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Feedback on my alpha site - www.techscratch.com

8 points by rralian ↗ HN
Hey all, I've launched the alpha version of www.techscratch.com and would appreciate your feedback. It's a task-trading site for techies. Basically you help people with what you're good at and you get help with what you're not good at, and everyone saves time. Different than stackoverflow in that TechScratch is task-oriented, rather than QA oriented.

I'd love feedback on the trading mechanics, whether the language is confusing, or if the concept is clear... any missing features you can think of. Anything I've done that you think is bone-headed. :-)

Thanks, really appreciate your time and feedback.

Sincerely,

Bob Ralian

7 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 31.3 ms ] thread
rabidonrails
I assume you have some idea about how you'll categorize the different focuses of the "work", right?
rralian
You attribute tags to a task, php, javascript, design, bizplan, etc. Is that what you mean by different focuses?
danvoell
So basically it's like Stack Overflow except people will actually do your exact project? I like it.
rralian
It's more about deliverable tasks than about projects. So, getting your whole web app built... Probably not the place for that. But certainly the place to get your cache.manifest file fixed. As long as you can break your stuff out into smallish tasks, that's what we're focusing on.
sktrdie
So I'm suppose to do work for people and get points in exchange? Why not money in exchange?

Stackoverflow works because it's about sharing knowledge, not actually doing work for other people.

rralian
The idea is that you're exchanging your expertise with each other. Say John is awesome at javascript but sucks at photoshop. Susan is awesome at photoshop but sucks at css. Rich is awesome at css but sucks at javascript. If they trade their tasks around and everyone focuses on what they're good at, they all wind up saving a ton of time. So the payoff is that you'll get help when you need it.

The points facilitate that exchange with a minimum of fuss. There are already a number of sites that allow you to post tasks/projects for money; elance, odesk, freelancer.com. They have some good points and some bad points. The money exchange generates a taxable event and also frankly brings in many lower-quality workers. They also tend to require a lot of hoops to keep your interaction through the site itself so they can take a percentage of the payment.

So this is just another approach with its own set of pros and cons.