Ask HN: Please review. Are we making something that people want?

[hwijaya]

Hi fellow HNers,

Can you please have a look on our startup and give me your feedback?

Bear in mind that it's still work in progress. We would like to see if we're on the right track.

Basically, "are we building something that people want?"

Here's the link: http://blindoptimists.com Invitation code: hn.sandtable

Thanks in advance.

[frossie]

Well okay, you know what? I liked this more than I expected.

I liked the look (I am sucker for bright colours). I liked the fact that I could try without signing up. I liked the fact that it is simple. I liked the popup offer of a super-brief tutorial.

So the idea is that you can sms/twitter/email your entries to this thing? If so sure, it could be useful. Personally I use neither twitter nor facebook (yes yes I know, who let Miss Daisy in here) so I would be interested in direct web entry, email and SMS.

Basically there are two kinds of personal finance applications that I would consider. My first preference would be for something quite sophisticated like wesabe.com which ideally automatically gets your transactions from your bank and so all you need is to categorise and analyse.

But, my bank lives somewhere between the dark and middle ages, and I can not automatically export to wesabe. While they do try their best to allow manual import, I find that is too much hassle especially for a task I would be avoiding anyway. So, the next best thing is something that makes manual entry as-you-go super simple, and I think you have done a good job at that. I would consider your site, even more if there was a syncing iphone app client for browsing the results and inputting data yet another way.

Little nitpicks - I did see "please wait" more than I would normally like to, and the calendar popup does not share the look and feel of the rest of the design.

[hwijaya → frossie]

Wow. Thanks a lot for your quick reply.

Yes, we would like to decentralize the whole process of inputting transactions from web.

Well, we build this to solve our own problems, and from years of experience, we know we hate having to sit in front of computer everytime we come back home just to input transactions.

We have started working on Twitter and email. Sms is still on plan since we're not sure if people would like to spend 25c to input their transactions.

Regarding your banks. I have to agree 100% with you. Both my cofounders live in Indonesia. We hardly have proper internet banking there, let along importing transactions.

iPhone, Blackberry, Android and Pre is definitely on our plan. There are a lot we would love to do. Have been trying hard to get focus on finishing one by one.

Again, really thanks for your reply. Appreciate it.

[frossie → hwijaya]

Some people are on texting plans so they don't pay for SMS. Oh and thinking about this some more, a really good input method would be voice-to-text services such as jott. Frankly, I can't imagine you can go too wrong having a lot of variety in input methods. From looking at sites that have done this right (eg. toodledo - check out the input methods they support, their syntax has some similarities to yours), the secret seems to be to have a robust mature API into your system, and then people will be motivated to provide the gateways with their favourite applications even if you don't.

Feel free to ping me when you have more to test-drive, my e-mail address is in my profile.

[hwijaya → frossie]

Thanks for a lot of your suggestions. That jott service is definitely very interesting. I'll let you know again when we have new releases.

[weaksauce]

Overall it is a good looking and fairly slick first pass at this. It would seem that you are on the right track for a simple account management system.

That being said criticism is the best way to make a product better so here are things that I would change:

1. Do not force the user to enter a dollar sign every transaction. If I want to say "10 sandwich" assume that because there is only one number that is the dollar amount. It does not seem like much but it saves two keystrokes for every entry. It's the little victories that make a user feel good about using the service.

2. Make the please wait windows go away. It is very jarring. That task should be handled in the background and updated via some Javascript.

3. Get rid of the flash and use a Javascript library for the graphs. Unless you are offering video there should be no need for flash.

[hwijaya → weaksauce]

Thanks. Yes, we're looking into making no 1 and 2 happen asap.

We've look at few JS libraries, but, they're not as good looking as Flash one. What is the major drawback of Flash you think? Isn't most people's machine got Flash installed these days considering YouTube etc? Thanks

[weaksauce → hwijaya]

It's pretty easy to do number 1. use a regex ([0-9]*) and check if there is more than one group of matched values. If there is more than one group then you can either error it out or do some more sophisticated checking(i.e. 100 meal at 10:50pm, two numbers but easy to discern what the intent was) number two is a bit more difficult but still fairly easy.

[oscardelben]

I really like the idea, what I don't like about other money management systems is that they connect with your bank account, but if you live outside the united states you can't use them.

[ErrantX]

I like it very neat and simple.

One comment: please do expand the currencies you allow :) I liked the idea but wouldnt use it because Im in the UK

(and yes I know I could use $ and mean £ but it doesnt feel as slick :))

[hwijaya → ErrantX]

So, you're saying, you prefer to be able to input using the currency that you set? Or, just for display?

Example, you can input "Books from Amazon UK for £10.95"? Or, simply just for display?

Thanks

[ErrantX → hwijaya]

Well either really - certainly display :) Input would be nice but I suppose not essential.

[vorador]

The dialog boxes could be better, and for some unknown reason, the income/expense charts always overlaps them (I'm using ff3.07 on linux).

[hwijaya → vorador]

Okay. We'll make sure to iron out that bug. We'll try to reproduce it based on your information. Thanks!