Ask HN: Can I help you be more awesome today? (No strings.)

In modeling customer acquisition, the metaphor of a funnel is often.

I think you mean "often used". :-)

I was a little taken aback by the gold/platinum/silver categories of customers in services; there was no explanation of why these three are given. (In my case, categorization of users ... hmm, actually it does pertain, now that I think about it.)

- Interface is quite busy. There is no clear call to action so I have to wade through the elements to see what I'm suppose to do first. (I highly recommend you play around with Wufoo's onboarding process to get an idea of a clearly defined path.)

- I like how you broke up the steps to the left, but it's not clear they are steps until I click NEXT. Conventionally, links to the left of a page are used for navigation. Placing numbers to the left and bring more attention to the current step to clarify that there is a flow here.

- I really appreciate the supporting material. (Video, articles...) The video would probably be very beneficial to introduce the step to the user and what they will do. Find a way to shorten the video to a 30 second overview and then offer a longer 3 minute version if the user is interested in hearing more. The 30 second clip might start when the screen first loads. (The auto load should probably be limited to new users only... saved users will have already seen this and will annoy them after some repetition.)

- Find a lecture hall with carpeted walls and re-record those videos (or invest in a clip mic). The echo is horrible in the video.... (still, major points for having the video in the first place).

- When you're segmenting customers, make the left area your "workspace" and the right area your committed data. Allow the suggested segments to be expanded. The first time the user does this in each step, give them tooltip explanations of each field and what it means in the big picture. Just a few lines are sufficient.

- A progress bar would probably help for long processes like this. I'm now noticing that the left side expands as additional steps are covered. So maybe the numbering scheme above might not work. But some combination between numbers actions and a progress bar should indicate to the user how far along the process they are. I currently feel like I'm falling down a rabbit hole so far...

- I should be able to reorder each (Customer Acquisition) Stage ever after they're added. Having to remove them after realizing it needs to be entered in order is forcing the user to do work twice.

This process is drawing out. Had you not specifically asked me to look through it, I probably would've given up a step or so back. I'm not sure what your on-boarding process is like, but the user should be prepared to invest 30-60 minutes if that's what it will take. (And PLEASE make sure you justify why it takes so long! Let the user decide if they want to make that investment with full knowledge of benefits and value they'll get.) I'm going to stop for now but I can continue on it later if you'd like. Hope these initial thoughts help a bit for now.

While playing, I would move the spell bar to the left, as that seems to be both more natural and more common. For whatever reason, having it on the right distracted me a lot more from the gameplay, I felt as though I always had to keep looking over at it and back (seeing as I hadn't memorized the hotkeys). The info about my current health (which is currently in the top left corner) is displayed under my avatar, which makes it non-essential info, so it can be moved to the right.

Take all of this feedback with a grain of salt, I'm not a UI person :)

As far as game interfaces are concerned, I need to understand the mechanics behind your game and spend more time with it than I'm willing to now. I'll spend time one evening going through it and will give a more thoughtful response over the weekend. :)

It wasn't immediately clear to me when I was leveling up - I wish there was a little more positive feedback. I also found it slightly annoying that I had to open up the inventory screen to read what the potions/spells/actions in my HUD do. I wish there were tooltips for those items.

Keep up the good work!

- Ask for a confirmation before letting a spellcaster cast a fireball on himself (mistakes).

- When casting an offensive spell, place the target cursor automatically on enemies, allowing for a faster pace. (For keyboard users like me!)

I like how lazy it is to move and attack :p At the beginning, I was searching the attack key everywhere only to find out that there's none. Maybe there're could be a way to explain that. I.e. A simple tutorial where you move, get your sword, and attack a frog or whatever ;)

I like the retro look with the modern nifty details. Good job overall!

To make our volunteer's efforts more expedient, I'll note that the url is at -> http://www.scribtex.com/ <- Click that.

I'm currently writing a book with a publish house that uses Word templates (dear god!) and it really sucks. =)

Here are a few pain points you need to solve (esp. for academics):

- All the formats: If you can offer all journal/conference formats (especially those that don't have LaTeX formats), you would be a godsend. - WYSIWYG -> LaTeX editing: Sometimes you don't want to handle all the boiler plate. - Integration with reference software.

Pain point for book houses: - Converting their carefully designed styles into LaTeX templates and back again. Can someone design up a doc template in Word or whatnot, then bring it to your site and make a LaTeX template from it?

A few questions: - How does your collaborative editing work? Can multiple people work the same file at the same time? Also, it is pretty rare that this happens in my experience - most papers are written by one person with some help from others. - In the end, without formatting or the other things mentioned above, you've got a place to store/share LaTeX docs. Given that, your pricing is a bit odd. However, with the features listed, I think it'd be a great product (at an awesome price).

Additionally, I'm not certain online music teachers would be willing to pay for such a product. Have you talked to any yet? Make some interactive mockups (Balsamiq or Keynotopia) and visit a few schools. Try to find people who are already sharing tutorials online and ask them.

Also, the idea reminds me a bit of guitarmasterclass, but that is more a repository of videos than a back-and-forth learning place.

- Nitpick: The text left of the iPhone on Windows and Ubuntu is not vertically centered on the band. I realize the headings line up horizontally, but my OCD is still itching. (Chrome 14 on both.)

- Nitpick: The active (blue) circle under the text to the right of the iPhone is just a pixel or two too low. (Again on both Ubuntu and Windows w/ Chrome 14.)

- Further Nitpick: On sliding the homepage over a few times, I feel this color band across the back of the page is causing my OCD more problems than text alignment. Maybe find another way to put a splash of color on the page. Or make it more subtle.

- I almost missed that I could slide the homepage over with the arrow, BTW.

- I see the clever active email request form built into the iPhone demo on step 2, but it'll probably get missed by the majority. Especially when there's no reason to believe that anything is active in the demo area. (Even with arrows.)

- You mention a video in Step 4 but I see no video link anywhere.... ????

- Do you track to see how many people get through to the end? Putting your "RSVP" request only at the beginning and end (and hidden in step 2), you risk missing conversions in the intermediate steps. I'd find a way to ask for that RSVP on every screen.

Overall, the layout and walkthrough is nice and give users something to look at if they're really interested. Nice work and easy on the eyes. I'm not an iPhone guy so I can't help you there. Dropped a tweet for you because of the decent execution here!

- Your value add is probably not the elegant interface you're showing us. Sure, eye-candy is great, but the features you outline below talk about "Anywhere Monitoring" and "Multi-Server Listening Support", etc. Maybe an image of a guy staring at his phone (anywhere) with lines going from his phone to your logo to his servers. Give people an "at-a-glance" of how your product works.

- I'd draw more attention to your "Call to action". It let's me know immediately what you want me to do. Should I view the demo? Should I give you my cash? Maybe you want me to look at features? (You probably want my cash above all else. Why not show it?)

- (This is super nit-picky, but...) Your copy reads in blocks. (Imagine Ben Stein doing a voice over for your website.) There's no visual rhythm on the page. Spend a few hours looking at other sales pages (Here's a good spot: http://startupli.st/startups) and look for patterns (ignoring, of course, all the cookie-cutter landing pages).

-- The important parts of description text LEAP off the page at you.

-- Very focused call-to-action.

-- Strong images which relate their message.

+ This is a great start! You have the important parts of the page down. Now you just have to tweak it. (Even the best do this: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3007-37signalscom-homepage-ev...)

I really enjoy the site, however. If I could add one feature, it would probably be a short landing page that I could edit to maybe include a short description and maybe a link to a blog/resume.

That said, I don't personally find that these services give very accurate depictions of a user's value. An arbitrary score means little without a control or reference point. (What would Linus Torvalds score?) Further, services like these typically rely on some secret-sauce to generate their numbers... and obfuscating this process lends itself to further skepticism of that value of your score. This is not an attack on your product specifically. I feel this equally about Klout, which I've ranted about elsewhere.

The problem services like yours should attempt to solve (IMHO) is indicating what qualities your score represents. This needs to be as clear and simple as possible. The best utility your service could offer will be in the following use case: A stranger, who is completely unaware of your scoring system, requests and consumes a report you generated for a user quickly; and to walk away with a strong sense of how that programmer relates to the metrics they care most about. Agreed, this is no small feat. But it's what services like BBB, Consumer Reports, and the like have spent years establishing their authority and clarifying their signals.

Hope this was food for thought. (Take it with a grain of salt. What the hell do I know anyway.)

- Interactions like mouseover on objects (which, I assume, give an overview of the connections without activating it) creates a cluttered/confusing look. Maybe while showing this overview, you fade out all irrelevant objects and markup?

- Doubleclick on objects should indicate that it's thinking or doing something. There's no feedback to know I properly activated an object with my intended interaction.

- I'm not sure if it's my computer or the UI, but it's extremely sluggish. I'm not sure I'd be satisfied with this experience in a finished product. I know it's a prototype, but still want to mention this.

- I might not be the best test subject as I'm not a Java programmer.... or even much of a programmer for that matter. I know this is helpful for someone, but I don't understand how it can be helpful for me. This might be important to be aware of.

I hope some of these thoughts help. Overall, I get the impression it's cool. (I'm just not sure why.)

BTW, here's my bit of helpful -- I noticed this page wasn't rendering quite right: http://www.heroframework.com/user_guide/developers/reference...

Your Account Credentials You can login to the control panel, and throughout the site, with:

Username: or Password:

This is unmodified output from the page. It looks like the username and password should be present here. It was not. So maybe something usual with my installation of MAMP that could be creating this side effect.

The user record definitely exists. I don't see errors in the server logs. Want to help me figure out where I went wrong?

(I don't understand why but cooler colors tend to do much better producing academic products. I have nothing but subjectivity to back this up, but I notice this over and over again.)

As far as accepting payment, I recently came across Stripe. It's completely free to implement and play with. PCI-compliant. You pay when you get paid. The discount rate is a bit higher as a result of not having a monthly fee (which is still reasonable). With their javascript library, your servers never see a CC# and you remove a LOAD of liability from your business. I intend to use it for my next project. They have a RESTful API with plenty of examples. And most importantly for you, they have examples in PHP: https://stripe.com/docs/api

http://stripe.com

* The screenshot on the right is possibly pointless as it doesn't actually show me anything (it's too small and texty).

* The blurbs are good; I get a good picture of what the app is about. Though I would scale up in size everything in the blue stripe.

* I would try to cut down the amount of text in the feature boxes.

- Your preview should really show it. Having something that small makes it practically useless to have there. As a programmer, you might consider something like SlideDeck (slidedeck.com) to make a really nice presentation of your apps various screens.

- In your price break down, it seems that your main differentiator between plans is the number of teams someone can manage. You say each is "designed for" a different purpose, but don't indicate in any way how. If there are truly design differences, you should highlight them.

- If there are NO differences, here's an idea: Completely remove the plans and pricing. You offer the free plan to manage one team. Give EVERYONE that plan automatically (since you force users down this path anyyway). Don't mention price or anything. Leave indications in your control panel that they can add additional teams to manage. When they're ready to add them, prompt them for payment then. You'll likely see an increase in conversions because interested parties won't be swayed by potential future prices (even if they'll never hit it). Typically, if they want to add more teams, it means they're very happy with the features and are more likely (probably) to give you their cash.

- See if you find a way to progressively reveal your interface. Your signup asks for the typical details right up front. I'm certain you could let people poke around in your interface for a bit before asking them to save their progress and register a new account. This would even indirectly solve the problem of your tiny screenshot. :)

Hope this helps a bit.

You should consider moving the search box from the "custom" stream tab to be prominently be featured on the homepage. Additionally, it should be more clear that tags are actually streams.

As a feature request, it would be great if I could add songs to a queue, instead of having to listen to them immediately.

- It's not immediately clear how this is suppose to work. I see a stream on the left and details on the right. I spent some time to realize this was my currently playing queue. The right side is suppose to show detail of the song playing. I wonder if there's a way to make this more obvious without beating a user over the head about it.

- This has a Twitter styling and was expecting to get details of another song when clicking on it. Surprised when it started playing instead.

- Clicking a tag seems to hide currently playing queue. I'm not sure how to get back to it at this point. Having an anchor back to your current queue might be helpful.

- Why are you hiding the Non-Facebook login at the bottom of the page? This comes across as sneaky.

- I think the interface is not so obvious until playing around with it for a few minutes. Maybe give a new user a "Quick Start Guide" overlay that they can later hide.

Overall, this is pretty cool! Streaming is solid. The playlists are relevant. The selection seems broad. A+ :)

I have to echo much of the sentiment of other comments here. The project is so busy. It does so many great things, but does it do any of them really well? I would identify the primary features the people appreciate most from your project and mercilessly slash the rest off. (If anyone wants to keep it, you've open sourced it so tell them to fork off!) In all seriousness, if you focus your project and show how simple it is to use, you'll find your adoption will improve.

Once you have simplified your offering, start improving your messaging to the public. Walk-through or tours will help greatly with communicating your value. People are typically visual. Large blocks of text tend to scare people away from the page. (You've got approx 3-5 seconds to grab a visitor's interest before they hit the back/close button.)

Hope this is helpful. :)

Things I'd make better: - Provide a rest API; I'd love to be able to use it from my console - [Tab] would be really useful (To complete tags or date) - When I click "out" of the textbox when editing a todo, I don't want the [cancel] [save].. just save it. - I've tried to twitter it but it said something went wrong; It might be twitter or me though.. but still worth telling you - I'd like a quick keyboard shortcut a-la workflowy. I.e. If I have multiple tags and I want to remove one of them can I do -#tags? Or something similar.

I could suggest lot of other things that "could be nice but would make it more complicated"; but instead, I'll use it for a while and stay you informed on what I really find missing.

Also, little bug:

When you add your account info (Email, phone), there's a textbox on the main page but we see html tags in it.. i.e. a href=mailto instead of a link.

Keep the good work :)

I like the hash tag syntax quite a bit. I love these types of apps and seeing how different people approach it. The one box entry is also a really nice touch.

Additionally, I think there are too many barriers between me and my task list with services like this. I'm launching a similar product which helps individual keep track of people they know within their browser. My burning question is wondering whether the browser is the place where people are asking "Where did I know this guy from?"

In a similar vein, I wonder if people will want to require an internet connection, browser, and however much time it takes for the user to access their account. Reducing the time gap between epiphany and recording seems like a noble goal for your product to tackle. I think if you get this part right, you'll have something that's marketable. (I believe it's usefulness is obvious and without question.) Other companies in this space have reduced this gap significantly by deploying a mobile version of their service.

Regardless of a viable business model, this is really cool. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-site_scripting for more inofrmation.

But the difference between free and $20/month for a linode should be dwarfed by the other costs, namely your time. But then again, time is only as expensive as your next best alternative usage: if you're learning enough by "wasting" time, it's probably a win!

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What are you waiting for? It's not going to upload itself!

I really like the effort of this product, but it isn't usable for me as it currently is. Here are the things which are non-starter for me that I've found:

- Loading music is SLOW. I'm seeing a variable response of ~2-10 seconds PER song. This is when I dump a single track to the interface. It doesn't seem to matter which screen I drop the track into. This happens with MP3s and M4As.

- Doesn't automatically go to the next track after a track is done.

- No search field? It accepts my typing, but doesn't show it anywhere in the GUI.

+ The animations and the UI touches are admittedly nice and give it a nice polish. But it doesn't matter if the product underneath doesn't play music well.

You're asking me what you should do next with this, but it really depends on what you want to do. Do you want to build a business out of it? What would your business model look like? What is going to make people give you money for this?

You might have a hard time developing a business model out of this project as music players are a well-entrenched industry with many successful products already on the market. The only way you'll be able to break into this is by releasing a superior experience. And frankly, the other companies have a huge head start.

This is not a bad thing at all! It's okay for this to be a project without trying to make it into a business. The GUI skills from this will certainly help with future products you'll inevitably make!

Something that also concerns me is that you're willing to drop college to attend a startup program if they accept you. This should be a clear indicator to you that this is not a project worth dropping everything to work on (because you'd be working on this full-time and have dropped college already if you were that motivated). And even if an incubator sees something valuable in you to go through their program, I would ask yourself why you're even in school if you're willing to drop it for a 3-month program. Figure out what that answer is and see if there are ways to achieve that on your current path. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't drop school, or should/shouldn't apply for an incubator. It just sounds as if you're thrilled about the prospect of being a successful entrepreneur with all the recent buzz these last years. (This is great!) Just think pragmatically about what you REALLY want and find a way to get there within your means.

- Sponsor .NET Hack-a-thons?

- Help feverishly in .NET forums and community sites like Stackoverflow. (Put the service in your profile...people really look!)

- Create programs that provide incentive for your customers to spread the word about a product they already love. Word of mouth is the best/cheapest/most-effective variety of advertising that I know of.

I'm not much of a marketing guy, but this is where I would start at first thought. :) BTW, the control really does look quite nice. If I were a .NET developer I'd be interested in using it.

Note: Tag line states "No Learning Needed", then in your advantages section you state "Minimum learning needed." Strive to be consistent.

Once I actually scrolled down a bit and started using the sliders I got it directly. Very easy to use, great job on this.

Another note is the "In the news" section has news from 6 months ago. It's not a big deal but doesn't look that good.

On the "Learn More" page after clicking a bank, the slider occasionally mis-renders. (The handle will render under the textbox which requests my deposit amount.) This is usually if I max out the Cash slider on the first step. (OS X 10.6.8, Chrome 14)

This seems pretty straight-forward to me. And pretty helpful. I think you're moving in the right direction.

    div.blockylist {
      line-height: 2.5em;
    }

    div.blockylist div {
      margin-left: 1em;
    }

Great work!

10:07p Got email describing next steps. I suppose I wait for human intervention to arrive. (PS: So far, none of this is easy. If it weren't for it feeling like a treasure hunt, I'd have probably given up already.)

10:12p Decided to register while I wait...

10:15p Got the welcome email...

10:17p Fell into a rabbit hole.

Sorry, but this is much too complicated. I realize this is a VERY early prototype (I hope) but there is no way a user will open an uploaded html doc to follow a url in order to link my account to my shared folder. Surely there is some other way of doing this via Dropbox's APIs?