

Honest reviews needed - abhishekdesai

I need honest reviews about the my startup http://rivals4ever.com. I would be glad if you can provide your valuable inputs to make my site better and more exciting for users. Thanks.
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kingnothing
Well, I just wrote a bunch of detailed thoughts and accidently lost them all,
so here it is again.

1\. The navigation links (all, entertainment, etc) should be the same width as
the main content of the site to give it a cleaner look.

2\. The site doesn't seem to work at a width of less than 1024 pixels,
although I was only resizing the window so that number might be a bit off. I
didn't get a horizontal scroll bar in either Firefox 3 or Opera 9.5.

3\. What is the difference between the default selection, "recently popular
rivals" on the left, and "featured rivals" on the right? Why isn't the
"featured rivals" section just another nav link with the rest of the rivalry
links on the top bar?

4\. I think the "Sports" section should be more prominently displayed towards
the left of the nav links as sports is a decidedly hot topic for rivalries. On
that note, you might want to add subsections for various sports such as
College Football, Soccer, Baseball, etc. I'm not sure if tags are the right
answer, but I'm sure you'll think of something if you go that route. If you
end up doing that, you might want to consider looking at the incoming IP
address's country of origin in order to have it say "soccer" for America and
"football" for the rest of the world, and "football" for America and "American
football" for everyone else, although I'm definitely offtopic now.

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abhishekdesai
great points :) i am definitely going to work on these points. sorry to hear
that you had to write them again. just out of curiosity want to ask whether
you liked the overall idea ??

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whatusername
Don't forget about _real_ football.. :P
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Football_League> and there's even a
"rivalry round" and another wikipedia page to make your job easier....
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AFL_team_rivalries>

All that aside - interesting site.. One brief comment is that the "JOIN
RIVALRY" link (in the featurd rivalries on the front page) is in the wrong
spot.. I was looking for one to join the left hand side of the box.. perhaps
either a link on both sides/teams or just move the link to the centre (or
_center_ if you have to use CSS)

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abhishekdesai
Cool, will check this out. JOIN RIVALRY point is noted. Thanks for your time
for reviewing this. Please feel free to criticize anything we are doing wrong.
We have lot to learn.

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Monkeyget
First visit thoughts :

First load was extremely slow, later pages loaded at a correct speed.

The menus at the top are very confusing. The first impression I had was "oh
gee so many stuff at the top. What a load of crap, I feel like closing the tab
immediatly".

At the top, there are 4 differents rows containing lists of links. I'm lost!

At the top of the page there are too many different styles (different sizes,
form, color, gaps, ...)

I have not a clue what IPL/ICL means

On the home/My stuff/ My... bar the effect to display the submenu is annoying
(slows navigation down). The fact that on that bar some elements have no
submenu and must be clicked on directly while some other have submenu and
can't be clicked on directly is disturbing.

What's the difference between "R4E Spy" in the top and the one below?

My stuff, My friends, My page. Why so many "My ..." What's the difference
between them?

I MUST click on one of the two option to access the details of a rivalry.
Being forced to click on one of the two options when I just want to look at
the details of the rivalry without voting is unpleasant. Why can't I click on
the vs image?

The name of the two options are in the middle above and below the vs instead
of being above each image. It's hard to understand what name correspond to
what text.

The pages for each rivalry comparison is overly confusing. There are too many
different styles. It's not obvious what is a link and what is not. The
separations between the different parts of the page is not very clear making
the whole thing hard to read.

Energy Meter bars are too small. (What the hell is it anyway).

"Top 3 Fans of ..." Why are those three the top fans??? Why them and not
other?

In the Featured Rivalries box (and other places), It looks like the circled 1
is crossed. That's odd.

On the registration page the password and confirm password fields have extra
spaced. If there's two fields that should NOT be kept separated in a form it's
those two!

I have to "Join this Rivalry first!" before being able to add a comment on the
Passion Talk? What a hassle.

When I click on the Join this Rivalry link I'm harassed by even more crap! No
I don't want to get updates, I just want to leave a comment! ( If I want to
get updates on that rivalry I'll opt-in by clicking on the relevent link on
the rivalry page).

Wait it's not over yet!! Why ain't I brought back on the rivalry main page?
Now I have to click on the "XXX" highlighted in red in Congratulations !! You
have joined ''XXX''. Damn! It's not a link... Why is it in red then? (By the
way only one of the two apostrophe is in red)

Now what? There are three choices but the icons are all but explicit about
what they do (especially the Add talk one). I have to read the text to
understand.

How I am supposed to edit/add my picture?

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abhishekdesai
well well well...one of best review i can get.thanks a ton for taking time to
review my site in such a detail. all of your points are well taken and will
definitely help me to rethink the whole strategy again. Thanks again.

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aseever
From a concept persepective, this type of site gets stickier the more upset
people get. Which is a good thing, it can be a great place to explore
differing opinions and think through your own beliefs, but you have to get
people fired up... and Red Sox vs. Yankees is not going to do it. People
disagree over which one is better, but there is nothing to talk about.
Politics, religion, race, philosophy, Ruby vs. Python, basically everything
that ought to make you uncomfortable as a webmaster... and it should, because
if you're successful the debates will get ugly in a hurry. But you'll also get
that cartoon where the guy doesn't want to go to bed because "someone is wrong
on the internet". No one is going to stay up using your site because they've
discovered someone prefers the Red Sox.

From a business perspective, in my opinion it's tight. Your CPM is going to be
pretty low because you aren't that kind of niche. Probably a few cents. My gut
says there isn't much opportunity for acquisition unless it truly takes off.
RWW did a roundup I'm sure you saw
(<http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/online_debate_sites.php>) - you have
direct competition from several sides. In my opinion you're competing with
more than just those guys... the big poll sites are also indirect competetion,
especially for your edge use case settling arguments. Poll Daddy may be your
largest, least obvious competition. Data Portability is another... a lot of
those types of conversations are happening in Friendfeed and Disqus now, and
that trend will only gain momentum.

Routes to success... you have a built in attention base with bloggers -
controversy is a major eyeball driver to their sites, and the "blog 2.0" trend
- the concept that the blogger doesn't "own" the debate, they just contribute
to it, could be leveraged - they will still be inclined to move the discussion
over to wordpress, but less snarky about it. If you can find a way to give
them what they're looking for (material to write about) you'll get some
traction. Otherwise you can try to convince Harrison Ford and Steven Spielberg
to debate pink vs. white grapefruit on your site. Good luck :)

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prakash
I don't think I am one of your targeted users, since I don't care too much
about any of these _rivalries_ and hence don't find it particularly useful, so
take this feedback with a large grain of salt.

It takes a while to load from Bangalore, India. ~300 ms of latency. I guess
you are hosted out of the US and most of your end-users would be from the US,
in which case it doesn't matter.

You could probably clean up the UI a bit, take a look at newscred
(<http://www.newscred.com/article/list>), those guys have a nice clean UI.

What kind of users are you targeting? Why would one want to use your site?
What value would your site add to the browsing experience?

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abhishekdesai
hi prakash, thanks for your review. the site is hosted on media temple which
is in US. i guess site is little slow to load because of lots of images on
homepage. we need to optimize that.

target audience is any user in the world who is passionate about their idol.
people can fight for their idol and discuss strengths, weaknesses, share
images/videos with like minded people. its a great platform to meet like
minded people and unlike minded people!!

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prakash
Instead of trying to create content from scratch, wouldn't it be better if you
could aggregate all this from various artist, sports team websites, using a
bad analogy, sort of like _gmane for idols_

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abhishekdesai
we can do that but there will be limit to what we can generate from handful of
people. right now 2 developers are working on and it and I am the one who is
driving the site. we want people to participate in this and get their passion
out and show it to the world. ofcourse we need lot of things to be done for
that.

your point about analogy is noted down. thanks.

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tom
Ok, honest review coming. No hard feelings.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but what's the "start-up" part of
this. This looks and feels like another comparator, this time with micro-
communities built around it. A neat spin on an old idea maybe, but I'm not
sure what benefit I get from joining. I hail from a big time "rival" area -
Boston. I do not like the Yankees. Seriously, I think it's coded in my being
to not like them. But, what's in it for me? Is there a pain that your
soothing? I'm not seeing the point. And yes, the inconsistent margins bother
me. I'd fix that no matter what. Your menu, header and body should be a
consistent width.

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abhishekdesai
Thanks Tom for really honest review. I see your point here. I need to see if a
person from Boston can not see anything worthwhile in my concept then there is
something seriously wrong.

Would you like to discuss your hatred for Yankees with other people ? If yes
in which format would you like to do that ?

Would you like to share some good stuff about red sox with people like you ?

Would you like to meet like minded people like you ?

Is there any feature which looks ok to you ?

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tom
Hmm, well I wouldn't call it hatred ... at least not out loud. The thing is,
for these fans, for Sports fans in the US there generally are places to do
this sort of thing. Most of it happens via blogs or blog-like sites
(<http://joyofsox.blogspot.com/>, <http://www.bostondirtdogs.com/>). I think
that sort of format works well for this (threaded comments or not). Most of
the Red Sox / Yankees stuff is "around the water cooler" talk. There's no
challenge finding discussion (save maybe finding a Yankees fan around here,
but I'm not sure I want to talk to Yankees fans about this rivalry). Also, you
really need to clean up your navigation. There are 5 horizontal levels of
navigation and that's a lot of work to try to find what I'm looking for. You
might be trying to do too much. Also, the "passion room" might have different
connotations here than you expect...

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abhishekdesai
hmm well taken. number of horizontal level can be a problem to find right type
of information user is looking for. what we have tried to do is instead of
having communication in all the blogs users can have at one place. may be we
are doing mistake in putting all those stuff together. need to rethink the
strategy of putting all the information together.

But i did not get your point about "Passion room" ?

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davidw
Seems ok, although nothing I'd be interested in. It looks well done, although
the front page is a tad slow to load.

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abhishekdesai
Yes you are right, front page is slow to load. Need to work on that. Thanks,
anything else we should work on ??

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aaronblohowiak
It is like kittenwar.com, but with more information about more disparate
topics.

you could re-engineer your site to be about pros and cons, and have topical
news items/products. i see that you have some of that right now with
weaknesses/weapons.

structured topical news item analysis would be something i _might_ spend time
on, depending how good the community was.

how do you plan on making money?

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abhishekdesai
well yeah we can work on that. we plan to make money on targeted
advertisements, sponsored rivalries, gaming integration once we get the
sufficient amount of traffic. how do you find the idea ?

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sc
If possible, don't delay monetization to traffic, especially if the plan is
further delayed by indirect monetization (i.e., ads and sponsors are very
different than customers).

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abhishekdesai
ok but do you think people will be ready to sponsor the site whose traffic is
not sufficient ?? we already have google ads in place but that is ofcourse not
helping right now

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kingnothing
I don't like that you have a number in the middle of your domain name as it
will make it more difficult for people to tell others about the site.

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abhishekdesai
we do have other domain which is <http://rivalsforever.com>. it just does the
redirect. should i promote the domain without number ?

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kingnothing
I think so. It's a whole lot easier to tell someone to check out "rivals
forever dot com" than "rivals forever, that's the number four, dot com", plus
the ensuing clarification.

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abhishekdesai
yeah right !

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j2d2
I asked a friend who is crazy about sports and fairly tech savvy. Here is what
he said:

 _Not sure I understand what it is. An “A” vs “B” in different sectors
(sports, tech, etc)? Just to be a comparison site where you can shit talk and
or compare products?_

One of your target markets has no idea what the is for.

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j2d2
He again followed up with this:

 _Kind of stupid, there’s nothing differentiating. If he could come up with
some way of getting discounts or a way to affect the entities that he’s
matching one another against, then great, otherwise, it’s just a sounding
board, of which there are plenty in existence._

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abhishekdesai
Thats a sure sign of bad design or implementation. Points are well taken.
Thanks. You guys are great. I am getting exactly what i expected from this
community. YCombinator rocks!

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mikkom
Very slow, I would have closed the site before the front page would have
loaded.

Also the front page is not self explaining, you really need a short "what this
is" and a slogan. In fact after I have browsed for couple of minutes I still
don't exactly understand the point.

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abhishekdesai
thats really bad on out part. i am gonna fix this right away. thank you for
taking time to view the site. does the concept interests you?

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mikkom
I think it's a nice curiosity but you have to think how to get people to come
back - you might want to create top lists based on multiple rivalries for
example, like top list of cell phones etc.

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abhishekdesai
yes for that we have all time favorite rivalries. and yes for getting people
come back we need to implement some serious sticky features to our site. we
are working on that, few of the features can be chat room, email notifications
about their side losing, compare people feature where you can meet like minded
people etc.

anything else comes to your mind ?/

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missenlinx
I'd promote the site without the number. I'd also implement clean urls for
categories.

Not to shabby so far.

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abhishekdesai
Yes you are right. Need to promote URL without the number and we are in
process of impmenting clean URLs for categories. Thanks.

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abhishekdesai
Do you guys think I should redesign the site ??

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j2d2
Very much so. It looks childish and therefore I don't want to use it. Sorry,
I've been harsh in my criticism so far... Just being honest.

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abhishekdesai
no problem. that is why i wanted feedback from you guys. i know i can get
really honest feedback here. well thinking of redesigning the whole stuff now!

