HN Explorer

What's wrong with my site? Did I just pick a bad idea?

3 points by dicroce ↗ HN
I suspect that I am in a position that a lot of the users of this site have been in, or will be in.

About 1 year ago, my wife was looking for a small business she could run to make a few extra dollars. I had seen a few custom trail mix websites, and realized that I could beat them all with a site that showed you what your mix was gonna look like BEFORE you order. I took two weeks off from work and coded the site. Here's a link to the coolest part of the site http://www.trailmyx.com/createMyx

Once the flurry of orders from our friends and family died down, we settled into about 1 order per week. Not very exiting.

We tried advertising with Google AdWords, but nothing I tried was profitable. Furthermore, everyone I've ever attempted to contact (food bloggers mostly) have either ignored us, or flaked out on us.

I'm taking the next two weeks off from work to work on the site. What should I do with this time? What is it missing? At what point do you throw in the towel and try something else?

22 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 51.6 ms ] thread
smoody
My thoughts:

- "Trailmix" is too generic. Do an alternate version of the site named hackersnacker.com or something like that and market it as the perfect food to have in a bowl next to your keyboard. In line with this, add chocolate-covered coffee beans to the mix along with other hacker-freiendly treats (sweet tarts, etc). Sell it to the audience you know.

- Anti-alias the various ingredients so that the images look more natural. The white boarders around the nuts don't make it seem very appetizing.

- Add a facebook "like" button so your friends and family can get the social graph rolling.

dicroce
Cool. :) "HackerSnacker.com"... Or perhaps "BackPackerFuel.com"... You know, chocolate covered espresso beans are already on there.
sixQuarks
This is great advice. It's infinitely easier to market something that's targeted very specifically, rather than trying to be something for everyone. Start with the "hacker" market and branch out as you grow.

Try a reddit ad, offer a coupon to redditors on their first order. Contact bloggers and journalists that write about startup culture, etc.

Geee
First off, the images on the site load slowly and also are scaled into wrong aspect ratio. Pre-scale those thumbnails and set proper caching for faster loading. Every time the item is added to the mix, all the images load again for some reason. Also, please upgrade to a faster server, that's just really slow.

I'm not sure that the 'approximate image' of the mix is a huge selling point (while cool). In general, I would work on the design of the site, now it comes of a bit 'amateurish'. Try to find a nicer typeface, use larger fonts, align everything, and remove all unnecessary items (like site news, and login). Concentrate on the images in the design.

Why there's login option? I think you should just allow people to create mixes and share them easily without logging in. Just create unique url for every mix like trailmyx.com/mix/dji4r and let people share that.

dicroce
Well, the login option is so that you can save a mix you've created. But I really like the idea about a permalink for every mix... I'm going to add that to my todo list right now.

As far as the design goes, it's really not my strong suit. Perhaps I need to find a designer to partner with...

mcarrano
When I first looked at your homepage, I was wondering if the site was active - Will I ever get my order, if I ordered something?

This has do do with the fact that the site news was last updated almost a year ago.

dicroce
Someone else suggested I just remove the site news. I think I'm going to do that.
gregr401
On this note, make shipping times very obvious (ie, with the current date). If I order before 2pm PST, can it be shipped same day? Speaks to the above; drives people to want to order.

Also, re-occurring orders. Monthly, bi-weekly, etc.

andrejewski
Instead of the image box with just a border, maybe have the image inside an image of the container it comes in.
dicroce
This is on my todo list for sure. In fact, we took some photos of the bags a couple of months ago for exactly this reason.
10dpd
Create a recurring revenue model - i.e. send my trail mix once a week.
ajakhu
This is a nice addition. Thumbs up to this.
negrit
The logo should be clickable. I don't like the createMyx page. I can't say why but it doesn't look good. The [login] link should be an image.

Also, what if I want more than 16oz in my created mix. The "1" at the bottom of the homepage shouldn't exist.

It might be a bad idea be running a Groupon/Google offer/... campaign could work.

grandpoobah
The homepage looks much better than your CreateMyX page. Why do you have a nice looking login form on the main page but on createmyx it's just a text link? The images on the homepage look far far more appealing than the generated images I was seeing on the createmyx page.. those look like shit tbh.
se85
Agree with everything said so far, also think you should look at having more content on your site - I can't see google doing much for you (with or without ads) with the current lack of content there to keep users around.

I also think it is a bit of a silly gimmick, if thats the only thing you offer over your competitors, need to step up the innovation a notch.

[dead] maxhacker
It's a really cool idea, but the "createMyx" page isn't too helpful (for me, at least). Most of the creations I made looked the same and seemed to be a jumbled "mesh" of things. Obviously, that's kind of what trail mix is but the images created didn't look very appetizing or real.

Still, though, I think it's a really cool idea and I definitely think it could get some momentum in time!

caw
* I don't understand at all how to create a "Myx". I tried clicking on an image, and nothing happened. I thought maybe JS was broken, so I tried Firefox, and still no luck.

* On your homepage, your link that says "Nut Allergy? Please see our" goes to couponcactus. The part that says "Allergy Notice" actually links to the content I wanted. This seems to only affect the first page.

I like the suggestion of a "Mix of the week" or month. Subscriptions are good, but it may be difficult if people hate cashews or pistachios or something. Maybe they don't care.

marcuschristie
Same here. Tried Firefox and Chrome but still couldn't get it to work. Finally tried IE and now it works; I actually see add buttons and the names of the ingredients on the left hand side. In FF and Chrome, only the thumbnails are visible in the ingredients list.
computerslol
Out of a random sample set of 1000 people, how many would want to buy trail-mix from the internet rather than pick it up at the store?

Out of those, how many are likely to trust you with their credit card number?

Out of those, how many would be willing to pay $4 shipping on a $7.50 mix?

computerslol
By that I mean improve you offering, implement paypal, and fix your shipping cost.