Hey HN,
I've been working on a little side project and could really use your feedback.
So, I've always been fascinated by those stories of successful startups doing crazy things in their early days - you know, like Airbnb founders personally photographing listings or DoorDash founders delivering food themselves.
I started collecting these stories, and before I knew it, I had a pretty big list. So I thought, "Why not turn this into a website?" And that's how https://dothingsthatdontscale.org was born.
It's super basic right now - just a simple directory with about 70 examples. But I'm wondering if this could be useful for other founders or startup enthusiasts.
I'd love to hear your thoughts:
> Is this something you'd find helpful? Why or why not?
> What would make this more useful for you?
> Is it easy to use? (I'm not good at design)
> Am I missing any awesome stories that should be included?
I'm not trying to monetize this or anything - just want to create something helpful for the community. Any feedback, criticism, or ideas would be hugely appreciated!
Thanks in advance, you awesome people!
And since you're asking, here's a few things that come to mind regarding the design:
- Stick to one font family. There seems no need to semantically distinguish different parts of the text; the use of font size and decoration already take care of that. I would keep the Bricolage Grotesque and ditch the monospace font.
- It should be interesting to read the stories on the main page, but in the current setting, three columns (on 1920x1080) feels to crowded. Two columns seems to be okay for that screen size, but perhaps three columns work as well if the padding is a bit different (see next point).
- Try fiddling around with the left and right padding in the quotation blocks, as well as text justification. On smaller screens, there's about three to four words on each line, and lots of empty space.
- The ten "things to do" are identically styled as the call to action buttons ("Share your story" in the menu bar, "Start doing things that don't scale"), but there's no action involved. I think the quotation block style would be better: blue background, yellow title (e.g. "Ask for help and referrals"), white text (e.g. "Leverage your network for initial users and incentivize them to refer others to rapidly expand your user base."). The user can easily distinguish the important stuff (title) from the accompanying explanation, and it doesn't look clickable.
And some other nits:
- A few "Source" links are broken.
- Privacy Policy gives a 404.
- On the /startups page, I already forgot what the ten recommendations were. Perhaps add ten filters that automatically select the stories that involve the particular recommendation.
- Does the epicness scale go from 1 (low) to 10 (high) (or 5 it seems?)