

I tried DomainPolish. Here are the results - imcqueen
http://iainmcqueen.posterous.com/swiperoos-domain-polish-results

======
dshipper
I'm the creator of DomainPolish which I threw together over the weekend. Aside
from thanking the community in general, and Iain in particular I just want to
let all of you know that if you have any questions about the service just
email me at dan@danshipper.com and I will be glad to answer them. Thanks
again!

~~~
bane
_Fantastic_ idea. I just talked it over with my co-founder and we will
definitely be using this service in the future.

Can you discuss a little how you source the focus groups? Are they free
volunteers? Folks at a mall? It might be helpful to understand a bit about how
web-savvy they might be.

~~~
dshipper
All of the reviewers are from <http://mturk.amazon.com>. My thought process is
that because your site is online for ANYONE to access your message must be
clear for anyone that looks at it. A big problem that I've had getting
feedback is that anyone I get it from is either a friend of mine, or knows a
lot about websites. It can be really difficult to reach the "average user"
which, I think, is the value of a service like this.

~~~
bane
Absolutely agreed. You can't imagine the groans we get from friends and
relatives when we ask them to go to a page and give us some feedback. And of
course they try and be nice and we don't get very good feedback as a result.

I'm afraid that our actual users also don't give very good feedback either,
but for opposite reasons, they're invested in the site and usually all we hear
are technical support questions.

Having some objective third parties look over the site has been a problem of
ours that I think this solves.

------
thematt
Since Dan mentioned that Amazon Mechanical Turk is being used to do the
reviews, as a founder it may be useful to know what the demographics of such
users are:

[http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-
demog...](http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-demographics-
of-mechanical-turk.html)

~~~
dshipper
Hey thanks a lot for this that's actually really helpful for me. I'll probably
end up posting some of that somewhere on the site. Good stuff man.

------
jqueryin
Since you're using mturk, do you currently offer your customers the ability to
decide which countries/languages they wish to receive reviews from? It'd be
nice to only receive pertinent results if you have a very targeted market or
can't sell internationally.

I've actually created human intelligence tasks (HITs) for websites on mturk
myself, which can be quite a cost savings if you're willing to do the
gruntwork yourself. You can create templates for reusability if you've got a
set of questions you'd like answered about your site.

If anybody is interested, I'll create templates for you and sell them for a
tiny fee... Hell, I'll make it a dynamic page and let you pick what you want
on it and generate the output. Fully customized, reusable at any time, and you
can name your own price on mturk.

------
heelhook
You should probably scratch the beta label in your site, too many things
launch in beta lately and its an increasingly annoying trend.

Since you haven't launched yet the beta makes even less sense.

Re the UI of the landing page, looks awesome, a video of kids using the thing
would be engaging and definitely a way to be notified with a simpler open ID
sign in c.f. typing your email address would be better, that said, I
understand you don't want to be working for too long on your coming soon page
and focus on what you are building ;)

~~~
phsr
How do you propose getting early feedback if you don't do a beta launch?

~~~
heelhook
I'm not against doing an early release, I'm just not fond of the permanent
label, I mean, Bing is still in beta! Gmail was in beta for how long?

<http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch15_Better_Not_Beta.php>

------
akronim
Is this different at all to feedback army? (<http://www.feedbackarmy.com/>)

~~~
dshipper
It's very similar - I actually discovered feedback army right after I built
this. I don't that site is being actively developed, but I could be wrong. Our
prices are better ;)

------
Postscapes
I like the site idea, and was about to pull the trigger but your payment
processing scared me away.

I can't tell if you use https, and the Stripe processing page is just an email
landing page......Get that up with Paypal or the like and you will have at
least one more customer.

Good luck with the launch.

~~~
dshipper
Thanks for the feedback! I'll be adding SSL just as soon as I get through all
of the orders this post has generated :). The payment is secure even without
SSL server-side because Stripe uses a JavaScript form to process the payments
which means that your credit card information never touches my server.

~~~
brohee
The point is that without SSL no one can know for sure the right, secure
Javascript was served.

------
cabounous
Where do you find the folks to do the review? Is this Amazon Turk arbitrage?

~~~
dshipper
Yes indeed. Let me know if you have any more questions!

~~~
addandsubtract
The page is pretty sparse on information, so I have to ask, can I only "upload
a design" (as in a screenshot) or can I submit an actual website that testers
then run through?

~~~
dorian-graph
I had the same question too as it seems at first that we're only allowed to
upload a screenshot. Once you go to the pay page it allows you to upload an
image OR submit URL.

Anyway, I went with a URL and will receive results in ~ 1 hour.

------
geekfactor
Front page on HN yesterday and the prices are double today.

(At least for the basic offering -- I didn't pay attention to the others
yesterday.)

~~~
bane
They doubled the basic prices, but added two more people. I think something
similar happened with the rest of the packages.

Still seems good, but a little less of an "impulse".

------
Anthony_qraving
I have this a try last night, very nice. The process completed much quicker
than I thought it would; and the concept is great. I think fleshing out the
ways you can receive the data (PDF/Word etc) would be very helpful, other than
that I was surprised at the ease of use.

------
jase_coop
From a design POV, I can't see what good will come from a focus group on
steroids.

~~~
dshipper
Very interesting to hear you say that. Why do you feel that way? I mean
obviously users can't come up with a cohesive design, but they can certainly
tell you when it's good or when it sucks...I mean I think...

------
parkerboundy
You really needed to spend $5 and 5 people's time for that feedback? Anyone
not involved with the project could have given you the same information.

~~~
prawn
Those five people got paid but I'm sure they appreciate your concern.

