HN Explorer

Review My App: Hacker / Entrepreneur Salon

8 points by jaytee_clone ↗ HN
Disclaimer: There's no app yet, because I don't want to start coding before I get a sense of what people want.

So I have been looking into a few social networks for entrepreneurs, and they all kinda suck. I think the key is to make it super niched, i.e. hackers / internet entrepreneurs.

What I really want is a place for internet entrepreneurs to brainstorm, get feedback from each other, survey, basically things that is already happening on HN that is not "news"

Yet, hacker news is build more as a news site so some of the other usage cases cannot be fully exploited. Non-news discussions tend to get drown out in the sea of regular news (though the addition of Ask HN section has made things better).

I want to do a survey to see what features will be good. - Video chat brainstorming - Site / App feedbacks - Organizing local meetup - Ardvark-like context matching of profiles to recommend relevant discussions - Weekly group Q&A, Contest - Plain old forum

And of course the site will following a set of rules of conduct such as constructive feedback, limited self-promotion, etc. It will probably have some sort of rating / karma system.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

7 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 28.2 ms ] thread
nanexcool
Why not do an MVP and then ask for input? That's the usual advice given here on HN.
jaytee_clone
I agree. Hence this process of figuring out MVP. Why guess what the MVP is when I can ask?
bdickason
The piece I feel would be useful is a simple link that is auto-generated from every hacker news discussion. You could hit it by going to the site from a comment link, for example: http://blah.salon/ and it would determine based on your referral URL what post you're talking about, then let people do some sort of collaboration around it.

Think of the "AMA" thread posted by the Angel investor yesterday (i think his name was Josh).

It would be cool if you could place a simple link there which would take you to a page full of discussion points, videos, etc that people put together. Or maybe just collaborate in a different fashion than text comments?

Anyway just an idea.

jaytee_clone
I like this idea a lot! I'm surprised that no one has done it.

Do you code?

bdickason
I dabble but I'm currently working on two different full-time projects, so no time for anything new :)

Forgot to add - I think duggmirror had javascript in place to automatically parse the incoming referrer URL and route to the proper link on the site. It might be worth trying to digg up some of their old code if it still exists.

jaytee_clone
Two full-time projects?! That's dedicated. Don't burn yourself out!

Thanks. I will check out duggmirror's code.

bdickason
Good luck with this jaytee, let me know how it goes!