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Ask HN: Review my business, Printavo

5 points by webbruce ↗ HN
I ran a screen printing shop a few years ago for a while and realized that using many different systems to keep our shop running wasn't the answer. We used Google Calendar, Bamboo Invoice, Highrise, Paypal and email which lead to tons of data redundancy and plain 'ol inefficiencies.

After specking everything out and gathering a bunch of initial feedback, I began designing the interface and looking for coders. That didn't work out too well so after a year of that nonsense I bought Michael Hartl's book and started learning rails.

Four months later I was ready to start building Printavo and three more months later I had 90% of it done. To help with the last 10% (Stripe, Paypal and some other bugs) I hired a freelancer (shout out to Kuah!).

Just went live last night and I'm focusing more on the marketing end now.

I wanted to get your guys' feedback on everything, thanks!

http://printavo.com

8 comments

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Berone
really slick and impressive site
retroafroman
I can't comment on much, as I'm not in the screen printing business. However, the design is very nice and professional.

There may be a bug-when I click on the link "Check them out" on the front page, nothing happens. Using Chrome on Windows.

bradhe
Certainly well designed site, value prop is easily understood although not sure how valuable it actually is (not in industry so...). How big is the screen printing industry?

I imagine the average screen print shop is between 1 and 5 heads. Are their needs significantly different than other creative businesses--an agency, say--of similar size? While there is a lot to be said for narrow scope, I think it's best to keep scope narrow on the product side and wide on the market side (especially at your stage).

hmgauna
As the others, it's hard to tell as I'm not in that business. The product looks professional and sleek, but the best advise I can give you is that you look for feedback from your real potential customers. You have to go find them and test their use, hear their needs, calibrate the pricing.

If you have some budget you may set an ad campaign and split tests to know what's is working and what is not. You may try several different home pages to see which things perform better. This could give you some ideas: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2977-behind-the-scenes-highri... http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2983-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes... http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2991-behind-the-scenes-ab-tes...

And also: are you tracking your users behaviors? That may give you powerful insights about the product.

I created an account to test it, but I had several errors in a row: 'We're sorry, but something went wrong.'

For the rest, congrats, it looks great. I hope you the best!

PS: You may work on a better favicon with a relative ease, by now is not looking so good.

webbruce
Thanks for the tips. I'm marketing a bunch on forums/blogs in the industry right now and then when that gathers more traffic I'm going to A/B

How would I track user behaviors? I'm just using Google Analytics.

All the errors on the site should be fixed now.

hmgauna
Hey!

It depends a bit on how your site works. A typical use of the GA script may already do the work. But sometimes, you need to set things to do the right tracking: the typical example is the usage of javascript. If you have a lot of JS you may want to track it. Maybe you want to know if some feature is being used or not, you should check those small things and have it clear, so that, when the traffic comes, you will be collecting valuable data about your product. But also, ask your customers. Some human feedback may be much more rich than a bunch of data.

PS: By the way, I like the 'XX shops are currently using Printavo!' PS 2: I'm still getting the error messages (now in the welcome screen).