

Show HN: Real-time Online Market for Services - sfyp
http://www.superfyp.com

======
jcr
I know you've worked hard on your site and business, but unfortunately, I have
a concerns regarding your company and site name.

The first issue with your name is, the phrase "Yellow Pages" is actually
trademarked in many countries, although not in the U.S.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_pages)

    
    
      In many countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia,
      and elsewhere, "Yellow Pages" (and/or any applicable local
      translations), as well as the "Walking Fingers" logo first introduced
      in the 1970s by the Bell System-era AT&T, are registered trademarks,
      though the owner varies from country to country, usually being held by
      the main national telephone company (or a subsidiary or spinoff
      thereof).[1][2] However, in the United States, neither the name nor
      the logo were registered as trademarks by AT&T, and are freely used by
      several publishers.
    

Sure, you can legally use "Yellow Pages" in the US, but you should consider if
it will really be worth the potential international hassle?

Since the trademarks exist in some other countries, you can still face foreign
legal challenges (or threats) from other countries. Sadly, this kind of
nonsense really does happen:

[http://www.anecdote.com/2007/08/yellow-pages-registered-
trad...](http://www.anecdote.com/2007/08/yellow-pages-registered-trademark-
telstra/)

The second issue with your name is, no one will remember it. The phrase
"Yellow Pages" is known and descriptive, but in the US it is over-used since a
lot of companies use it due to the lack of a trademark. It fails to be
distinct. From a branding and marketing perspective, being plain and generic
is a death knell.

For your sake, I hope my concerns on the name are unwarranted since changing
it would be a ton of work.

Your video was excellent! The animation is fantastic, and the voice-over is
clear and preformed well. With that said, it's too long to be the first thing
people see/experience on your site. It's 2 minutes and 48 seconds but nowhere
are we told its length, so watching your video might be a two hour investment,
or worse. --Your pitch is "Save Time" so expecting someone to sit and watch a
video is counter productive.

I'd put your form first, top and center, then put the video below or as a link
to another page. It might just be my own old habits, but I'd label the form
input fields clearly. The "title=" attributes on the form inputs are good (and
helpful for accessibility), but unlike labels, they require javascript or
mouse hovering to be displayed. Labeling the input fields with plain text
solves this accessibility issue.

    
    
      "broadcast your search request to ALL matching local businesses."
    

I'd use "needs" or "wants and needs" rather than "search request". I'd also
capitalize the "b" in "Broadcast".

You need to realize what you're competing with, namely someone saying two
words like "local plumber" into their mobile phone.

To make the site more useful to users searching for services, on submit also
provide a list of the local businesses you are contacting on their behalf,
along with the sites and/or contact info of the businesses. This helps to
establish and increase trust, as well as makes the site usable anonymously.

It was great to see you have "Privacy" and "Terms" clearly listed.

The text (copy) on the "About" page reads well regarding _what_ your company
and site does. Having a bit more general information _about_ your company like
history might be a worthy addition. The "What We Do" of your company should be
concisely expressed on your main home page along with the search form.

Grey text on a white(ish) background is very common (like here on hn) but it's
a terrible choice and is a well known accessibility issue. It makes your
about, privacy, terms, and other pages are hard to read for people with even
minor vision deficiencies.

Your "Team" page lists one person, Lou Pereira. He might be a one-man army,
but until you have a team of people, I'd skip having a team page. On your team
page, your html source has a commented "angela.jpg" image, which you may or
may not want to remove.

Though not on your main home page, html source (and php) on the team page has
a very common issue; you used a text editor or IDE that's configured
improperly so you are unable to see the trailing whitespace on lines, and
you're unable to see when you're mixing tab and spaces characters on
indenting. --How would I know? Well, I spent too many years botching indents
and line endings with characters I couldn't see, until finally one day I
configured vim to highlight my mistakes. ;-)

Lastly, you've got a form checkbox to allow a phone number input so searchers
can receive text messages, so I wondered if another checkbox to _allow_ users
to have their email and phone sent directly to the businesses would be
worthwhile?

As always, writing up feedback for "Show HN" posts is a tough balancing act
since the criticisms always tend to stand out a lot more than the compliments.
I think you're doing good, so I hope the above is written well enough to avoid
seeming overly-critical.

------
downandout
I tried something like this, but instead people would just take take and
submit video of a problem they had with one tap (the noise their car is
making, the leaky faucet, showing and telling what interior design work they
need done in a house etc). The idea was to let businesses see the videos for
free but make them pay if they wanted to contact the customer.

I got no takers on either side - no one submitted videos and, if they had, I
had no businesses interested in viewing them. These marketplace ideas seem
like better businesses than they are. I'm convinced that the only successful
ones will be those that are hyper-focused on a single niche. "Oh that's the
app/site I open if I need X" instead of "I can get anything I need from this
app/site". It seems that consumers just don't like having too many options
from a single source (with a few notable exceptions, but it is effectively
impossible to become one).

Good luck with yours though - I am just sharing my experience.

~~~
grimtrigger
What kind of marketing did you do? It seems like a pretty reasonable idea but
I can imagine it would require a heavy investment to get a sustaining
userbase.

~~~
downandout
I did some Adwords ads - spent about $5k. The plan was to get some sense of
ROI (positive or negative) and then try raising money with proof of concept
and estimated budget in-hand. I tried targeting consumers, thinking that at
first if I got even a few leads we could have a call center call the relevant
businesses. When no one submitted their videos (despite a dead-simple, two tap
submission process) I tried to pivot. I started pitching businesses on a
cloud-based service to receive, review, and reply to video from their
customers (including automated appointment scheduling etc) through their
existing websites/apps. Out of hundreds of businesses I contacted, not a
single one expressed even the slightest interest.

It seemed like it would be a great business, but the market told me otherwise.
That's why I said these marketplaces sound like better businesses than they
are.

------
xur17
Interesting idea - it looks like you're a lead generator for businesses - do
they have to sign up with you, or do you manually call places? How many
businesses do you have signed up? If I was looking for a plumber, etc, I'd
give your service a shot.

This may just be me, but for some reason, the landing page turned me off - I
think the call to action may look too similar to a website that costs money,
or signs me up for a 'trial'? I'm not really sure, but I figured I'd mention
it. Some other people might want to chime in here in case this is a personal
thing.

~~~
sfyp
Service providers don't have to be signed up, if they are publicly listed we
will call them to alert them of a sales lead.

Thank you for your feedback.

------
mrmondo
As others have said I'm fairly certain that you're breaking a trademark with
your naming. I'd also suggest redesigning the websites interface, it's
confusing and not usable on a mobile device.

------
nirmel
How are calls placed to service providers? Does a robot voice read out the
requests? If so, how do you convey to the service provider that this isn't a
spam message?

~~~
sfyp
We play a pre-recorded message to service providers whenever they have a
matching lead and direct them to the site to retrieve the lead info. The
requests are not currently read out. Each request is verified by a human to
prevent spam messages.

------
rwc
I immediately closed the tab because I thought it was an advertising popup.
Page is too sparse, lacked credibility.

~~~
sfyp
The sparsity was intentional. Did you watch the video?

What do you think is missing to establish credibility?

~~~
dwynings
It'd be helpful to have a "How it works" section with steps.

I'd never rely solely on a video to sell a service, as it takes too long to
get your point across.

Even a headline like, "Local Businesses Compete for Your Business" would be
helpful.

------
ukc
I think this is a trademark.

------
antimora
Superfast? I barely can open the homepage.

