Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues
www.openloopz.com
I have written more about it on Medium here: http://goo.gl/JN03yf
I knew from the start the odds were stacked against me. I’m almost 36, I have a family and I live in the North East of England where - without wanting to sound negative - the opportunities are few and far between compared to what I see on here. When I made the BETA announcement, I knew no-one would just magically sign-up, but I watched and waited anyway and became extremely pissed off when it didn’t happen. “It’s been 2 hours - why haven’t I got 100 sign-ups already?”. Silly really.
I used up all my savings to get this far and I don’t regret any of it (except maybe the weight gain, lack of a social life, and development of bad sleeping habits!). I wanted to prove to myself I can build a production quality app that I honestly believe in without bias, and I can truly say I have achieved that now.
But now comes the hard part. I need to force myself to stop coding and start actually talking about OpenLoopz and trying to spread the word. I am the first to admit I am not very good at this. I am struggling to even write this post because I already know that probably no-one will read it. But I just have to learn to get over that and keep going. Any feedback - good or bad - will be greatly appreciated, thanks.
163 comments
[ 6.7 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadThe red introductory price text feels a little out of place. It's left justified when the rest feels centered, and I feel like it could be a better callout with improved formatting. It may be a British spelling, but I saw misspelled 'occassional' in the Beta section.
Best wishes with the project it looks promising!
You've just pointed out that now comes the part about communicating what OpenLoopz is all about. Once you've done that well, you'll see the beta sign-ups come through. They may not necessarily buy from you just yet but keep in touch with them and learn from their user interactions to improve the product.
One of the hardest things is landing the very first customer. But it's not impossible. Good luck!
My early thoughts: Based on the website, it's not fully clear what OpenLoopz does and how it does it (i.e. How will it make me communicate better and get things done quicker?). You got me somewhat hooked on "communicate better and get things done quicker" so now, tell me can I achieve it with your app. Since a "Loop" is a new concept, you'll need to explain it but keep it subtle - as a user, my point is to communicate better and get things done quicker. If a "Loop" helps me do it, great. If not, I'm not really interested in what a "Loop" is.
I'd focus on trying to serve 1 customer segment at the moment. Having multiple price packages for multiple customer segments will be tough to serve because all their needs and demands will be quite different.
References: https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/apex-domains.
So, DNS A records point to IP addresses. In the specific case of Heroku (and maybe other PAAS providers), tying your site to an IP address makes them less fault tolerant as they can't do things like shift your app between availability zones if one blows up or something.
Given that it's fairly easy to put a www. (or whatever) redirect on whatever IP your basename does point at, your users don't have to worry about remembering to use it.
btw I'm in a similar situation : 34 with 2 kids + one on the way and I'm almost out of money after investing on my 2nd startup. You shouldn't see this as a desperate situation but as a challenge with an opportunity to focus on what really matters ( in your life and in your company ). Good luck ;)
Maybe is all the front page HN traffic (or my slow connection). But after 30 seconds of waiting for the page to load, I was greeted with a..... blank page.
sigh maybe it was a timeout, or maybe I really must allow JS to see anything on the page. Maybe this is just me, this annoys me and if a site won't display SOMETHING without JS I leave, but a fellow NE Englander, I will make an allowance.
Anyway, am another one man shop, so don't really need a communication tool. But did the same as you couple of years before, no actually a few years ago now. Quit job / in the 30s / with family to go out on my own.
As you said STOP CODING AND START PROMOTING. It is hard the knockbacks hurt, but whore yourself to all potential customers. You do know who you potential customers are, don't you? Find where they are and do all you can to get them on board. If it is a forum, offer some respected members full free access, people like free things, get them to talk about it.
Learn marketing / seo. Yes it is the spawn of the devil and all marketeers should kill themselves, but you have mouths to feed, morals go out the window.
Again, good luck
I understand the sentiment, but really -- is it impossible to market something without being immoral? I think it is. Lots of startups have provided great products that help people get their work done or make their lives easier. Marketing can just be the process of letting those people know that the product exists, and why it's useful, right? Not all marketing involves brainwashing kids into buying fast food, etc.
Your medium article is 50X better than your website. Your website is useless for promoting your product. I don't like the headline font for your site, the lack of screenshots, basically the lack of focus on a product that will live or die on its usability and interface. I'm not a fan of the Z in openloopz. Combined with the comic sansy looking headline font it doesn't feel polished.
The inventing of a new words ("loops") is to be avoided unless absolutely necessary. You are now not only trying to tell a (very) mildly interested reader about your product you need them to learn a new language in order to understand it. This is an unrealistic cognitive burden for a sales pitch for a todo app. I strongly suggest that you use the simplest possible terms in plain language to describe the focus of your product, how it fits into the users life, and what problems it solves for them.
Your post here is more focused on your personal suffering than on your product. We are all eating shit to try to launch our companies, but too much focus on that makes for a downer intro to your product. I'd try to separate your moments of sharing the struggle and the moments of sharing the product. Do you want people to be genuinely excited about it, or pity you? Which emotion do you want to be a stronger first response?
Scanning further over your medium article (It's longer than a casual browser will give it time, ie 5 seconds) I suggest you take whatever the salient feature of your product is, maybe the hashtagging to create inline tasks and put that front and center in a huge picture and font. I'm still not sure what problem you are solving or who you are competing with, is it todo lists, slack, what? Where does this tool fit in my life? I suggest you take a look at the way that slack conveys information https://slack.com/is/team-communication (notice even the url hammers home their function).
I think that honest feedback is very imporant and that your main problem here, which is something that affects us all, is that you are too close to the product. You already understand it, you speak its language (invented words and all), and you are now longer able to communicate it to the passing man in the street. I suggest workshoping your pitch and language with fresh ears constantly until you are able to get someone to understand the basics of what it is and how it helps them in 10 seconds or less. All that said, I'm rooting for you, best of luck!
Honestly, it'd be a miracle for anyone to look at the website and decide they need to sign up. Not because the product isn't amazing. But because I have no idea what it is and I'm not in the habit of signing up for services if I don't know what they are. That's how you get Cat Facts.
EDIT:
Also, you need an Editor really badly. I don't mean to be a dick about it. But this is your family's welfare on the line. Find someone hyper-critical to tear your writing.
ie:
> What is OpenLoopz? > OpenLoopz makes it easy to manage and share your digital content online, as well as helping you get things done quicker and communicate better!
I've just tuned out. That sentence is as empty and as much bullshit as they come. A very direct question was asked and you disrespected my time. You could be describing Facebook for all I know.
If you want your site to be compelling: Be Brief. Every word needs to tell me something useful and important. Your broadcast is all noise and no signal right now.
Anyone saying the Medium post is good: Don't believe them. It's better. But that'd be difficult not to do. It's still completely useless for moving units. People are just being kind.
Get an editor. If there's one rule you need to follow, it's brevity. Brevity. BREVITY. It's not rocket science. This isn't beyond you. You aren't doomed to failure. Be brief. Be critical. You've failed at communicating your product's worth. Now try again. Not tomorrow. Today.
And don't let perfect be the enemy of good. It's not going to take you a week to fix this. Limit yourself to 400 words, and some screen shots. Fix it today. After that's done, keep iterating. Revise revise revise until you have the perfect 400 words and can't think of how to improve it further. Then find someone who can.
Good luck!
http://www.fogcreek.com/fogbugz
Fogbugz is a terrible name and if an unknown developer had released it there's a good chance too few people would have looked at it for it to get the necessary traction it needed to succeed. It really isn't an example of something people should follow.
"Ve still neet a buck trecker, I vas finking about Jira, or do you haef a better idea?" "Yes, I recommend FuckBugs!"
In BrainFuck.
"Yeah, it's not an ideal name... But the brand equity is already worth significantly more than the cost of having a yucky name... (There was a period for about 6 months when "Z" was all the rage. Antz, Dogz, and Atomz come to mind)."
Also your HN post had a very big air of uncertainity, lack of confidence etc. If you want your product to succeed, you'll need a lot more confidence in it & yourself. Don't put yourself down like that. I agree there might be less choices up north than say London & SF. But at the same time, living costs are far lower. So it's swings & roundabouts - there's never an ideal situation. This stuff is hard - that's why everyone isn't doing it and making millions.
Apologies if my post came across as personal suffering - I certainly don't want any pity! I didn't intend for it to be too negative - I was just being honest and got a bit carried away! This has been a very, very hard slog and I realise most people on here are going through the same thing. I would never write something like this on a more mainstream site - it was written for hackers in the same position as me so I felt I could afford to be more down to earth. Having said that, I take your point - it was probably too much for a "Show HN" where the main focus is to sell the app.
I agree with everything you say about the word "loop" and me being "too close to the product" and not knowing how to sell it. I will spend as much time as I can going following this and all the other advice on here to learn how to sell this thing. It's all new to me, but I am determined to learn it all.
Thanks again, excellent feedback.
One thing you might want to do is update your dns so that your app also answers on openloopz.com.
Currently you receive a heroku message stating "There is no app configured at that hostname. Perhaps the app owner has renamed it, or you mistyped the URL."
Take a look for example at the landing page of stripe dedicated to bitcoin: https://stripe.com/bitcoin — in less than 10 seconds I can get what is it about (and even how to integrate it) and I didn't have to read or watch a video. That's more or less what you should aim for so completely new visitors can go "oh, this cool, I could use it, let me signup". As it stands right now, your copy (keep friends in the loop, communicate better and get things done quicker) isn't very compelling to get someone to sign up.
Also, what is your target group? For example, do you expect the product to be used mainly by developers and makers? Because in that case the main page should be tailored to speak to them (the current copy, imo, doesn't, too generic to get a dev excited).
Does the name need to be OpenLoopz? To me the z there makes it sounds like a product for kids and not very professional. Personally I'd consider going for another brand if it's possible at all.
Resolving these issues won't get you users and customers overnight, but I think it'd put the product in a much better position to start.
"Keep your friends and colleagues in the loop!" "Every day, more and more people are relying on OpenLoopz to communicate better and get things done quicker."
Which doesn't tell me what the product is or does. Reading the why section:
"ACCESS AND SHARE ALL YOUR CONTENT IN ONE PLACE" "IMPROVE COMMUNICATION WITH FRIENDS AND COLLEAGUES" "INTEGRATE WITH YOUR FAVOURITE APPS" "ULTIMATE CONTROL OVER YOUR DATA"
I continue to have no clue about what the product is. I just know that I can integrate it with apps, control its data, etc.
So my suggestion is to focus more on the copy of that page. What is the product, at its core, what does it do and why should I care?
Good luck with it (sorry if this comment sounds too negative, I'm not trying to attack, just to provide what I think is valuable feedback for improvements).
To have invested your life savings into this app which, uh, is really hard to determine what it does seems silly to me - especially since you have a family to care for.
Slack Meets GitHub Issues? Doesn't Slack already meet GitHub issues in that it integrates with GitHub fine?
The fact that you need a very long blog post to explain exactly what this does should be a warning sign that it's unfocused and released too late.
"It can help you manage everything from todo items to chat messages to blog posts to photos to fully-fledged projects, photo albums and even mini social networks! Really, the type of content you create is completely up to you."
That sounds like a nightmare to me, now I have to invest a lot of time to figure out exactly how this thing works? Start small, focused, make one small thing that does one thing well. Release it quickly, try to get a few people using it (hopefully paying for it) and gather some of their feedback. Find out how they're using it and what their pain points are. Grow from there.
I know you said opportunities where you live are few and far between, and you clearly have the skills, why can't you build a production ready application at an established company?
Finally, I'm being overly critical because I've been in a similar situation before - you spend months building something, release it, and argh! why aren't people coming? It's frustrating, I know, but your skills are better put to use elsewhere.
I think you can use this to lead to better things. Iterate on the product, get some feedback, and attack it again. In the meantime, blog throughout the process. Get your voice out. If you generate interest about your product before you release it, you can generate more momentum when you launch.
Good luck!
There are so many communication tools, surely its a solved problem right. Ask a knowledge worker today about their favorite communication tool, and you will end up with a dozen answers in about a week's time. Definitely a sign that the problem is solved. There are a dozen solutions after all. :)
OP doesn't really know what the product is himself, so cannot begin to differentiate.
(And that's certainly valid criticism, but it's not a strong basis for telling someone they just wasted their time and money. A marketing problem can be fixed.)
What this product would be useful for isn't explained well, and I'm not sure even the OP knows.
But there's clearly something compelling here based on the attention we've all given it.
It should be noted that the original title contained an "I quit my job" affectation, which may have biased the original upvotes for the submission. (which is why the affectation was removed)
If the submission was simply a link to the service instead of a story, I would imagine the results would be much different.
Something being is interesting or worth talking about doesn't necessarily mean that thing is valuable (or a good idea for a company). An upvote doesn't necessarily mean, "I like this," but rather, "this is interesting" (or whatever other metric one uses when determining whether to upvote).
I upvoted the OP because I thought it was interesting that someone had quit their job and sacrificed so much to work on something. I didn't look farther than the Medium post because I feel like Slack already has this angle covered.
Or it could be that I'm just not the right audience or I don't get it.
What if the product actually has tremendous value, but suffers from a marketing problem? That's a pretty easy problem to fix.
Rather than using your severely limited understanding to encourage the creator to throw the baby out with the bathwater, you should focus on tangible, solvable problems, or just keep your mouth shut.
For anyone who has actually invested a large amount of time in a dead idea, the above poster is right on the money.
I think you should take you own advice and talk only about things you know intimately. Lest your sentimentality gets the better of you, when actually trying to address a problem that could suck OP's life down the proverbial toilet.
I think the issue here is that the above poster has probably not done his due diligence to actually verify the premise of this statement (that the idea is a dead one).
I could be wrong on that, but I see almost nothing in the post that refers to anything about his experience actually using the app.
For what it's worth, I'm trying to use it right now but I think the site is getting slammed by HN, so I can't actually use it. Therefore, I'm not going to tell the OP that he just wasted all his time and money.
Correct, and further, I don't think a passive bystander can make that judgement. The opinion of any one person is irrelevant. If the idea is bad, the market will reject it.
That is the logical conclusion of your statement, and that notion is utter bollocks. If in 15 minutes someone is convinced that the product is lacking focus and vision then that is a valuable insight. It might just be that the person reflects on whether his call to action is obvious enough and tweaks his site to make it clear what his proposition is. Or maybe he has been holed up for months by himself in a bubble and has developed something no one wants. Rather sooner he finds that out than later.
This kind of namby-pamby "if you can't say something positive say nothing" mentality that I see in replies does a massive disservice to this community and people in it who risk much more than just a little bruising to their ego (whether it be financial or career).
2. I am certainly not advocating diffuse positivity. If you knew me, you would know positivity is not my strong suit. :)
There's nothing wrong with saying that the product seems unfocused or overly complex, or suggesting that the creator focuses either the execution or its messaging. That's useful, constructive feedback that the creator can do something with.
There's not really even anything wrong with saying "I don't understand why anyone would use this" -- although that's not particularly useful feedback.
Jumping from these reasonable positions to "you're wasting your time" is where I take issue. It's a dangerous leap of judgement that none of us can or should make for someone else -- certainly with the limited understanding that we can gain after a few minutes.
The creator seems to have come here to get feedback on the product, not for an intervention.
Hey, maybe this can be a new startup funding mechanism. I propose "haterade.io", a betting pool where you can bet that projects will fail by a certain time. If you lose, your bet goes to the project.
Edit: the real problem is the OP's tone. I do agree that the founder of this project has an explanation problem, but the tone was "your project sucks and you're wasting your time."
Shut up and take my money!!!
- Paraphrased 95% of the users on this site lately
I can't tell you whether or not it's worth pursuing, but I know that in my own experience it was. Our team spent almost a year building and launching a product that we ultimately shut down. We could have stopped and gone back to our day jobs, but the silver lining is that the core technology became the foundation for our current (seemingly unrelated) company.
While the now-forgotten product we launched was a failure, pushing past that resulted in a product that has been far more successful (funding, product-market fit, etc). There's no guarantee you'll pivot into success, but there's zero chance you will succeed if you stop iterating.
Think of your first public launch as the start of the development process, not the end. You need to track down people who need what you've built (or need something similar), talk to them in person, listen to their problems and make sure your product solves them.
If you can convince 100 people to try your product and a decent proportion of them turn into daily active users, you're onto something special. If you can't do that, keep iterating or find a new problem to solve.
1. I will update the openloopz.com asap - oversight on my part. Not sure how I missed that tbh.
2. The word "openloopz" was coined about 7 years ago when I first started working on this "project" and 'z' was kinda cool back then ;-) The project has changed a lot since then but the name became quite close to me and I put a lot of work into the assets, so I stuck with it. I have considered changing it to Loop and would love to do that, but it would be a lot of work and I was focused on getting something out there as quickly as possible.
3. The welcome page is a work in progress. I originally had something more detailed with LOADS of screenshots and features, even a video with my own voice (eugh!). But I was advised to focus on why customers would want to use the product as opposed to focusing on features, and all the content became obsolete when I changed the look and feel. Anyway, I will take all the comments on board and revise the landing page - I agree it could be a lot better.
Still reading... will respond to individual feedback separately.
My suggestion would be to think of all the customers that you are marketing to that will never give you $5/month. For example, high-school kids looking to chat and have fun will never bother learning your concept and pay you $5 for the privilege. Get rid of all marketing messages aimed at that use case. Will college students pay you $5 to collaborate on a school project? Stop marketing to them. Will a family use this to plan their vacation? (etc)
If you do that you should be left with a smaller group and that will allow you to make a definitive one-liner that describes your product, for example "OpenLoopz is a collaboration tool for event planners." Or something to that effect.
Even though your service can manage any type of content, you will do better if you just select a few use cases and then customize your marketing to fit them.
WHAT IS IT!? Is it like Slack but self hosted? I need screenshots. Are there companion apps? Show me.
It's annoying that I can't delete the first loops from Loopy.
I also think the app needs an easier way to navigate between loops, rather than relying on the back button.
I think the user list is not very privacy focussed, I remove it for a username search instead, rather than just listing everyone.
It looks really polished though and I think you have proved the fact that you can create a web app by yourself.
Have you made a pitch deck yet? I've done a bit of fundraising in the UK.
Good luck from a fellow northener!
OP, I think this phrase, or something like it, should be front and center of your communication effort. IMO it describes your product better than all the stuff I've read in ~5min on your sites.
Being developers, we wind up blaming the record-keeping tool for the unmanageable mess rather than our own habits. That leads us to think that if we could just create a better tool for keeping track of our TODO list, our lives would be easier to manage, and maybe others could benefit from the tool as well.
Of course it never seems to pan out, because what we're trying to manage is our (work) lives, and our lives cannot be represented as a simple task list. There's a lot more nuance and complexity to it. And that's why we end up with a million different implementations of simple TODO lists.