I just launched a site with hardly any features | Hacker News Reader

I just launched a site with hardly any features

tumblr.swgoof.com

20 pointsswGooF24 comments

No one will like a site without a few more of those features your site doesn't have. There's the old phrase "it's whats on the inside that counts", but with first impressions, that's simply just not true.

I look at your site, and I see its a poorly designed, poorly implemented site. For most people, that's enough to immediately leave the site, and not come back. First impressions are extremely important, and your site gives off a terrible first impression. When someone sees someone link to your site again, they will immediately think to themselves "this website again? I hated it my first time there." and then you will have to convince them that it is worth it to go back. It takes a lot more effort to convince someone your site is good later on, than take the time and effort to make it good to begin with.

Why don't I immediately see when I go to the homepage how I can submit my own idea? No, I have to go to an idea first (at least from what I can tell) to submit an idea.

Why do I need to click into an idea in order to vote it up/down? Put a plus next to the title, which will expand text below it, and then have the Good/Bad buttons next to the idea.

The Free CSS template makes your website seem cheap. It immediately shows that you haven't thought about personalizing the site for your users, but rather phoned it in in order to put your site out there.

Never expect people to like a site that has shown that no effort was put into it to begin with, to justify to yourself to put more effort into said site. The phrase "I am not going to spend time implementing features for a site no one will use" boils my blood, because you as an entrepreneur are the showman: if you'll only do a song and dance after people say they loved you, even without knowing you, you'll never get a gig ever.

You get people to care about your site, not the other way around. You've shown that you don't care about your site, and so thus other people will care even less.

There's a weird assumption in your comment, eggbrain, that swgoof "expect[s] people to like [this] site".

I agree with the factual content of everything you say, but the tone and the assumptions and the context seem way off-base.

There's nothing wrong with sharing a low-investment project, and letting it have whatever success or failure it has. The problem comes with false promises, false entitlement, and to a lesser degree false expectations, but I see no reason to believe any of those are happening here. So what's the problem?

That would lead me to ask, why is he making the site? Apparently not to make money. If it's for an honest exploration of good ideas, people are going to have to use it. If they don't even 'like' it, I presume they won't use it.

I could make a site that had nothing than an animated picture of a duck spinning around on the middle of the page, but I wouldn't expect people on Hacker News to think it was meaningful.

I originally started the site because I was planning to add the features it is currently missing. I got side tracked and never finished. So instead of letting the code die, I decided to launch it, as is.

It turned out to not be a very good idea. If I added the missing features, would you find it meaningful?

Hey, it's a solid idea to be built upon. I like what I take the point of this post to be, which is just go ahead and release what you have instead of waiting forever. It's actually a very 37-signals/paul grahamy sort of message.

I do think you should keep working on it, and add what it takes to make a useful little tool. Some people here have decent suggestions.

Thanks jholman. I was sharing a low-investment project.

There is nothing fancy about the site, but it doesn't look that bad.

I thought it was an interesting idea and I would go back if I heard about it again. For a site like this you don't need everyone to love it, you just need a few boosters who like the idea to give you some validation.

That being said - I'm not sure of the value for me to go back again. Maybe if there was some way to track my favorite ideas or see people who start working on them that would be kind of neat.

Thanks for the nice comment. Tracking your favorite ideas would be a good feature.

eggbrain - First off, thank you for taking the time to write a well-thought response (that is not intended to be sarcastic). Nearly everything in your reply is true. I had started the project a while back and quit on it. I then decided to launch what I had and see what happened. jholman is correct when he says that I did not really expect people to like the site. I honestly had no idea what people would think. That being said, it got lots of hits today. Way way more than I expected. I had to shut it down because of the spam. I was hoping to get a few hits (maybe 50-100) and see if I should resurrect the project. Unfortunately, it got so many hits that I think you pointed out the problem, "I hated it my first time there." Now, I am not sure what to do with it?

Thanks again.

Interesting idea (that is, launching the site with hardly any features). Good way to make sure the product doesn't become vaporware.

The idea sounded interesting to me as well, but in hindsight it was not such a good idea. It got very spammy very fast.

"Social Media Sharing Links - It is not easy for a person to Facebook like or tweet an idea"

Sign me up!

Thanks, I should probably add those links. That is a pretty easy one.

Perhaps this is whooshing over my head right now, but I meant that I prefer websites without social media integration.

I don't like that they slow down the web, I don't like that they track me, and I don't like that they centralize a large part of the web's content to a few number of companies.

Sorry, I misunderstood your comment.

The site is exactly as it should be. Simple , straightforward, not fancy UI tricks, good color palette. overall I understood and trusted the site in 30 seconds, and browsed it for 5 minutes. If you add things too much you will become an also-ran in a crowded space. Run with it. my 2cts!

Thanks, the site is live again but people cannot add new content anymore. I am glad you liked it.

A nice idea. Some folks may be nervous about expressing ideas without an NDA involved, but do we want their ideas anyway? :-)

The design looked nice, but it was not intuitively obvious how to get back from an idea to the main screen.

Thanks, I know the navigation needs some work. Also, the site is not for people that need an NDA. The privacy policy is simple: everything is public.

Yeah, eeeeverything about the navigation needs work, and it seems prime candidate for early minimal work.

How do you get a new random idea in category X without clicking Back and then re-selecting the category? Without voting, I mean.

Open-source the site source code on github! :D

Yes, I know the nav is bad.

It is on github:

https://github.com/swGooF/34ideas

One feature that feels kinda necessary while the ideas are sparse is the ability to skip (or not have repeating) ideas. Otherwise, I feel like I've already read over all the submissions in just a few minutes.

Personally, I just hoped people would vote multiple times on the same idea. Anyhow, you may have seen all the ideas in just a few minutes. When you left this comment there were not many ideas.

Thanks

I made the site non-functional. It was getting bombarded with spam.

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