

 Looking for constructive criticism on our Pingdom Killing Start-up - captaincrunch
http://verelo.com

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someone13
Some initial thoughts:

\- Not a huge fan of the "Pingdom killing" tagline in the title here. It sends
a negative message that's unneeded, IMHO.

\- I like the main page, but the multiple black boxes that popped up are
distracting from the main content. Specifically, the "we're not here now"
Contact button in the bottom-right, in addition to the Support button and the
Sign Up button.

\- You can't drag the scrollbar on the "Edit Check" page - it selects part of
the page instead.

Other than those points, some small stuff: it doesn't say how I get
notifications, the "contact us" black button obscures the "Follow Us" when you
scroll to the bottom of the page, and, like bhauer mentions, the color depth
seems a bit much - it's almost TO flashy.

All criticism aside: I'm still using it for my personal website :-) It looks
like a good product, so keep up the good work!

~~~
verelo
Thanks for that comments! We actually meant to remove the support tag on the
home page, we'll fix that!

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bhauer
Just created an account and it looks interesting. Some random thoughts, take
them for what you will:

1\. The differentiating factor is the 5-second check interval, yes? Clearly, I
am not the target audience for that, but I suppose it could be of interest for
some people. The argument seems to be that there is a measurable difference in
the ability to react to an outage if you are notified within 5 seconds versus
60 seconds. That is true, but I suspect that even at my best, it would take me
at least another 5 minutes to do anything about an outage.

2\. It's not clear on the demo account tier how I would receive notifications.
On the Probe editor, it shows that I will be notified, but not how. I presume
by e-mail at the e-mail address I used to sign up (since you don't have
anything else yet). But it should probably be more clearly indicated. Aha,
elsewhere on the site it's clear the notification is via e-mail.

3\. Overall the graphic design looks a little too "templatey," if you know
what I mean. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a designer so I don't have any
grounds to criticize design. Nevertheless, a few things could probably improve
the look & feel:

a. Slightly tone down the color depth. Right now, many different sections of
the page are all popping as if they are accent or highlight colors. b.
Commission some custom icons. I don't have any drawing skill, so I too use
stock icons. But considering how heavily you utilize your icons, the icons are
important for you. The icons have no site-specific character. c. At the
"Detect Portal," the content of most interest to me--the list of monitors--
seems among the most diminutive and unimportant visually speaking. d. Padding,
margin, and spacing. The icons shouldn't touch the borders of their
containers. The label on the "Create Check" button looks off-center
vertically. e. Terminology. The page names are a little weird; the page title
doesn't seem to change? Also, while I understand what you're trying to do with
the main navigation along the left, it's a little odd to click "Detect" to get
to a list of "Checks" which are then called a "probe" in the URL.

Best of luck!

~~~
verelo
Thanks! Great feedback, we'll chase those items down. We have the differential
locked in, but its not released yet...you'll have to stay tuned, but trust me
its good ;-)

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OstiaAntica
I've been a Pingdom customer for several years, with no plan to leave. Here's
my perspective:

1\. Our primary use of Pingdom is to show prospective clients our app uptime,
as validated by a 3rd party. So Pingdom's main value for us is in marketing.

2\. Because Pingdom has years of our data, we are really locked in.

3\. Sub-minute monitoring is not appealing, I don't want that much load on my
servers from monitoring.

4\. The name Verelo does not convey what your service does.

5\. I think Pingdom's $10/month price point is about right for our use-case.
We'd probably drop it if they raised prices very much.

Hope this helps, good luck with your venture!

~~~
verelo
Thanks for the feedback. I think helping migrating being painless is something
we do need to look into.

I would encourage you to check back when we add our next feature set, there
are some big game changers coming.

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guywithabike
Really annoying to try to read your marketing copy because it keeps scrolling
away.

And why do you delay the page load just so you can do a fade in animation?

It seems like half the things you have on the page are there to prevent me
from finding out what you guys do.

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slater
I think if you're positioning yourself as a "Pingdom killing start-up" (I
didn't know Pingdom needed killing? Are they that evil/bad?), I'd put the
feature comparison, or a subset of that, front and center on your website.

~~~
cultureulterior
Well, we went to wormly because of missing pingdom features.

~~~
verelo
Nice to hear, we'd love to know more about that those features are so we can
be sure we're offering a competitive solution.

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iusable
I really like what you guys are trying to do here. But, I think your sign up
flow needs some clarity and maybe some a/b testing with an app like Myna
(mynaweb.com).

For instance, I currently require 3-7 clicks to understand the entire offering
and how they compare cost wise. This needs to be done to 2 clicks max.

Also, your primary call-to-action needs to stand out on the landing page,
above the fold.

There are bunch of other optimizations I see, but for the first cut this is
really good.

Best wishes :)

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Getahobby
Things like "reports so easy even your boss can understand them" don't go over
real well with my boss.

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tzs
1\. On iPad, when I clicked the link to the how it works section, the animated
arrows showing the flow of checks and responses were in a layer behind the
cloud images that I think are supposes to stay in the back layer. I only saw
this glitch once.

2\. Pricing confused me. 6 checks for $14/month. My first thought was this
means you only would check my server 6 times a month, so on average it would
take 2.5 days for you to notice a problem and tell me. That can't be right, so
I must conclude I have no idea what a "check" is. Does it mean 6 pages or
things at my site are monitored? Anyway, sine the pricing is based on checks,
you should make sure no one gets confused as to what a check is.

~~~
verelo
Thanks for the feedback, we'll look into those ipad issues. "Checks" are an
individual end point (Http or TCP) you want us to monitor, we will continually
monitor that check as often as you like (from as often as 5 seconds to as
irregular as hourly).

~~~
rhubarbquid
Wow, that's really confusing terminology. I would never have guessed that a
"check" corresponded to a url or port.

Why do you hide the link to pricing info in the "Features" section? My first
question about any product is "How much will it cost me?".

The back button doesn't work in either browser I tried (Chrome and Safari).
Click Features, then click Our Customers, then hit back. The page scrolls up
about 2 pixels.

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ceejayoz
Looks interesting.

On the feature comparison chart, the "Early Response System" seems to be
something Pingdom has, but you've marked them as lacking it. Per their docs:

> If we can’t reach the target with a test, a second location in our
> monitoring network will be asked to perform another test right away. If both
> these locations agree that the site is down, the check is considered as down
> by Pingdom.

~~~
verelo
Its a fair comment, but this is one of the main reasons why we state this is
because pingdom does the check "soon" after the error. The issue with this is,
if your problem is intermittent, or changing over time...the actual issue may
not be the issue you observed in the check on the "follow up".

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namidark
The initial page load and scrolling back up to the top is extremely laggy, not
sure what your doing behind the scenes buts its bad in Chrome on dual i7's

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kbbjcc
Need to draw someone to the Sign Up with a more distinct colour.

