Ask HN: Review my first MVP
Premise: Write funny stories with random strangers... one sentence at a time.
My Design Goals:
1. Be a true MVP - test the idea without wasting any time
2. Go from idea conception to deployment in 1 day (I nearly achieved that)
3. Try to develop something with some viral marketing potential
4. All content to be user generated
5. Moderation sessions should be fun
6. Try out heroku.com to see if it would be a good fit for another product
7. Do something silly and fun (I come from the enterprise software world)
You can follow my thinking through the process at http://twitter.com/finishstart
All feedback more than welcome. Especially in the areas of:
1. Conversion - I consider a conversion to be someone who adds some well thought out content and who submits their email address to get a copy of the story sent to them on completion
2. Viral Marketing approaches
Cheers
13 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 42.3 ms ] threadI think you can make the UI a lot tighter. Imagine just a WHITE screen with THE story...constantly refreshing. Along with an inputbox at the top to add your contribute to it. Perhaps integrate with twitter.
One story is a bit hard for lots of people to concurrently work on unfortunately. Part of my strategy is to have short stories so that I can email it to the contributors when it is completed (hopefully within a day or two). Then I'm hoping they will forward the funny story to their friends (with a link of course).
Suggestion: email users once per week/fortnight with a partial story + embedded form so they can play via email, especially if they haven't played for a while. Increase/decrease frequency of email sending depending on how they respond to playing via email.
I think I'm up against a lot of tough competition in the time killing market on the web :)
You've made a very good first version. Just get lots of people to use it to write at least one line and then publish and popularise the finished stories on social networks. You will get to see if the stories are actually any good and also might get ideas on improving the app itself.
I'm going to give it a couple more days and if I don't see much traction I'll probably let it pass away quietly.
1. You need a reason to keep people coming back - some sort of hook to keep people interested. Off the top of my head:
-private stories (restricted to a group)
-solo stories (one sentence a day for one user)
-stories limited to people with a certain birthday
-graduation class stories
-drama/english classes
-let people upvote/downvote/move sentences
-publish a blog of anything that turns out good
-allow combination of random sentences from different stories into new stories
2. The "Anything Goes" section could easily turn into porn/adult content. That can make advertising revenue difficult and make it unusable by schools, etc.
3. If you get a lot of traffic, this blows up and becomes hard to manage. A story could grow very rapidly if you're not careful. Although on the edge of "premature optimization" I would keep an eye ont his as you work.
Fun site. It will be interesting to see if you can take it from "interesting curiosity" to "something I check when I'm bored".