
Please rate my Startup: Kroud - Q&A Community Building Tool - stulogy
http://kroud.co
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hajrice
I just checked out startup.kroud.com and it seems super fast.

* This might just be me, but I'd suggest you improve your home page, perhaps add "Why use Kroud" or "Features" and such. To be honest, no one really cares unless you're some hotshot(don't mean to rad). Instead of that put what people say about Q&A. Here's an example: "63% of communities lose their members because of engagement. — WSJ" and then some button below that says something like: "Rewin those members with kroud"

* You're "selling" your product not yourself - remove the "Hey I'm Stu." Replace it with something regarding WHY JOIN

* Your headline is a bit vague("Questions and answers for your community"). When I first saw the headline I thought, oh this is probably some week open source project. I checked out your product and I think something like "Get your free hosted Q&A community up in minuets" or something.

* Good work on building some sort of comfortability with social proof.

I'm curious, how is this different than already-existing services like
Sponge(getsponge.com) or

Oh, and, start charging for it.

Best of luck to you

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stulogy
That's really good feedback thanks, I'll take it on board. This is actually
just the kind of thing I was looking for because I really struggle with "The
Irresistible Offer" type slogans that catch people. I'll work on it.

Stu

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hajrice
No problem. I suggest you check out the lean startup principles if you already
haven't. Perhaps you might need to pivot. Eric is really balling hard there.

Keep it lean.

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jeebusroxors
Here's the wiki link to "lean startup"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_Startup>

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steveklabnik
Just signed up.

Holy balls, is this fast! Mind sharing some details of your tech stack?

Secondly, can guests actually ask things? They have a text box, but no "Post"
button, and if you hit enter, the text goes away, but the question doesn't
seem to be asked. This is important to me, because I don't want my users
signing up for Yet Another Service just to ask a question...

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stulogy
At the moment you have to be signed up. I'll set it up so you can optionally
enable anonymous posting or not. Personally I like people in my community to
sign up so I know their name and their bio, and you dont get that from Guest
posts. But yes, it should be at the disgression of the person running the
community whether this is allowed. So I'll build this functionality over the
weekend probably.

It's built on CodeIgniter, using jQuery. I wrote all the code except for that.

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steveklabnik
Cool. I agree, it'd be better to know who they are, but I like to stay as
friction free as possible...

That's cool. I've heard good things about CI, but haven't used it. Back in my
PHP days, it was always Zend... ugh.

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tworats
Looks great. The homepage is dead on: simple explanation of what it does, a
live example, and a prominent signup button.

One issue to think through: companies would likely want to integrate the user
management with their existing apps. That is, if a user is signed up for my
web app, I'd like for them to have the same identity when on kroud. Sort of a
federated authentication scheme. Likely not easy to do, but that'd be the
major point preventing me from adopting kroud instead of hosting something
ourselves.

Who did the design? I really like the simple and clean look.

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jeffepp
Stu, thus far I have been really pleased. For us, Kroud is a Quora + Uservoice
for our customers. The goal is to create a community around best practices and
FAQs.

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Kilimanjaro
Nice and clean, with a catchy name.

Good to see more startups using .co domains since I am launching one with it.

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Kilimanjaro
Btw, as soon as you have more krouds, try showing 'newest' and 'most active'
krouds on the front page.

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stulogy
Yeah I was thinking of doing that until I looked on the database and saw a
Kroud called "vagina" and "whatthef __k"

:-)

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jgervin
There is room for more than one Q&A building tool. You can be the low-cost or
you can be targeted on one specific industry.

You may need to pivot, but only if you don't get any traction.

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instakill
I like it. Good design too. One thing you might want to look into is your
Kudos points. It looks as if someone's already gamed the system.

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d4ft
I'm still a little confused about what the value prop is. Is this like quora
for your business? Or more of UserVoice type service?

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stulogy
Yup you got it - brandable Quora. Can't say that though on the home page or we
could get in trouble

