Comment by imperialWicket | Hacker News Reader

Comment by imperialWicket | Hacker News Reader

First and foremost, congrats on shipping your mvp (even though it went a little late by your original timeline), I hope it sustains well. Like others have said, the video is great and design is consistent and appealing - great work and thanks for sharing your story.

A few thoughts I had while perusing eval.me:

1. There doesn't seem to be information about what charities you partnered with on the anonymous site pages. I suppose this could be contractual, but it was one of the first questions I had.

2. I was confused by the use of "Sign Up" and "Sign In" together; at first glance I thought there was an issue with your site and there were two Sign Up buttons. Maybe "Sign Up" and "Login" or "Register" and "Sign In"?

3. I haven't investigated thoroughly, but wouldn't a charitable incentive inherently skew your survey pool? Although upon consideration, a product-based incentive may do the same thing - just in a different direction.

This is great feedback. Thank you.

1. Somebody else had mentioned this and I am working on it. Currently, the list of charities will show up when you create the survey and you have to select 5 of 20 charities.

2. This is a great suggestion. I wil A/B test whether Register or Sign Up gets more sign ups to be able to decide which is better.

3. Product based incentives are a great idea. I am not entirely sure how I would implement that though.

As for skewing the survey pool, I would argue the pool is already skewed towards people who either love or hate your product.

I think the charity component skews it less because the act of giving your time and opinion is very similar to the act of giving to charity. Hence, more of your customers can connect with that charitable act than say, entering a drawing for a prize.

This is ancillary to the effort, but I think it's interesting. So here goes, I am not certain about skewing the pool less than more prize-based incentives -- as opposed to somewhat evenly. However, I definitely agree with the implied concept that the resulting pool will yield more carefully completed (and hence more useful/accurate) survey results.

And before we deviate too far from the core point of the thread, I'll simply echo my earlier sentiment regarding the act of quitting for a startup: great job so far, and good luck moving forward.

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