My startup: An aesthetically pleasing, innovative Social network; Thoughts? | Hacker News Reader

My startup: An aesthetically pleasing, innovative Social network; Thoughts?

swupa.com

17 pointsSwupa24 comments

I don't have a huge interest in social networking, but the landing page doesn't give me any compelling reason to sign up or learn more (other than knowing you're an HN'er).

I might not be the target demographic (somebody without a Facebook account), but it's not immediately clear to me what your network does or why I should want to use it.

Excuse me for sounding harsh, but I don't find this "aesthetically pleasing".

Quite the opposite, it looks very, very badly designed. The number of different and seemingly totally randomly used fonts alone give me a headache.

The design seems to be a modified version of King Size, which is a popular theme on themeforest - http://themeforest.net/item/king-size-fullscreen-background-...

Its actually a good template (a friend of mine uses it for his photography) but I don't think it adapts well for social networking.

I'm guessing the idea of the theme is to show off the images created by the site owner, so it's well-suited for a photographer's site, but the images coming up on Swupa are borderline kitsch. A few I've seen are a breath away from Thomas Kinkade.

Worse, they tell me nothing about the site or why I'd want to use it. The effect is puzzlement.

I'm wondering what the research or testing process was that lead to this design. Or are we now taking part in the research and testing?

Wow. Good catch. When the main element of an app's pitch is that it looks great, it removes a lot of the cool factor to find out that the look was achieved by dropping in a canned theme.

As far as marketing plans: I am working on that. So far it's off to an interesting start!, we have 645 registered users currently and launched ~2 and 1/2 days ago. I am 19 years old & i've been working on this (myself) for the past few months now; however I've been coding for about 5 years now. Sadly, I've never been a marketing guru but I am actively working on getting Swupa out there now as much as physically possible, I have a decent amount of funds (all out of pocket) and have & will continue to cater hardware wise to the sites growth much before it's actually needed. Trying to really do this right :)

Fantastic. Off to a great start here :( Must have mistyped my password when creating the account because i can't login and tried about 100x. Proof its me still: http://www.swupa.com/admin/431/ --- Privacy policy: Something I was literally just thinking of. I will get that done now as I understand that is crucial for a community like this. On a side note, all info is completely optional by all means. Signing up only requires a Username & Password.. Just like here :)

I really like the background images but the UI in general feels really confusing to me. I click one button and something jumps up in the middle of my screen, I click something else and the background starts changing. You've obviously put a lot of work into the UI but I think you're at risk of confusing people. What age range are you targeting? I don't think anyone over 20 is going to want to use a website quite as flashy as this.

Cool man. Great design. But as I'm sure you know, you are entering a very tough market. You'll need more than superior aesthetics and good marketing. I might suggest targeting a particular social niche rather than the general population as a whole. Best of luck to you.

Thank you so much; Really, it means the world to me and gives me more motivation than ever (and it's hard as hell to motivate me at times) when I get any type of user feedback what so ever. I don't have any real-world contacts that do what I do (code/internet related work in general) that I can get feedback from, So needless to say I rarely get it for any of my projects.

Yes it's a very tough market; But I see nothing wrong with that, it just goes to show (in my eyes) that it's a good market to get into if it's that popular, but you have to make people love it & make it stand out otherwise you'll be another failed startup collecting e-dust.

I agreee, refreshing design! I'd focus as well on trying to develop a sharing segment, similar to the newsfeed of the entire community, where people can browse whats being shared. Also, just a thought, the awesome background in the beginning could be switched to an image rotator of pics uploaded by users with a public setting.. And a bottom part with most active public discussions or shares.. Sort of whats trending in the community? It would help the users visitings knowing why they should sign up, or at least me:) Did you do this just for fun or is there a specific issue you want to solve? Suerte.

Gracias! And very interesting ideas (thank you for them! I like way you think.) -- I definitely need to make it more active mainly for new users since it's still very small for a social network (675 users and counting... almost 3 days in though!) and it can seem a little quiet at first. Well, to be honest I got inspired to make this when Facebook started with the changes... I don't want to put in a cliche phrase about being the next big thing, but I just saw a lot of my friends and the general public pissed off and hating Facebooks changes, which led me to think you know what might as well really test my skills and see what I can do. I attempted a social network before myself (this is my second attempt) but that was about a year ago and It's stupid how much I've learned since then.

hey, send me an email to yurij.gabassi at gmail, love to bounce a few more ideas with you.

Hmmm... how are you going to market this? It needs to be marketed heavily in order to successful in a heavily crowded market. What's your value proposition aside from aesthetically pleasing? Btw, the design looks excellent :)

I agree about the design it is very clean. I also think you might have something there with the reddit integration.

Thanks :) And Xbox Connect is about to get a lot more awesome. The thing is though, I don't want to make it too geeky. The Reddit Connect/Xbox Connect features or benefits if you will, will only be prominently displayed if in fact you are connected; I don't want to be showing a bunch of Reddit or Xbox related stuff to people who don't give a crap about either; but I want to make it even more awesome for those who do.

You need to foster an enclave of early adopters before you become mainstream. They tend to be geeks.

Dayum, your signup sequence kicks ass. I especially like being immediately logged out after a password change (it needed doing) so I can type the new one in and say "yes" when the browser offers to remember it.

I'd rather have my browser know I change my password and save it for me. I think some websites already manage this.

Safari usually only picks up on it when you're actively signing in to a website.

Your landing page gives me zero reason to sign up, so I did not.

no privacy policy?

there is a link in the bottom of the black ribbon, i canno't paste it here because it uses some type of "lighbtox" to display.

Down-voters: the policy link was added after my comment.

The policy is excellent. Short, clear, understandable.

Why is the text for the word "privacy" such a dark grey (#262626) on the black background?

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