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Ask HN: Evaluate my startup, PoundWire

2 points by criddar ↗ HN
I'd appreciate any constructive feedback from the community. I set out to solve a real problem with noisy social news feeds. Essentially by ensuring that every post would include at least one hashtag, it would create both a new way to follow (by hashtag) and a new way to silence social connections (also by hashtag) within the same feed.

And even though I know I'm caught in the usual chicken and egg conundrum (need users to get users), the deeper issue is that new visitors don't even sign up to take it for a test spin.

So, in order to showcase the platform, I built a self-teaching/self-tagging aggregating service that pulls articles from top blogs to kind of seed the site. Still no takers.

So I ask, am I solving a problem that many blog about, but that doesn't really exist? Should I turn off the aggregator, and see what kind of community (if any) arises? Is there a better approach? Or is the only solution to the problem one that lives as an add-on to Twitter's established community?

9 comments

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brennanbortz
Can you post the url for ease of access? I'm assuming it's just poundwire.com, but you should probably include it in your post.
badkins
I just read your post here, and your homepage and I still have no idea what this is supposed to do.
brennanbortz
I thought I may have been the only one and assumed I just couldn't figure it out because I've been so occupied with my own startup, hah. But some word of advice: you need to have a more clear explanation of what your product is. I found myself searching for an About page on your site after I still couldn't figure out what it is you were trying to do. Adding one could help people understand what it is that your application does. An idea for what you could put on the About page would be picture examples with arrows guiding the user down through the process of use with minimal wordage. Or maybe you could have a question mark in that section at the top of your website where it gives the couple of instructions. Upon a user clicking that question mark symbol, a popup could come up and offer the user said picture process flow. It's very possible that no one is registering on your site due to lack of instructions and understanding. So I encourage you to take this step.
criddar
Sound advice, thanks. It's hard to look at it from the perspective of a new visitor when you've been immersed in the details for months.

If it comes down to just having clearer instructions and a more actionable description, I'll be pretty happy.

criddar
Ok, advice taken. Thanks a ton! Your advice has been valuable.
freddy
Agreed just not clear what it is.
criddar
freddy, I added instructions an hour before your comment. So are the instructions unclear? Or had you looked before they were published?