Ask HN: Critique my startup

[PStamatiou]

I am the co-founder of Skribit.com along with another developer and we also have substantial help from an active news.yc member and a business advisor. It started out from Atlanta Startup Weekend back in November from my frustration about finding original content to blog about. Skribit aims to help bloggers cure writer's block by allowing their readers (through a variety of ways) to suggest things for them write about. The most common way is a widget. We are doing ~4M pageviews/month including ~1300 widgets. Analyze that how you like, we realize counting widget loads as pviews is odd.. need to find another way to show our growth. We have been trying to lay low until we have a core set of features out, so users don't try us for a week, leave and never come back.

Fairly simple in concept, but we plan to do some advanced data analysis/etc and find related blogs/users and automatically suggest suggestions for bloggers - particularly useful if your blog doesn't have many readers. I've also pitched it as a "tomorrow's news" idea. Down the line we will be more of a portal highlighting today's hot suggestions in various groups/categories which could be tomorrow's news, or what have you.

So I'm here to ask what you guys think - of the idea, our implementation, feature requests, and so on. We are all developers so we are quite aware we'll need design help in the next few months. In the last few weeks we have been meeting with local investors to get advice on what we should do to take the next step and in result we have been hashing out a product roadmap and are beginning to think about market analysis. Financial model is three-fold with freemium being the core. I don't think I can talk about the other two yet, but we have a prov patent on one.

For those wondering, it's a rails & nginx app on an ubuntu box at (mt).

thanks

http://skribit.com

on an unrelated note, I find Satisfaction to be _great_ for getting user feedback. http://getsatisfaction.com/skribit

update: and people are already poking around for XSS exploits. :-P

[nadim]

For some reason I'm not finding the front page of http://skribit.com to be informative enough of what your startup does. Could easily just be me though.

I was going to ask if there was a way to vote, but then I found this example and it answers my question: http://paulstamatiou.com/

After looking at that example, why is there no way to vote yes or no? It looks like you can only vote yes for something . Based on the frontpage there are a lot of polls, why not add voting?

[bigbang → nadim]

I also felt the same. From the front page it was difficult for me to find what your startup is about.

[PStamatiou → nadim]

suggestions can be voted on to gauge interest on that suggestion.

[brianlash]

I'm not a technical guy so I can't comment on the implementation. But it should say something that I'll absolutely use it when I get set up with my new blog. I like that Skribit's lean and won't clutter my sidebar or dramatically decrease my site's load time.

Are you distributing via any widget networks? I ran a search on Widgetbox (don't care for that one but there are others) but couldn't find you. It might be something to consider when you're through this period of laying low.

Also, I'd encourage you not to worry so much about scaring people away. I know that's a problem for new services, but there's nothing so off-putting about Skribit that would make users leave in some mass exodus. You may turn some folks off when you have those predictable hiccups, but the feedback should more than offset that loss.

As an aside, I saw you got a hat-tip from Problogger. Awesome.

[PStamatiou → brianlash]

Is Widgetbox a big site? Should we consider listing Skribit on there?

[brianlash → PStamatiou]

According to their website they are.

I know about them because they're so well integrated with TypePad: http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/widgets/

[akd]

Do people ever get the undirected urge to blog but don't know what to blog about? Usually people blog about the things they care about, and don't need suggestions.

[whalesalad → akd]

I can attest to Paul's claims that this is a valid problem. Yes, a lot of bloggers do write whatever they feel and it just comes out real easy, but a lot of bloggers (such as myself) would love to have some sort of resource to find out what readers want to hear.

Skribit is a great idea. I think it's still very young and has a lot of room to grow, but it's a terrific start and the first of its kind.

[PStamatiou → akd]

bloggers that like to blog regularly have this problem. I know that if I don't blog for a week I might get an email or two asking what's up as I usually blog more often.

I've run into this problem quite often when trying to keep up with my readers. Thanks for the feedback though - how can we make it more apparent that we are solving the "writer's block" problem?

[alaskamiller → akd]

It's a system for a feedback loop.

If I have a blog for subject, I would still like to understand what it is my audience want to know more about such a subject as to guide what I write in the future.

What this is supplementing really is just email, in a more passive way.

[luckystrike → akd]

I would also be very surprised if it turns out that there are a whole lot of bloggers who constantly need ideas from others to write about.

Most bloggers i know, write because they are genuinely interested in an activity/thought/event. If someone writes about something they are not really interested in (or knowledgeable about), it would be plainly visible. (One of the exceptions i can think of are people who write pure fiction like short stories on their blog ala writers.)

[steveplace]

The title of the main page may need some work. "Blog Topic Suggestion Application" seems to lack any fluency when you describe it. Perhaps "Cure your blogger's block" or something like that, except much better.

You also might want to think about bringing your signup forms up to the front page, or at least making the buttons stand out a little more. Maybe bringing the login/signup from the top and putting it above your yellow box would help add to conversions.

[PStamatiou → steveplace]

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah I recently moved some things on the homepage, added the slider, but I need to put some prominent "sign up now" type of badge in the sidebar.

[trickjarrett]

Just to say that I'm a user of the skribit.com site for my podcast and that you guys have been great about watching for feedback and taking my suggestions. I think it's on the right track but you're a bit away from finding the real gold there.

Some of the things you lay out are going to be real good, the analytics and possible value of suggestions from similar blogs suggests directory building and that information can be very valuable depending on how you do it.

Keep it up!

[Jax]

Great Pstam! I agree with you. People actually need topic ideas to blog about(depends on what kind of topic they focus on). Consider a popular example, Arrington wouldnt find news to talk about if no one tells him about it or if he hasn't read anything. I just read the idea. I haven't seen the site yet, i'm on my mobile phone, so will take a look at it later.

[Hexstream]

I don't like the slider presentation widget.

1. It keeps moving automatically. That's irritating.

2. It always seems to be sliding too fast or too slow. I don't feel in control. Do you really want to place yourself in a situation where the best you can do is guess at the best compromise and hope your setting won't be too fast for the slower readers and not too slow for the faster ones?

[PStamatiou → Hexstream]

Thanks for the feedback. I made that presentation slider thing with prototype carousel. I also feel the same way - how do I get users to have control but also realize that there are more slides? Make the arrow buttons larger? Have 1, 2, 3, 4 links?

[volida → PStamatiou]

it's not as much annoying as it is distracting

visible round buttons with numbers and slower transition between slides or change the transition effect from a slide to fade in/out

[truebosko]

My 5 second feedback: Going to your front page, it doesn't excite me, looks boring, nothing really STICKS out.

I've seen your widget in action and I think it's great, but for a new comer who is checking out your site I don't see anything exciting on the front page and it leads me away.

[mikkom]

What's your business model?

That's the most important question. If you don't want to talk about it it's okay but there is no point in discussing about a startup without knowing the business model. If we do, we are talking about something else than the startup.

[PStamatiou → mikkom]

The core of our business model is freemium. We have a set of pro features lined up that we have determined users would find value in paying for. We also have two complementary items to support it, which I cannot talk about at this time.

[mikkom → PStamatiou]

Have you done market research? The most important question will be: "How much individual blogger (in average) would pay for the premium product"

If you want to learn from other peoples experience and mistakes (which is always a good idea) good questions are "Who are my core competitors and what is their business model", "Who have done something similar in other sectors (by other sector I mean for example news reporting in other media) and what was their business model and profit margin (and why you are different or similar)" and "Who have tried the same thing and failed and why they failed"?

That's just some food for thought :-D

[globalrev]

Well nice webapplication. But a startup? Isnt that suggesting that you will make money from it?

[Stabback → globalrev]

Most web apps out there do make money, or have a plan to. Even if it is free to the user there is usually a revenue plan in place. Not many people will host a large scale web app from their pocket and not make any money from it.

[tectonic]

Hey pstam!

[PStamatiou → tectonic]

hey andrew!

[pg → PStamatiou]

It seems a shame to me that a couple guys saying hi to one another got downvoted into oblivion. I've noticed a lot of downvoters piling on lately. I'm going to see if I can tweak voting to prevent this.

[PieSquared → pg]

Err... What manner of tweaking would solve that problem? Just curious, since to me it seems to be more of a community issue.

[pg → PieSquared]

One thing I tried (released yesterday) is more aggressive graying out of negative comments, in the hope that people wouldn't be so prone to downvote something they could no longer read. I also increased the threshold for downarrows to appear. Neither of those helped in this case, though.

So for now it's back to the drawing board-- or rather, vi. I'll write some code to analyze voting patterns and see if there is some way sw could distinguish mean downvoting from e.g. the downvoting of trolls and spammers.

[Xichekolas → pg]

Have you thought about just putting a floor on downvoting?

It seems anything that truly merits a -10 is firmly in 'getting killed by an editor' territory, with possible account deletion, and, if there were a floor, anything that doesn't deserve a -10 would not get modded into oblivion for no reason.

Maybe you don't want to change the modding system that much, but I was just wondering if you had any thoughts on the idea?