Ask HN: review my startup, a planning/analysis app for cyclists
ridewithgps.com
ridewithgps.com
Benefits sell software, not features.
Think of it this way -- you're a cyclist, right? Supposing you were trying to convert a family member into cycling, would you say "Involves moving a pair of pedals in circles quite a bit! Spins wheels! Forward motion while cycling!" No, you say "Do this and you will be healthier, have more energy, save money on gas, and not kill the planet." (Feel free to strike the last one if you are not an environmentalist. Gaia knows I'm not. But you get the general idea.)
Figure out what your software does for your user rather than what your software does, and then sell them on buying that tangible benefit to their lives.
We have put together some money and quit our jobs, with the intention of making Ride with GPS the best site of its kind on the internet.
Having 3 full-timers working on a bootstrapped project (especially one with no current revenue model, as far as I can tell) will be very tough. Ramen profitability is that much further away, and you burn through your seed money very quickly.
Since I don't want to start the whole "quit-your-dayjob vs dont-quit" debate, all I will say is this: Consider not waiting until your seed money is completely exhausted before exploring avenues of funding, and by this I mean getting some kind of job. Any sort of income that still allows you to work on your project can help you stay alive until you start making a decent income from your startup.
One feature you can think about that I've often thought would be useful, would be to track road quality via a device that detects vibrations. Poorly maintained roads = big vibrations. I don't know the technical feasibility of this off hand, but hopefully it gives you a new avenue to explore.
You should let people drop in their RunKeeper user URL and scan their activities GPX data from there (it's all there).
Quite a few people I know use RunKeeper for cycling now because it's one less device to buy/maintain/ride with (running on the iPhone and all). In addition, the RK guys are likely to help you promote your service -- they're quite active with respect to their community.
We are investigating our options and will proceed when we understand the implications of those options. With that being said, this feature was VERY popular, and I loved watching someone bring in 100 routes from their other accounts. People love the concept of data independence and are pretty shocked when they hear one of their favourite sites doesn't allow them to backup their information. So, we are hoping to bring this back in some way that doesn't tick off the other services, or at least does so in a way that doesn't have negative implications on us or our users :P
So I came to your site as an excited novice and I'm sort of clueless. Hard to know where to go on the home screen. I assume I want to sign up, but I don't know your feature-benefits well enough to make a decision.
To that end, why are the "Start drawing" and "Sign up" buttons given equal weight in the UI? Do you expect 50% of your visitors to do each? Seems unlikely--and is that even what you want?
The right-left arrows (<|>) to bring up that other blurb is totally unexpected behaviour given a right-arrow click. The content should be coming in from the side, and be progressing me along some kind of 1, 2, 3 step process. Otherwise, why hide the first blurb in order to show me the second?
I agree on the left/right slide action comment, will flag it for fixing :)
I really wish I was doing this all day every day whenever I ride... I think I rode 10 miles a day for the past 2 years rain or shine to and from my job and it would have been super rad to see the hundreds of miles ridden all added up!
So, sorry I don't have any immediate feedback yet but I am using your app and hope to have some good feedback soon:)
Here I am - http://ridewithgps.com/users/4151
Questions I have: 1) Is your home location or post code displayed to anyone else? If so could you by default "approximate" the location to others unless a user specifies that they want their precise home location shown. Reason: Bike theft. Don't tell someone precisely where your bikes are, especially when combined with data showing when you're likely not going to be there.
2) Upload photos of equipment/accessories. Add a Flickr picker... I immediately balked at having to go to Flickr, download a photo just to re-upload... actually a URL in addition to a browse would sort this out pretty simply.
3) I'm pretty sure I said to hide my email address, yet options implies it's visible.
4) Time-zone... set it according to home location.
5) Health page... weight inc' bicycle and gear? Nope, you should put the weight of equipment on the equipment page... this data varies depending on what bicycle I take out.
6) Health page... age instead of date of birth?
7) Route drawing... remember prior preferences. Avid cyclists will start to begrudge always telling the tool that they aren't "Driving".
8) Full screen mode is nice, as is the elevation cross-section. A few of the route segments seemed to be wrong but I suspect this is Google's doing and not yours (it would send me needlessly down side-streets and correcting it is a pain in the ass).
9) Route planning should allow for the addition of markers. Think of things like: Lunch stop, viewpoint, toilet break, etc.
10) Consider a way of displaying several routes on the same page... think of scenarios like the Dragon Ride and the short and long rides sharing a considerable chunk of the route (show specific routes on the same page). Also consider scenarios like "I'm going to ride Ventoux, allow me to visually compare the routes in that area" (show routes that meet a search criteria on the same page).
11) Haven't yet used the GPS functionality, but you appear to have the basics covered.
12) I liked the embedding widget... but it's ugly. Does it have to be in black? Could you not have a prettier logo?
13) Before I enter in too much data I'd like to see when it's no longer free. Even if everything is free now, you should let people know at what point it ceases to be free. The issue is... "Why should I invest my time and data with you when I don't know how long the functionality offered will be offered to me at the price you're giving it to me (currently free)?". Even if you just say, we're not sure, but in this ballpark when we feel that we have a finished product... you'd increase the amount of trust and faith I have in supplying you with so much data.
14) Route sharing, route widgets... go beyond the simple. Look at this scenario: http://www.londonfgss.com/thread31699.html A single ride, with over 100 participants, that recurs and changes direction... yet it's obvious it should only be stored as one route, but you should allow multiple people to say that they're riding a route in the future (scheduled event rides as well as individual rides in addition to route planning). There's a big space for being the people who can route plan sponsored rides let alone community rides and things like that.
15) I'd consider adding ride photos or something to pull in photos from Google and show those. If someone is remotely route-planning (prior to a foreign vacation) they will want to know whether the place looks good... i.e. This: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/23644 does not communicate the beauty of this: http://images.google.co.uk/images?q=nesque%20gorges
Overall it works really well with even the poorly mapped areas: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/23644
I run a large bike forum and will pimp it there and ask for more feedback for you: http://www.londonfgss.com/thread35392.html
There is no option to hide your location, however it doesn't get more specific than the zip/city even if you used an actual home address to set the zip/city/etc. However, I agree it should be hidden and consider it done. Easy to add, I'll do so today. I have talked to a few people about adding a 'fuzz' factor to routes, so that the start/end doesn't touch your house. I am not sure how I want to implement this yet, so it hasn't been done. but, it is being thought about!
Soon we will have photo geotagging on routes. Should be an easy enough task, it's just been on the todo while we make what we have more solid. I like the Flickr integration and will investigate it.
I will clarify the email address hiding stuff, thanks for pointing out the confusion.
I haven't investigated how to assign timezone based on zip/city, but I would be surprised if Google doesn't provide that with geolocation information.
Thanks for reminding me about the weight problem. I will flag it as needing change, so your base weight is on your profile and gear weight on the bike. Additionally, I know people that want to track individual weight per ride, so I'll have to probably default to a riders last ride weight, profile weight or inputted weight when they log an activity.
Route planning currently does allow markers, they are called 'course points' (according to garmin), but that name is not too friendly. I'll massage that, but, you can currently add markers around the route it's just a kludgy UI. I am reworking that really soon, after I finish my week long list of bug fixes/improvements.
We have been working on multiple route display/comparison, including segment matching (same leg of even different trips), but it's very rough and not forward to the public. It will be cleaned up, released and expanded soon.
I agree the embed is ugly, it's just been so easy to forget it exists! It's on the list, highlighted, including adding more options for the person doing the embedding.
The product will always be free, but to a limited ability. I agree however, we have not expressed that very well. I'll sit down with Zack and Cam and come up with some explicit language that will help people with this.
We plan on adding events, most likely as a premium feature. I would love to have cyclists register and appear on the list of an event, with some way of showing it in their profile. We have been talking about this for a while, but haven't nailed anything down. It needs to (and will) be done before spring, when the riding season starts really taking off.
Thanks again for sharing our site around and generating the exposure. Traffic is already way up from both this post and your forum, so it is MUCH appreciated. I'll jump on that forum as well and get involved with the discussion. Additionally, I'll bug you later today when I have implemented some of your suggestions.
Additionally, I am working on an android application for our site, which will allow direct interface/logging, negating the need to use mytracks then upload a file to your pc and then to us, etc etc.
It's a bit more work, but the results are much better, UK postcodes will actually work instead of being random.
Nice work!
Reminds me somewhat of http://www.mapmyrun.com/