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Show HN: a tool for collaborative project growth

4 points by alexwestholm ↗ HN
Hi HN! I'd love for you guys to take a look at my lean-style project growth tool, Feature Pop! It's is a side-project I've been developing over the last month and a half (in between working on my primary startup project, trying to find a job at a law firm, and surfing a lot). It aims to help users vocalize their desires about the direction an application takes, so that you can grow your product based on what's actually popular with your users rather than guesses at what they might want. It was the result of wondering how I can easily validate my assumptions about where to take my main project after we release it, as well as experience at another startup watching overly vocal users steer the product in a direction that's probably not where it should have gone.

It basically operates as follows: a single page is given to users, where they can order preferences in sets of 10, which are then merged into an overall ordering. Project owners have a page that shows them this popularity based ordering and some data about its accuracy. There are a lot of features I plan to build into it as it matures, but I thought I'd get meta about it and ask you guys to check out the FP page for FP itself to suggest the right direct: http://www.featurepop.com/feature_pop. I've also posted an FP page for Hacker News, just so you guys can play around with something familiar (I'm not sure I agree with all the feature suggestions I've posted, but that's the whole point - the crap filters to the bottom): http://www.featurepop.com/hacker_news

If you like it, tell me. If you don't like it, tell me why. I'd love to hear some insight about the UI - if you view the (poorly recorded) screencast at http://www.featurepop.com, you'll see that I've already tried to improve it, but visual design is not one of my strongsuits. Also, do you guys think there might be a way to monetize this at some point? I'm a flat broke recent grad, so I can't really afford to keep it running if it gets popular (I'm on the free plan at Heroku right now).

Thanks guys/gals!

15 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 46.9 ms ] thread
ColinWright
Going meta ...

There's a penalty on HN for items that don't have a link. You would be better served to write up your text on a web page and submit a link to it. Work hard on getting the submission title text right, and submit when the site is busy, but not swamped.

Your "landing page" can then have the links in it, and you can include screenshots as to why it's useful and/or interesting. In short, sell it, otherwise most likely no one here will notice.

alexwestholm
Thanks for the tips! I probably could have picked a better day to release this - RIP Dennis Ritchie! I'll probably follow your suggestions at some point next week.
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smoyer
It's an interesting idea, but when I attempt to add a feature I get an error message - "Validation failed: Time estimate is invalid".
alexwestholm
Can you fill me in on where this happened and what your input was? I'm not able to replicate your problem. The input for the number of days/months/years should be numeric, which I should probably not there somehow. Is that your problem?
alexwestholm
Ah, the reason I couldn't reproduce was that I was logged in. Pushing a fix momentarily. Thanks for finding that!
smoyer
That field wasn't even in the form I was given ... I'm not sure the input values would matter.
alexwestholm
Yeah, it's an option given to project owners if signed in. The fix has been pushed.
smoyer
Short name: "Instructions waste space" Description: "Replace the instructions after my first visit (or maybe first edit) with a list of the "crowds" most popular features and how my feature selections compare to the group."

I also just got a captcha with an umlaut ... not very convenient on my keyboard.

smoyer
Same error when trying to save ... perhaps I need to clear my cache if the fix has been pushed?
alexwestholm
That's a phenomenal idea! Thanks!

And re: your post below, yeah, try the cache - I just added a feauture called "Testing validations" with no problem.

smoyer
Yep ... the fix appears to work with a cache refresh. I would also suggest an "X" button (in addition to the up and down arrows) so I can just drop the features I don't care about and see features in positions 11 and below immediately.
hagyma
seems to be a lot more fun, than traditional voting...

i see this evolve into a great tool, but i'd consider re-branding it to fit the non-geek audience. :)

congrats!