
Ask HN: Please review my new startup. [Free account for HN community] - zackattack
http://www.customerfind.com
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marcamillion
Hey Zack, Firstly let me say that I love the idea. I can see it being very
valuable. I am working on an idea myself, and I can definitely see us using
this service once we are ready - who knows when that will be. I am sure you
know how that process goes.

Secondly, I must also commend you for charging from the get-go. The price
point seems good, what I was looking for though was a 'pricing page' that
tells me what I am getting for my $20/mo and other plan options. I would also
like to see other options, say only 3 or 5 keywords with a more limited
account for $10/mo. Couple that with a 15-day free trial (7-days I think is
too short) and you reduce the risk significantly for the customer. Imagine I
am able to add a few new clients in the first 15 days...that's significant
value-add.

Thirdly, I am sure you guys have thought about this already but I can see
other things like 'recommended keywords' based on 'successful keywords' that
the user has chosen. Those can be derived by finding a 'high correlation'
between those keywords and other successful keywords chosen by other users for
example.

Fourth, I am not too perturbed by your site design. You can always do a re-
design, I would focus more on adding features to the $20 account, because it
seems a little feature light at the moment.

That's all I can think of right now. Good job. I would love if when I am ready
to use it (maybe a few months from now) I could get the 7-day free trial...or
who knows maybe by then you have implemented a 15-day free trial on all
accounts :)

One last thing...did you find the cofounder you were looking for and did you
go it alone on this project? Would love a similar post to your hiphopgoblin
post :)

~~~
zackattack
> Thanks, keep me posted.

> Yeah, I agree. I'll consider changing it depending on how things go with
> this first round. The important thing is to demonstrate the value up-front.

> Actually, what I am planning on doing is mining the data from tweets of
> users who have followed-back. Then, looking for common bigrams...

> I guess I could make the "keyword suggest" account $30/month and a "light"
> account $15/month. I don't want to add features just for the sake of adding
> features, but I do agree that there should be multiple account options -
> c.f. the study of The Economist alluded to by Dan Ariely in _Predictably
> Irrational_

> Yes, that's possible but if not just email me: zackster@gmail.cøm

> Found a couple great candidates but geography seemed to be a problem for
> everyone. I am actually moving to NYC now and would be open to finding a
> cofounder there, with whom I could partner up on projects.

------
miles
"Free account for HN community" should read "Free _trial_ account for HN
community" in my opinion, as the former is rather misleading.

~~~
flooha
Agreed. The OP might also consider a longer trial than 6 days. I'm not sure I
can really evaluate the system in that time.

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marram
Some feedback: 1\. It is not clear to me what happens after updating the
keyword list. Would the program then go find people and follow them based on
those keywords?

2\. "People you have followed (controlpanel.php?p=following)" is empty.
Shouldn't this fill up instantaneously?

~~~
zackattack
The program then goes and finds people and follows them based on those
keywords, yes. It does so periodically with a cron job so no, it would not
fill up instantaneously.

How can I communicate this clearer?

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marram
Here is one problem: After I authenticated my twitter account, I got the
following error message: """ You registered the Twitter screen name foobar but
authenticated the Twitter screen name fooBar. """

I'm sure you know you should convert strings to lowercase before comparing
them! :)

~~~
zackattack
Whew. Fixed. Anyway, your free account has been activated

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NEPatriot
Seems like a great idea that would really give start ups a leg up when
starting with the twitter world.

I wonder if the hubspot app has something like this? This is great because it
takes one piece of functionality and lets users roll with it.

Just launched - will let you know how it goes. LiranBaron at gmail dot com

------
keefe
<script type="text/javascript" src="[http://code.jquery.com/jquery-
latest.js></script>](http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js></script>);

This lagged hardcore the first time for me. Pretty sure you are not supposed
to hotlink this in production?

~~~
zackattack
thanks... changed to google repository

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fjabre
I like this if only for the fact that the idea was born of necessity.

For me at least it seems the ideas always come when I'm busy building other
projects.

It also seems pretty relevant to where online marketing is headed.

Best of luck

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workhorse
I would get rid of the horizontal bar.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3)
Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5

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bdmac97
Am I missing something or hasn't this already been done by others like
Twittermass?

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paraschopra
Great app, it seems. Just curious, what do you mean by "whitelisted by
Twitter"?

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slig
Feedback: Let the user choose the language of the keywords.

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petekoomen
I'd love to check it out: pete at carrotsticks dot com

~~~
zackattack
activated

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AlexBlom
Registered alexanderdblom AT G MAIL

~~~
zackattack
activated

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marram
Oh oh. Seems to be down now.

~~~
zackattack
It's back up. I think my webhost just restarted apache or something.

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nkohari
Wow. Your website is a _very_ blatant ripoff of Basecamp's design. Imitation
is the sincerest form of flattery, but yours is a little over the line.

~~~
angusdavis
Yeah, it means the guy is smart and is borrowing strength from what he knows
works. 37 Signals published their conversion rates from the highrise landing
page for a reason. Goal at this stage is to see if people will sign up for the
concept. Once he proves that out (i.e. customer development), I'm sure he'll
invest in some of his own graphic identity, logo selection, color schemes,
etc.

~~~
nkohari
So you're saying that, until I have the time to invest in my own branding, I
can just use the Coke logo instead?

~~~
shpxnvz
No, he's saying you can imitate a design that is not protected by trademark;
quite unlike the Coke logo.

They do declare copyright on the design, but that doesn't protect against
designs that are merely similar.

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jcoby
jacob.coby at gmail.com

~~~
zackattack
activated

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Raisin
fdcleary at gmail

~~~
zackattack
activated!

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zachware
zgware@gmail.com. Excited to check it out.

~~~
zackattack
activated

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flooha
flooha at gmail

~~~
zackattack
activated!

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NEPatriot
liranbaron at gmail dot com thanks

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uvince
uvince AT yahoo.com

thanks for the free account!

~~~
zackattack
activated

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ABrandt
austin [at] beatnex [dot] com

~~~
zackattack
activated

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ekpyrotic
ekpyrotic at gmail dot com

~~~
zackattack
activated

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gaz
contact at tallstreet.com

~~~
zackattack
activated

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tonyvt2005
tonyhuynh29 at gmail

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zackattack
STEPS TO GET YOUR PAID ACCOUNT

1\. REGISTER ON THE WEBSITE

2\. WHEN YOU GET TO "STEP 3", WHICH ASKS YOU FOR PAYMENT, POST IN THE THREAD
WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

My new website is CustomerFind.com.

Remember my web app HipHopGoblin.com? Well, about a month ago, I wrote up a
blog post detailing what I had learned and posted it up on HN
[<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824905>]. In part, I explained how I had
used Twitter to promote the website: I scanned for artists mentioning certain
keywords, and then auto-followed them. This got me a lot of exposure, and a
lot of gratitude from people who were glad to find the site.

Then I got contacted by the CEO of a web site, asking for me to sell him my
scripts. "Sure," I said. "I can package them nicely and include the MySQL db-
creating scripts."

"No, no," he refused. "I want a hosted solution." And thus was borne
CustomerFind.com.

After a month or so of work, this is iteration #2 in my startup, this time
having a paying customer from day 1. And I'm offering a 7-day free trial for
all HN readers. Just reply to this post with your email address and I'll hook
you up.

All feedback and criticism welcome, as well as suggestions for future
directions of the product. I'm thinking of evolving it into a CRM tool, so you
can communicate with the people who have followed you back (and are clearly
interested in your product). But I don't want to write it unless I know that
many will pay me for it ;)

Again, all comments welcome. Thanks for taking a look.

~~~
vaksel
doesn't twitter ban people for doing this?

~~~
zackattack
Good question. In my experience, no. There are many other apps that do the
same thing, and this one is especially geared towards finding high-quality
keywords. In fact, we only follow 25/day, so that we can slowly figure out
which keywords work and which ones don't. The ultimate goal is to follow
keywords that convert at 20%+, which is easily doable.

That being said, Twitter reserves the right to do whatever they want at any
time. But this is non-aggressive, and we're discouraging "spammy" behavior.

