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Is it an outrageous price to ask? Please send your feedback.

6 points by bilus ↗ HN
I got round to thinking about offsetting my hosting/infrastructure costs for Criticue.com -- a feedback exchange online app I launched with your help exactly one month ago.

I intend to keep the core offering free but do need a revenue source. Don't we all. :)

Here's my first stab at the beast: http://i.imgur.com/yfjXb.png

My questions:

Is the offer clear and understandable?

Is this the amount you'd pay for the service?

This is a pretty obvious route to take and has been suggested by many users but I do have backup plans in case it doesn't work at all. :)

Thank you so much everyone for your excellent feedback so far!

EDIT: Link to the service (not everyone knows what it does haha): www.criticue.com

9 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] thread
benwerd
I'm not sure why I'd pay for the gold plan when you can just click through to the site anyway. Ditto the Pro plan, actually. Perhaps you could give people more review credits the more they pay?
bilus
Thank you for the feedback. I'm too not 100% sure about the frames but got pretty many requests about it. Will be thinking about it.

I'd love to sell credits like this but this is a drawback of a 1-to-1 exchange ratio; it's fair but there's no margin you can capitalize on. But I'll think about what you said.

Thanks again.

rikacomet
1. The offer is clear, but as they say you need power before you can reason with others so, say you are SEO expert, your critical view of any related field would be most welcome, other might get ignored. So I'm thinking you would want to hire freelance experts for different fields, once you do that, or get them on-board you would be ready to give feedback of high quality. Best is to set a revenue share, 20-80%, in case sales happens, if not nothing. This will bring you lot of customers.

2. yes, its a steep price to ask, compare it to the fact that online lockers cost way less than that, yet hardly anyone gets premium occasionally!

0.99 and 1.99 per month sound more fair, given low quality feedback sites are absolutely free.

bilus
Thanks for the feedback!
staunch
Keep it simple. Charge for reviews, let people choose what makes sense for them.

One time transactional purchases:

  $5 for 3 reviews
  $10 for 8 reviews
  $20 for 18 reviews
Subscription plans:

  $5/mo for 5 reviews/mo
  $10/mo for 15 reviews/mo
  $20/mo for 30 reviews/mo
Work to earn:

  1 review for 3 reviews written
  1 bonus review for every 5 written
I think a ratio of 1:3 is perfectly fair, it may not be an even exchange, but it's fair. You have to have a profit margin built into the service to ensure its longevity. Reasonable people understand that.

Since you're charging good money for the reviews they have to be very good quality. You'll need a moderation system and a way to very easily let people flag a review as bad and get a review credit refund.

ajryan
I think this is the better direction to go. People will use your service to improve their sites, and they'll pay (and keep paying) to get the most improvement. I don't think additional screenshots/IFRAMEing will improve the review quality much. Getting more reviews (and higher-quality reviews, once reviewers/reviews can get feeback) is the most valuable thing.

Actually second thought, the one place I can see screenshots being useful is to let people crop out a specific piece of UX for comment. Have you thought about letting review requestors add a comment to guide the review toward a specific question they're trying to ask? That could also be pay-for.

Obviously the balance you have to strike to keep the site healthy is to maintain the balance of reviews owed to / owed by users. Staunch is on the right track with rebalancing the "free" tier in order to primine the "owed by" pump. You can further maintain the balance by paying reviewers (perhaps "top"/"verified" reviewers, as suggested by donutdan4114) a fraction of the income you get from subscribers to do reviews.

I can see that you're drawn toward keeping the 1 for 1 simplicity, but I think it'll be hard to find other features worth paying for.

PS, as an enthusiastic user of Criticue, thanks!

donutdan4114
1) The first thing I noticed is the 0/$9/$19 scheme. I would make it 0/$10/$25, it's more to the point and I think the rounded numbers would be better received.

2) I think you could make a lot more money. Large web development agencies could use this site to get quick feedback on new site designs. Not sure about your entire strategy but I'm thinking that you could "rank" reviewers. A reviewer who reaches a certain threshold is considered an "expert" or something. Then, offer those better reviewers to these development/design agencies for $99/month (or more).

3) Similar to point 2, maybe you could have a verification process for professional designers/website builders (prove they are good at what they do). They would (most likely) provide the most technical and potentially useful feedback. I think agencies would like to have these people give critical feedback which could be worth a lot... Like $300 / month. You could also provide incentive to professional reviewers with compensation ($1 / accepted review or something).

4) I would limit the # of reviews per site based on the plan. Free = 5 reviews Pro = 20 reviews Gold = 100 reviews Unlimited = Unlimited reviews Not sure how many reviews are normally submitted per site, but you get the idea.

These are just some quick ideas. Like the site/idea, g'job.

source: Work for a web development agency.

ajryan
These are all good points.

1) Anecdotally, round numbers feel more "honest" to me, it's probably been studied but I can't find any references.

2/3) Definitely reviews themselves are the most valuable and if you can find a way to increase their supply, you've got something really worth selling.

4) Potentially a good idea but could turn some people away. Maybe a throttle rather than a hard limit.

What about a ladder like this to get reviews in the bank? 1 gets you your first 1 2 & 3 get you your second 4 & 5 & 6 get your third etc