Ask HN: How would you go about marketing a new dev board?

My apologies if you find this harsh, but it's honest feedback.

My first impression of the site is that there's very little concrete information about what the product actually is. "Prototyping platform" -- is that like an Arduino? If so, why should I buy it when I can buy an Arduino for 1/4 the price? What are the tech specs? Is there any source code available? Who is my money going to, and how do I know that person is trustworthy?

Leaving aside the product itself, the website is pretty sloppy. For example, is the product called "BetaBoard" or "betaboard"? Are the add-on modules called "Grove", "Groove" or "grover"? (And where can I buy them?) Are those different from "BetaBlocks"? What is "Amteml studio IDE"? There are a bunch of other spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes.

The "Buy Now" button on the top of the page goes straight to PayPal with no storefront or confirmation of what's being ordered; the one at the bottom doesn't work and just reloads the page. The wiki contains no content except for "Welcome to the betablocks wiki!"

To be blunt, if I stumbled across this page randomly instead of seeing it in an "Ask HN" post, the lack of detail would lead me to assume it was a scam instead of an actual product. I would recommend putting together some content that explains what the board can do -- schematics, demo projects, documentation, videos, etc. That kind of information is much more important than a fancy website template with fade-in animations and parallax.

I hope this feedback was helpful. Good luck with your project!

My take is that people in the market for a development board don't want a slide show of hero images and don't care about animated images. They care about the numbers: capability, price, and lead time. All of those moving pictures are noise, not signal.

You're competing with the information density of this: http://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Texas-Instruments/MSP-EX... and probably not winning with your approach. Because people buying prototype boards are looking to buy from a source that understands their business.

Good luck.