Hey Zack,
Firstly let me say that I love the idea. I can see it being very valuable. I am working on an idea myself, and I can definitely see us using this service once we are ready - who knows when that will be. I am sure you know how that process goes.
Secondly, I must also commend you for charging from the get-go. The price point seems good, what I was looking for though was a 'pricing page' that tells me what I am getting for my $20/mo and other plan options. I would also like to see other options, say only 3 or 5 keywords with a more limited account for $10/mo. Couple that with a 15-day free trial (7-days I think is too short) and you reduce the risk significantly for the customer. Imagine I am able to add a few new clients in the first 15 days...that's significant value-add.
Thirdly, I am sure you guys have thought about this already but I can see other things like 'recommended keywords' based on 'successful keywords' that the user has chosen. Those can be derived by finding a 'high correlation' between those keywords and other successful keywords chosen by other users for example.
Fourth, I am not too perturbed by your site design. You can always do a re-design, I would focus more on adding features to the $20 account, because it seems a little feature light at the moment.
That's all I can think of right now. Good job. I would love if when I am ready to use it (maybe a few months from now) I could get the 7-day free trial...or who knows maybe by then you have implemented a 15-day free trial on all accounts :)
One last thing...did you find the cofounder you were looking for and did you go it alone on this project? Would love a similar post to your hiphopgoblin post :)
> Yeah, I agree. I'll consider changing it depending on how things go with this first round. The important thing is to demonstrate the value up-front.
> Actually, what I am planning on doing is mining the data from tweets of users who have followed-back. Then, looking for common bigrams...
> I guess I could make the "keyword suggest" account $30/month and a "light" account $15/month. I don't want to add features just for the sake of adding features, but I do agree that there should be multiple account options - c.f. the study of The Economist alluded to by Dan Ariely in _Predictably Irrational_
> Yes, that's possible but if not just email me: zackster@gmail.cøm
> Found a couple great candidates but geography seemed to be a problem for everyone. I am actually moving to NYC now and would be open to finding a cofounder there, with whom I could partner up on projects.
Some feedback:
1. It is not clear to me what happens after updating the keyword list. Would the program then go find people and follow them based on those keywords?
2. "People you have followed (controlpanel.php?p=following)" is empty. Shouldn't this fill up instantaneously?
The program then goes and finds people and follows them based on those keywords, yes. It does so periodically with a cron job so no, it would not fill up instantaneously.
Here is one problem: After I authenticated my twitter account, I got the following error message:
"""
You registered the Twitter screen name foobar but authenticated the Twitter screen name fooBar.
"""
I'm sure you know you should convert strings to lowercase before comparing them! :)
Yeah, it means the guy is smart and is borrowing strength from what he knows works. 37 Signals published their conversion rates from the highrise landing page for a reason. Goal at this stage is to see if people will sign up for the concept. Once he proves that out (i.e. customer development), I'm sure he'll invest in some of his own graphic identity, logo selection, color schemes, etc.
You got it. I'm reading steve blank's book (slowly...it's tough) and trying to formulate my own unique way of applying it to web applications. This reminds me: I'm gonna go spend an hour reading.
I noticed your company's site has a header too. It's just not colored black. There is not much difference between your site and CustomerFind in that sense.
In fact, your pricing page(http://agilezen.com/pricing) is clearly inspired by basecamp. Absolutely nothing wrong with it(I don't think it is in ripoff category). But for someone to have such stringent standards when evaluating others, it's odd.
Sure, our pricing page is inspired by Basecamp... and practically every other SaaS offering out there. As I said in another comment, everyone (including myself) takes inspiration from other designs, but there's a difference between taking inspiration and taking a stylesheet.
I'm not accusing the OP of anything. I was just pointing out that I took one look at the website and immediately recognized it as heavily inspired by Basecamp's design. That's all.
The colors and font of the header are identical, including the use of a single green link. The fonts used in the headers don't match the logo or the buttons, and have altered kerning just like on Basecamp's site.
I honestly couldn't give a shit either way. The OP asked for feedback, and I figured it was better he heard it from me than from 37signals' lawyers.
The OP asked for feedback, and I figured it was better he heard it from me than from 37signals' lawyers.
It doesn't look like 37 signals has trademarked that particular color scheme or design, and I don't see any evidence that they own or have an exclusive license to the font in question; so there really seems to be no legal concern here at all.
I have to agree, it's a bit overly similar (mostly because of the top bar). However, I trust that Zack will be going back to that design and updating it over the next few days. A design is a pretty easy thing to change, and I don't see anything morally wrong with using someone else's design as a starting point.
I'm sure he used their design as a template to get something somewhat presentable for the time being and that once he has some more time and traction, he'll give the design a bit more attention. Let's relax a bit and stop making this out to be some corporate scandal.
I wasn't saying it's a corporate scandal or that the creator was a bad person. The problem is that 37signals didn't offer their design as a template for re-use.
Everyone uses other designs as inspiration (myself included), I'm just saying you should put some distance between yourself and the original inspiration before showing it to others.
I just see a teeeny-bit of inspiration. Remove the top black bar and it will be hard to tell that he was even inspired by basecamp. Sorry but you are way off on your judgement for this one. Of course, IMO.
2. WHEN YOU GET TO "STEP 3", WHICH ASKS YOU FOR PAYMENT, POST IN THE THREAD WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS
My new website is CustomerFind.com.
Remember my web app HipHopGoblin.com? Well, about a month ago, I wrote up a blog post detailing what I had learned and posted it up on HN [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824905]. In part, I explained how I had used Twitter to promote the website: I scanned for artists mentioning certain keywords, and then auto-followed them. This got me a lot of exposure, and a lot of gratitude from people who were glad to find the site.
Then I got contacted by the CEO of a web site, asking for me to sell him my scripts. "Sure," I said. "I can package them nicely and include the MySQL db-creating scripts."
"No, no," he refused. "I want a hosted solution." And thus was borne CustomerFind.com.
After a month or so of work, this is iteration #2 in my startup, this time having a paying customer from day 1. And I'm offering a 7-day free trial for all HN readers. Just reply to this post with your email address and I'll hook you up.
All feedback and criticism welcome, as well as suggestions for future directions of the product. I'm thinking of evolving it into a CRM tool, so you can communicate with the people who have followed you back (and are clearly interested in your product). But I don't want to write it unless I know that many will pay me for it ;)
Again, all comments welcome. Thanks for taking a look.
Good question. In my experience, no. There are many other apps that do the same thing, and this one is especially geared towards finding high-quality keywords. In fact, we only follow 25/day, so that we can slowly figure out which keywords work and which ones don't. The ultimate goal is to follow keywords that convert at 20%+, which is easily doable.
That being said, Twitter reserves the right to do whatever they want at any time. But this is non-aggressive, and we're discouraging "spammy" behavior.
thanks. Is it one twitter account per customerfind account? Also I would love to be able to avoid following certain twitter accounts. Do you think there is a possibility you could add a field to input twitter accounts we don't want to follow? It would be useful to have some fields to follow only twitter accounts tagged with certain locations too, for eg, London, Berkshire, Brighton etc.
Secondly, I must also commend you for charging from the get-go. The price point seems good, what I was looking for though was a 'pricing page' that tells me what I am getting for my $20/mo and other plan options. I would also like to see other options, say only 3 or 5 keywords with a more limited account for $10/mo. Couple that with a 15-day free trial (7-days I think is too short) and you reduce the risk significantly for the customer. Imagine I am able to add a few new clients in the first 15 days...that's significant value-add.
Thirdly, I am sure you guys have thought about this already but I can see other things like 'recommended keywords' based on 'successful keywords' that the user has chosen. Those can be derived by finding a 'high correlation' between those keywords and other successful keywords chosen by other users for example.
Fourth, I am not too perturbed by your site design. You can always do a re-design, I would focus more on adding features to the $20 account, because it seems a little feature light at the moment.
That's all I can think of right now. Good job. I would love if when I am ready to use it (maybe a few months from now) I could get the 7-day free trial...or who knows maybe by then you have implemented a 15-day free trial on all accounts :)
One last thing...did you find the cofounder you were looking for and did you go it alone on this project? Would love a similar post to your hiphopgoblin post :)