

Ask HN: Review My Startup: Bookhu - pmjoyce
http://www.bookhu.com/

======
Vindexus
First thing I noticed: "What Does It Do?" I wasn't really sure right away what
it did. I found the "How Bookhu Works" box, but at first glance I thought it
was an ad so I didn't even look at it.

My recommendation would be to put a small tagline below your banner. Maybe
"Book reviews broken down by gender" or something.

That said I think the design is really good. I'd add some title attributes to
the scores in the listings. It would be nice when I hovered over the 5 stars I
could get a tooltip saying "3.4 out of 5 stars (from men)" or similar. Also
the colored box with the percentage or men or women readers could use the same
tooltip. At first glance I thought that was a rating out of 100. I know most
people don't bother with tooltips, but do it for me?

I was on this page: [http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-
book-4...](http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4/) and
when I clicked the "Select Bestseller List" it scrolled me down for some
reason. I searched the source for an '<a name="menu">' but didn't find one.

One the home page with the slider, the arrows are stretching to the edge of
the screen, but the slider container isn't. Here's a screenshot:
<http://imgur.com/8JVjN>

When I use the dropdown to change the bestseller type, it disappears on the
listing page and moves to the right side, instead of the top left. I'd keep it
in the top left and put the list title right beside it.

For advertising I'd have to say that you should definitely start a blog.
You've got some pretty cool data and you could run some interesting blog
posts. Maybe do some queries and find the words that are likely to appear in
men's favorite book titles, but not women's.

You could also do some sort of contest. I'd make it a "Men vs Women" thing to
try to get people into it, and spreading it. Maybe a giveaway of a couple of
books, or maybe Amazon gift cards. Maybe pit a predominantly male book against
a female book and based on which one gets more votes, give the gift card to a
man or a woman. I know if you put Twilight against something you'd have a
chance of going viral on Digg, Reddit or 4chan. Those people hate Twilight.

Anyway, good luck with the site. It's well done.

~~~
pmjoyce
That's some high quality feedback (and bug reports) and some good suggestions.
Thank you.

I like the idea of blogging the data - something similar to what they're doing
over at okcupid will put my mind to it.

As for the competition - I'll have a chew on it, sounds like there might be
something to highlighting the gender rivalry aspect.

------
ryanelkins
I would make the "How Bookhu works" box stand out a little more. One thing
I've noticed with all of the "review my startups" is that we have no idea what
we are going to initially generally, and when we get there the first thing we
want to know is - what does this site do. You explain it well enough, I would
just make the box pop a little more visually so I don't spend as much time
hunting around for it.

I found the site interesting enough to poke around a bit. Visually I thought
it looked pretty good. I would probably make the call to action more obvious
as well. Don't be afraid to tell people what you want them to do. The buy
links are pretty small and not even very clear that I am buying them by
clicking on them. Make them very obvious.

The "Leave a Reply" at the bottom doesn't make sense to me. What am I replying
to? Is it just a spot for people to leave their thoughts on the book? Again,
tell me what you want. Perhaps you could form it as a question. Try some
different things and see what gets people to start submitting comments or
reviews or whatever it is you're looking for there (or just take it out).

Overall thought I thought it looked pretty nice and it will be interesting to
see how you do.

------
pmjoyce
I submitted the same site in November last year -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172>. Since then I've gone through
several point releases, a refactor and a design overhaul (I'm hopeful it won't
be compared to a domain parking page this time).

I'd be interested in your thought and opinions. I'd also like to hear any
thoughts on a marketing strategy. Looking at my stats, visitors seem to hang
around on the site (as measured by avg time on site and pages/visit) for a
relatively long time compared to any other properties I run and I get a fair
amount of repeat visitsors. My biggest challenge at the moment is getting
people to visit it in the first instance. I experimented with PPC (Adwords) in
December - I'm no whizz so I ended up down, but only by a margin.

The revenue model at the moment is amazon affiliate sales.

~~~
Concours
your site looks good, clean interface but not selfexplaining , I don't know
exactly what the site does either, and there's no about page where you could
explain that. After sometime spent there, I then found the short description,
well you yould make it somehow stand out, so when someone land on it, it
doesn't feel and look like a Galerie showcase. Great Idea.

------
fhirzall
I think you should have a longer delay on each book preview in the scrolling
list of books at the top. I made it through half of one and then it switched
over. 5 more seconds would be perfect.

The "How it works" box isn't very obvious to a first time visitor - maybe you
can hang this somewhere off the top next to the logo?

I like the arrows on the left and right but I suspect that they would be too
far to the sides on a widescreen monitor - I suppose you would know better
what resolutions your visitors are using.

Otherwise I think the concept is cool, you might benefit from putting this out
in the various book forums online.

~~~
pmjoyce
I'm spotting a pattern here. All the comments so far suggest that I need to
explain what the site does. I guess after working on it for so long I
developed a blind spot. Thanks for the input.

------
billturner
I'll probably dig into it a little more later, but initially, on one of the
book's detail pages, the text (and everything else) is pushed all the way to
the sides of the browser window (in Chrome on OS X), so your "Feedback" side
button obscures the content. See this screencap:
<http://i46.tinypic.com/oixe77.jpg>

~~~
pmjoyce
ouch - thanks

------
bgriggs1
Why not move the "How Bookhu works" box to the top left? It doesn't seem like
you need full width for the book scroller.

For the book scroller, shouldn't you add some functionality there inherent to
Bookhu, like the ratings? It just has descriptions right now, which makes it
look simply like a catalog.

~~~
pmjoyce
you're right - I should make it less generic and include some site specific
detail.

------
andrew1
A few questions (I don't mean to sound overly brief or critical - it's a nice
site - but I'm at work so can't spend ages writing):

* Where do you get the data from about gender? Is it from users of your site? Is it from Amazon or something like that? I like to know where data's from so that I can make some judgement as to whether I want to disregard it. Data with no source definitely gets disregarded :)

* What am I supposed to do on your site? Just look for books and then follow links to buy them? Or can I rate books?

* Why are you basing the whole experience off of gender? I don't see why it's particularly useful to know what other men like, or what women like. I'd rather know what people like me like. i.e. like the whole Netflix recommendations thing. This just seems like a one-dimensional version of that?

~~~
pmjoyce
At the moment the data comes from amazon but I'm just about to add a module
that takes review data from goodreads.

To answer your 2nd and 3rd questions; it came out of a requirement I had to be
able to quickly segment/categorise books I might want for myself but I think
other people also use it for gift inspiration.

I found gender was a reasonably neat line for me to be able to segment. I've
also found it a little more-ish to check up on books I've read in the past and
see where it lie on the spectrum.

This is not supposed to be a one size fits all in book categorisation and
segmentation - it's just another tool. Some people seem to have fun doing it
and find it useful - some are even clicking through to amazon to purchase.

------
jfarmer
Doesn't add value to my life. Can't really think who this'd be for.

Or is this just a tech demo?

~~~
pmjoyce
Not a tech demo but I am starting bite size with small set of features.

The bit that interests me is that there are some people who just don't like it
and almost take exception/philosophically opposed to it [1]. There are others
I can see from my stats who spend a baffling amount of time browsing around
the site jumping from one book to the next for way longer than I originally
anticipated anyone would. Most people, of course, lie in-between and don't
take it too seriously.

My thoughts? It's just a novel way to browse for books (no pun intended),
people like to categorise and it's fun.

1\. <http://twitter.com/debwhite/status/7202044020>

------
MicahWedemeyer
Are you married to the "bookhu" domain name? I think you might have troubles
with the phonetic aspect of it. How does someone pronounce that? _book-hoo_?
_boo-koo_?

If you're totally set on that one, you might want to grab any phonetically
similar ones like bookwho, bookhoo, etc.

I'm not sure how important the phonetic aspect is, but if it's too difficult
to guess the domain from the sound of the name, you'll lose any possible
traffic from "Hey, you should check out bookhu, I think you'd like it..."

~~~
pmjoyce
this is a perennial issue for me - I'm never sure how much weight to allocate
to domain names, or how many bases to cover.

~~~
MicahWedemeyer
I'm no expert either. All I try to do is avoid names that are ambiguous or
tough to spell. Think "del.icio.us" - Are you going to have to explain to
someone every single time what your domain is, or will a casual mention be
enough? Side note: this is why I think non-.com domains are almost worthless.

On my startup, DoLeaf, we got "doleaf.com" and "dewleaf.com". Probably a good
thing, too, as there seems to be a decent size minority that reads "doleaf" as
"doh-leef", like Homer Simpson.

------
Goladus
Where's the data coming from? This is interesting as a sort of bookstore web-
storefront, but the numbers look funny to me. _Catcher in the Rye_ readers are
75% male? _Poor Little Bitch Girl_ (by Jackie Collins) readers are 100% male?

------
Vindexus
Here's a quick mockup of a possible redesign for the home page. I'd make the
book thumbnail bigger than I put it at, but you get the idea:
<http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png>

~~~
guiseppecalzone
This is a lot more clear than the current version.

Although I'm not sure if I would use this site, this version only takes 3
seconds for me to understand what it does.

------
ddemchuk
What's going on on the SEO side of things? You need to get your meta info
cleaned up, running a site:bookhu.com shows that you aren't even including
your meta descriptions, and you have a bunch of duplicate titles.

Additionally, why are only 46 pages indexed? Are there more indexed and I'm
just not seeing them?

You stand to get a lot of really good long tail traffic because of the nature
of your content, but if Google can't see it, no one else will. Get all that
stuff cleaned up and that way you won't have to spend as much on PPC.

Shoot me an email if you want to discuss some of these SEO things, I can
probably help you out: darrindemchuk AT gmail DOT com

~~~
pmjoyce
Much of that was probably referencing the old version of the site - I don't
think Google has crawled this latest version - it only went live a couple of
nights ago.

I've have tried to be a little better on the SEO side of things, I've included
some structured meta in the header of each book detail page. The honest truth
is I haven't made it a top priority - you're right, I think I probably should.

