off by the lack of design and the
slowness. You mentioned in another comment you enabled caching, however, I
don't see enough on the front page to require caching at all...Toss this
comment aside if you are just testing the waters on a personal machine or
something.

On a kinda of related note, I looked around and saw your other site,
mightybrand, which caught my interest. However, it takes alot of trust to
giveup a credit card before you ever see the product you might end up
purchasing. I'd recommend you allow free trials without a credit card, and
then once someone is hooked or reliant on the product, cripple the account and
ask for money. At least this lets people try it! I walked away from the signup
form the moment a credit card was requested. Don't follow this example with
your prmanna site, if you do decide to go paid with it.

------
apsurd
Possibly OT but I knew I recognized your username around here and a glance at
your profile reminds me you run <http://mightybrand.com>

I'm genuinely curious what makes you (and others) start new projects when I
would think you have (or should have) your hands full with seeing how far one
can go? In other words why and how do you feel your time is better spent
starting a new project as opposed to improving/optimizing your current one? Is
it a matter of burnout and just needing something _different_ to think about?
I guess I've always thought that running a business entailed hundreds of hats
as it is, and optimizing different areas of your business would always leave
you with something _different_ to do.

Genuinely interested on your motivations if you don't mind.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
That's a fair question. It's partly some burnout and needing a new challenge.
It's partly that this took me a weekend or two to build (and most of it was
built before we started MightyBrand, to be honest), and I hated the thought of
throwing it away without seeing what kind of response it would get. And if I'm
honest with myself, part of it might be a mistake on my part. I'll have to
think about it some more.

------
rscott
Well to be quite honest it's a bit slow and the design is basically
nonexistent right now. Stuff like this shouldn't occur:
<http://prmanna.com/requests/list/1>

I dig the idea though, but getting people to respect it will be a challenge.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
Guilty as charged on both accounts. I just turned on caching on the homepage,
so hopefully that'll be a little snappier. Caching for the rest will need to
wait until tomorrow. I'm not a designer, and I didn't want to wait until the
design was perfect before launching. Hence, it looks like does :) I have some
plans for the design, but it didn't seem likely to be a show-stopper at this
point.

Agreed on the "empty pages" problem. I want the browse categories page to be a
lot more informative, and show number of open requests in each category + 1-2
recent requests for that category.

Isn't getting people to respect any new web app a challenge? :) Thanks for the
feedback!

~~~
jasonkester
Holy Yikes! Are you saying that this little web app, seeing maybe 2k visitors
from a Wednesday-evening hackernewsing, with nothing but a few test entries in
the database is actually slowing down to the point that you need to implement
CACHING for the homepage?

What technology in combination with what $5/month hosting company could you
possibly have used to achieve such terrible results?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I do have this on a pretty crappy host at the moment, as I didn't expect to
get much traffic (it also got picked up ReadWriteWeb today). I'm using
CakePHP, which is great for rapid development but does unfortunately have some
overhead, so I turned on caching, which entails changing one setting, and the
homepage is then served almost as a static html file (there's still a few
lines of PHP in there). It helps a little, and I didn't see any reason not to
do it. Really appreciate your supportive attitude, though :)

~~~
trevelyan
Most of the CakePHP are slow complaints are more issues of not knowing how to
use it. Suggest if you really think CakePHP is being slow set $recursive = -1;
in all of your models and use Containable to only fetch related model data
when needed. You should be able to hit tens of thousands of unique visitors
per day without caching no problem.

Remember that you will need to add indexes to the database manually. Cake
won't screw with your database by adding them itself.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I've done xdebug profiling and cake does add some non-negligiable overhead.
However, 90% of the issue here is that the host is _really_ crappy, and the
latency on the db is bad, so view caching is helping. It'll be moved to a new
host in 48-72 hours.

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thibaut_barrere
The "send me feedback" area took all my first attention. Maybe it would be
beneficial to reduce its attraction a bit ?

