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Ask HN: Please Review FavoriteThing.Me

13 points by dshipper ↗ HN
Hey HN,

My friends (wesleyzhao, ajaymehta) and I are HN regulars and college students trying to hone our web development and entrepreneurial skills. Combined we have released 7 fully featured web apps over the past 30 days, but we haven't gotten as much traction as we have hoped.

We saw an opportunity to create a site similar to threewords.me and formspring.me and decided to give it a shot. You can see the result of about 40 hours of coding at:

http://www.favoritething.me.

As an example, my personal page is:

http://www.favoritething.me/dan

It's basically a site that allows you to tell your friends what your favorite thing is about them. We're hoping that the Valentines Day spirit attracts more visitors on launch day. We still have homework to finish for class today so....

What do you think?

31 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 78.0 ms ] thread
scrrr
This is cute but neither solves a problem of any sort, nor does it give any satisfaction to comment there, nor do most people feel the need to fish for compliments like that. (That's all just in my opinion of course.)
dshipper
We really appreciate the feedback I definitely understand where you're coming from - all issues we thought about prior to launch. But we're committed to doing as many projects as possible and seeing what works and what doesn't. At worst (we hope) it will be a learning experience.
markbao
threewords.me was 100% an experiment. I have an article about this that I'm drafting. Web developers and startup folks can more effectively learn through experiments rather than reading things. Akin to mixing the baking soda and vinegar instead of reading about it from the textbook.
wesleyzhao
We hope it's cute! We thought it would be perfect for Valentines day. Thanks to markbao we had a good starting point and were hoping it would just be something nice, cute, and possibly flirtatious! We wanted to make something fun. :)
markbao
> Combined we have released 7 fully featured web apps over the past 30 days, but we haven't gotten as much traction as we have hoped.

Been there, done that.

> We saw an opportunity to create a site similar to threewords.me

Hi!

Nice work. You definitely need to work on the design a lot. At the moment, it looks a bit gaudy. "My favorite thing about you is" hint text is good leading (I didn't think of that). You NEED for someone to be able to create their own profile immediately after they post something. Currently the user flow is: new visitor –> post comment –> "okay, what now?" –> close page. Get your viral coefficient >0 and ask them to sign up for a profile right after they submit something.

More of my signups on threewords.me were through the new visitor –> interaction –> signup viral flow (viral coefficient >0) rather than the go to homepage –> get convinced to sign up for the site –> get account flow.

Good luck on the site, and the homework :p. I'm about to get back to mine. Cheers.

wesleyzhao
The user flow is something we really thought about when making the site. We should definitely get to the drawing board and see how we can encourage more comments.

RE design. This was something that got better as we got closer to releasing but we still weren't a hundred percent sure. Very glad you mentioned it so we know what looks good to the eye and what doesn't. Hopefully changing it up while users are using it won't be too bad.

markbao
Yep, if I could name three fundamental things that made threewords.me successful, one is the "solicit sign up after engagement" flow!
dshipper
Thanks for the feedback that's so helpful especially since you're so experienced in the area :) We'll definitely look into improving the user flow that's great idea. Thanks again - I hope your homework goes well I know I probably won't touch mine for at least another hour until the traffic dies down a little.
davidw
How does it make money?
dshipper
Well we we're more looking to create a project that had some success in terms of number of users before looking to make money with it. It's all basically an experiment to see what works and what doesn't.
senko
> Combined we have released 7 fully featured web apps over the past 30 days, but we haven't gotten as much traction as we have hoped.

It seems to me like you're focusing too much on the tech part of things (building it) to the expense of "business" part (spreading the word). I'm a technical guy too and have similar problem with my projects - I enjoy building them, but I'm poor at actually reaching the potential users.

So my advice (which I'm trying to follow myself, too :) is for the next 30 days, don't build any more projects, instead focus on marketing the ones you've already built.

dshipper
That's actually great advice thanks I've definitely noticed that my cycle seems to be build - release - do a little bit of marketing and then drop it for a new idea. The only problem I see is that I don't really know where to start in terms of marketing past the obvious, submit to HN, post on Facebook, Twitter, blog etc.. Do you have any suggestions?
rlmw
Minor issue - your front page has a block of text thats an image. As a result at least three kittens have died.

Had a quick look around. The idea seems nice, but I think stuff like this has to look more 'fun' in order to succeed. Its a really weird thing to describe, and I'm not great at articulating emotions about technology - but your site doesn't seem 'fun'. Perhaps this is just an aesthetic thing that you can solve quite easily though.

Another thing is that this seems like the kind of project that you could probably get a big viral bump from facebook or twitter. For example '@foo things @bar is sexy' and some kind of wall post spamming probably generates traffic. When you come to monetize, attaching your data to people's logins might be worth more money than your data alone.

ecto
Can here to say all 3 of these.

The first feeling I got from the design is that the site was kind of shady. I felt hard-pressed to put a password in the box.

The idea is really cool though. You'd need to integrate some kind of social login for it to get any traction I think.

dshipper
Thanks we're definitely going to work on that. We appreciate the feedback!
ajaymehta
I totally get what you mean. Not being web designers, it's pretty hard for us to feel out what works and what doesn't -- we kind of just subscribe to the trial-and-error method.

If you think of anything we can do to make it look more "fun" we're completely open!

Udo
The design could use a little work, but I think it's far within the acceptable quality range. You said you didn't get much traction with this idea and having visited the site, I can at least tell you why it didn't work for me:

The idea of contacting my friends to leave feedback on why they think I'm awesome made me deeply uncomfortable. If it was the other way around, and you could post compliments to your friends, it might be different - but then you'd have to figure out how to solve the problem of spam control. To be fair, I'm not all that enchanted by the Three Words concept either. Sorry man, I wish I had more constructive things to say about this idea.

rgbrgb
I'd get your design above "the acceptable quality range." To your users, the design is the product.
ajaymehta
Totally agree -- we're learning and under no pretenses about being skilled at design.

We'd love some concrete ideas or general suggestions about the design, if you have any off the top of your head?

Udo
I'm totally the wrong person to ask (that doesn't prevent me from bitching about it though), however, I would consider a simplification of the color scheme. Maybe choose a prime color and stick with it. Don't change too much, I believe the foundation is solid.
kawohi
Consider learning Web Standards and HTML, your HTML is bad. Place all that JavaScript ether in a different .js file or bottom of the page.
wesleyzhao
What are some things about our HTML specifically? Thanks for the comment - since I am relatively new to web development I need to soak up all the standards I can. I probably have done several things wrong in terms of standards and good practice so let me know what else I can fix!
autalpha
My dear friend, since it is Valentine's Day, I say this with a lot of "heart" and love for you and your partner/friend:

I am not a security expert but security is a very important issue. I am not sure what framework you're using (most likely no framework), but being anonymous AND able to post as ANYONE is a serious issue (well, your user list only goes up to about 6 people--0 being unknown and 1-5 are somewhat real users; user # 4 user is deleted perhaps). One thing you can do is to check if the user posting is actually authenticated and really who s/he claims to be.

Your infrastructure is too fragile and amateurish. Obviously, haters are gonna hate, but believe me when I say, this hurts me more than it hurts you. Take (all) your apps down and then do a security audit on all of them before you hurt yourself.

Happy Valentine's Day.

wesleyzhao
Thanks for pointing out the security flaw! As of now, I believe it has been patched up. No user should be able to post as anyone else but themselves at this point (or anonymous).

If this is not true, someone feel free to drop be an embarrassing "favorite thing"

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x0ner
You need to look into some serious security stuff on the site. You have directory listings, so I can see all your php files and start fuzzing them. I managed to get some mysql error to dump on input which then showed a little idea of how your were processing. There is no input validation and scripts process and render (your dan page is broke) causing anything else to stop functioning.

Also, I tried to register using the link that says register and it goes to a 404 that tells me to stop hacking the site (made me laugh only because the lack of input validation), so you may want to change that to something a little more friendly.

You may want to consider the following: - Lock down your dirs - Sanitize input and strip out all tags - Setup an approval queue for anonymous user postings.

dshipper
Thanks I noticed this :) not sure why I didn't put more time into security I have to keep deleting stuff from the database to keep my page from breaking. Thanks again for the tips
x0ner
Do a quick tag replacer or stripper from your input validation. The script stuff is the biggest issue, but as you can see from the ORLY owl, HTML is still making it through too.