Ask HN: advice for my startup

[darwinw]

Hi everybody,

my name is Darwin and I'm new to this community. Very excited to have found HN and have been following all the threads for quite a while before thinking of asking your advise.

I have a one year old baby and I'm concerned because he doesn't walk or talk yet, he's not social and not very active, the big guys like techcrunchie, lifehackerz or scobelicious don't want to play with him. we feed him regularly and he seems like growing day by day, but i guess we are concerned that he's not growing fast enough. And Oh, the baby's name is TripnTale.com

any tips on SEO, usability or marketing I can do to drive the awareness?

[pedalpete]

First of all, I love the way you posed the question. Mine will be 1 year old soon, and i've got some of the issues you've got too.

First off, you are in a very crowded space as far as I can tell. I've got a very tiny bit of experience with PlanetEye, so I know a bit about the space that I think you are going for.... but that is the problem. What are you going for? what are you REALLY trying to do? What is the differentiator. There are some really good trip planning/sharing sites out there, why should I use tripntale.

When I first hit your homepage I'm confronted with a big image and a sign-up, aka fail. Below the fold you have images that link to trips. I'd move those above the fold and make sure they are seen, and make them look more like links. Just a picture isn't good. Tell me where it is, maybe when the trip was, what user added it. That HAS to be above the fold.

Move the 'sign-up' stuff to a sign-up page. One button says 'click here to sign-up' that way you can give people more info, etc. Move your searchbox up. top of the page would make sense, and the login stuff can probably go somewhere else.

Playing around for a bit, i just wasn't dragged into the experience. I can look at photo's but maybe there just isn't enough content or something. Not quite sure, but I'd say you have some product/UI issues to deal with first.

I don't think you'll get much major blog love until you get your usability figured out, and focus on the users first experience.

On another note, TC is not a marketing plan, and I can speak from experience. As great as it is to have a positive review from TC, it doesn't make your company, but it is a great way to get feedback.

[darwinw → pedalpete]

Hey PedalPete, wow, I really appreciate the effort you're putting in writing the review, I agree with you, I'm not happy with the home page and honestly out of ideas, but what you suggested makes perfect sense.

OKay, i need to go back to the drawing board for the experience. thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it. I'll check out Planeteye now

[blizkreeg → pedalpete]

You say, "When I first hit your homepage I'm confronted with a big image and a sign-up, aka fail".

I'm curious to know why a sign up on the main page is a bad, bad idea. I am developing something myself and figured that having a quick sign up form on the main page would ease the sign up process instead of click on "Sign Up", go to another page, and then fill in the form. On the main page, if you like the site, it's a quick decision to just sign up then n there. My site requires a user to sign up before he/she can interact with other users (privacy concerns etc). So it's more important to me that the sign up is an easy process.

Yes/No? What am I missing?

[zepolen → blizkreeg]

A internet user's attention span is tiny.

You are wasting the precious few seconds of first impression you get asking them to sign up for something they don't even know if they will like yet.

Bring them straight into the flow of your site, and let them signup only when they want to, not when you want to.

You can whet their appetite by showing other people interacting, no need for them to interact themselves.

Take YC for example, I bet there are hundreds of people who just lurk and read submissions/comments, but if they really wanted to reply to one of them, then they sign up.

[pedalpete → zepolen]

The key thing that Zepolen points out that I think lots of people miss is your site/business/etc is about what 'they want', not what 'you want'.

Your business is about your customers. Customers don't want to sign-up, they want to explore or share travel (or whatever your site does).

I think i'm in one of the few markets where vistors are telling me they want a way to sign-up and get notifications, but that is after i've given them what they want, now they want more.

[darwinw → zepolen]

Very good feedback, thank you, and point taken.

[darwinw → blizkreeg]

I only recently added the sign up box, and it's because I saw that Facebook was doing it. And I can say that for sites like mine which is not very popular, people need to understand what it is first before they're interested to sign up. And I can see the difference in sign up rate before and after I put the sign up on home page

[il]

There's a lot of room for improvement in your site's SEO. For example, the urls- instead of having URLs like http://www.tripntale.com/trip/4820, get some text in your URL, even something like http://www.tripntale.com/trip/mai-chau-vietnam/4820 would be better. Also, get some text on your pages! How can you rank in search without any text? If you do SEO If you have any more detailed questions, feel free to contact me at the email in my profile.

[sgrove → il]

Hey il, I had the same thought upon seeing the URL. Are you experienced with smoothing out SEO? Would be great if you could help Darwin out a bit more here so others can view your answer in posterity! http://www.chuwe.com/questions/my-search-engine-ranking-is-t...

[sgrove]

Hey Darwin!

Send me an email (sean at chuwe dot com). We're a free advice site for small business and startups, and we'd like to talk for a small project we have going!