7 ms·

Ask HN: Does my startup suck?

7 points by man_bear_pig 13y ago

www.reppio.com honest opinion/feedback would be appreciated. i want to know what i can do to make it better.

uchinerd 13y ago
I'm not much of a shopper, but this stuff looks cool. What's the process for inclusion on the site?
- man_bear_pig 13y ago
  inclusion? you mean onboarding vendors? a lot of hard work and sales efforts as well as some easier affiliate models.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
tehwebguy 13y ago
Did you make 2 fake accounts to comment on this? Both accounts that commented here were made 3 hours ago and have only commented on this post and your duplicate here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6781847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6781847
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Most likely yes. One of the two comments on this post was deleted. This is the weirdest attempt at reverse psychology growth hacking ever.
  - man_bear_pig 13y ago
    have you had a chance to check out the site? any advice there? 7,000 sign ups since we launched at noon but conversion ratios not that great. wondering what i can do to improve that (i.e. where should the sign-up modal pop up)... maybe that should be it's own thread.
    - minimaxir 13y ago
      1. I don't believe you received 7,000 legitimate signups in 4 hours. Not even startups which launch on TechCrunch receive that kind of engagement that quickly. 2. I would not recommend making another thread, since that is bordering on spammy.
      - man_bear_pig 13y ago
        1. you are wrong about tc bc some actually do. (however, legitimate sign ups - you're probably right but how many are legitimate sign ups from tc in the first place. next how many of those legitimate sign ups become return, loyal users? very low %). ask the guys at fab.com what % of their 150,000 launch users came from tc. < 2%. 2. i'm a lifestyle site. why do i care about going to techcrunch or any other tech site to debut my site? it's irrelevant. we also had a landing page up for 2 months while working on the site to grab email addresses where we mixed giveaways and share options to get users. how many of these are "legitimate?" 7,000 are technically speaking; out of the much greater number that just input their email addresses and has yet to verify. time well tell if they're "legitimate" - but shooting for more than 10% at max is probably out of the question. nevertheless, don't question my numbers. why can you not help by answering my question? isn't that what hn is for? if you downvote a guy who had 1 fake account set up to get things moving (which in fact i technically didn't. just had one of my friends sign up and comment so the aforementioned comment is not valid). if you cry foul play than you should never vote on reddit since the entire site launched with fake comments to begin with. you should also go on and comment on dropbox acquisition of mailbox bc mailbox's counter. yeup that was fake. you should then monitor techcrunch every time a tinder article gets published and comment there since the entire supply side was created with fake hot girls to begin with. oh yeah btw. techcocktail. their monthly stupid competition that is the core part of their business? it's all fake. mechanical turk wins the race on the last day of voting after 11am. true story.
        wh-uws 13y ago
        how did you get 7,000 people that fast though? Legitimately curious
Geee 13y ago
Ditch that members-only bullshit.
- man_bear_pig 13y ago
  haha. i've been thinking about that. what do you suggest i do to get users registered? did it really make you not sign up?
  - darylfritz 13y ago
    If your product catalog is good enough, users will sign up. Don't force Facebook authentication either. Also, I can't tell if your site is like Pinterest, where I flag things I'm interested in, or like JackThreads, where the store's product selection is nicely curated.
    - man_bear_pig 13y ago
      it's like a mixture of both. it's more like a local version of fancy. we have to curate bc to be honest 90% of local shopping is crap. so we do the hard work of finding only quality vendors. then from there users can collect and share the things they like and follow stores (to get updates on new arrivals and exclusive deals). vision is to link this browsing when bored model to geo location mobile device so whenever you want to go shopping you can see the shops you liked, items you liked (as well as your friends) and then be able to go into them. we give options for both fb and email but i guess it wasn't clear. power of fb is that one can easily share with each other (product pics as well as comments - if you look at our comment box - you can @mention and it'll get communicated to that person so it reduces the friction to sharing). thanks so much for your input. last question: did you think that the product catalog was unique and well-balanced? what did you like or not like?
      - blueicelt2004 13y ago
        Agreed remove the member only stuff. I went to your site, clicked and found only member stuff and that I needed to signup and bounced.
epc 13y ago
Seems pretty much every link which would tell me something about your inventory/stores/whatever leads to the signup page. I don't sign up for services which don't tell me anything of value of why I should sign up for them. Your photo of NYC on the homepage seems to be ~18 months out of date. WTC1 is finished as is WTC4
- man_bear_pig 13y ago
  that is a pretty fking good observation on wtc. wow. the value is that you get to see inventory that you can't find anywhere else and all consolidated onto a single platform. 500 shops. all in 1 place from ny, la, chicago. is it better to show the inventory? or have a deeper landing page with more info? we have 10,000 curated lifestyle products with a catalog and guide. what is the best way to communicate that without getting to wordy? when i had the signup modal two steps in, noone wanted to sign up bc they can get most of their daily dose of cool items fed to them on 1 page. would it be better to have sign up modal pop up after x time? would that help even if it was 10 seconds?
  - epc 13y ago
    This is an extremely personal opinion but: I truly detest the trend towards the page-obscuring modal dialog box, whether it's an account creation signup or get-this-newsletter or whatever. Just my $0.02. However there's extensive UX research that the "you must create an account to continue" step in e–commerce is the single greatest reason for shopping cart abandonment (it's not quite apples-to-apples for your site but consider it). As far as communicating: I just so no reason to interact with the service, it seems like a splash page with a sign up. I get no sense of the sorts of stores you represent, the inventory of items available. Why should I trust it? Why should I do business here? I'm probably not your typical user, I live in NYC and frequently travel to Chicago so the other question in my head is: why would I use this when I probably can walk down the street (metaphorically) and shop direct? What's the value add to me? What do I get by adding your service as an intermediary between me and the store? Put another way: if I were to come across this site outside of HN commentary, I see nothing that would cause me to interact with it. You don't have much if any press to go by to judge reputation. Your twitter feed is mostly launch promotions. Your tumblr feed could be interesting but all of the images link just to your homepage, so even if I had an account I'd have to rummage around to find the item I just clicked on. I went ahead and created an account and what I find are: - yep, the tumblr links just go to your homepage - you have my gender but still display dresses to me - I clicked through both stores and items and: meh, I don't see a strong value here to buying here. A final comment: you don't have an SSL side set up on your site. There is zero chance I'll "add a credit card" to a site running without SSL.
matttheatheist 13y ago
Uhhhh... clearly I'm not in your target demographic. But as someone whose girlfriend spends hours online browsing for the latest fashion crap, I think you might be on to something.
- man_bear_pig 13y ago
  "latest fashion crap!" i love it. your gf must be hot then. btw. can i ask you if you were deterred in signing up bc of the modal that popped up? other people here seemed to be pissed. i've tried to test so many different ways. it seems like if there is a story written about us (pr piece) conversion skyrockets. otherwise, conversion goes down. but if i show inventory and other parts of the site, a lot of people are lazy bc we have a forever scroll function on the shop page so people just browse what they want for 5 minutes and they leave. any insight would be super helpful. thanks for the compliment!
bbissoon 13y ago
Pro User Interface Designer/Hacker Here: If you want to increase engagement, ditch the viewing of your catalog by way of sign up. There's tons of techniques to allow your users to browse what you offer and limit purchasing to members only. 1. Having to sign up to see what you all had turned me off from the jump. Just skipped it. If your product isn't a necessity - don't make registering to use it one. 2. Kill unnecessary fade ins and outs like on the menu structure at the top. Give me a solid look that's as short and fast as a typical user's attention span. 3. As many others have stated, kill the facebook only registration. It's there for a convenience, but making that mandatory is a buzz kill. Facebook isn't for everyone. When those 3 things are addressed, I'll happily create an account and survey the rest :) I can't comment on the usefulness because GILT and Fab and the flash sale craze has finally killed itself, but if you market yourself to the right hipsters, I don't see why this venture wouldn't grow in those locations. Think Hyperbeast.
- man_bear_pig 13y ago
  Amazing feedback. Thank you so much. 1. social commerce sites typically have a fraction of the conversion rates to normal e-commerce sites. e-mail re-engagement is very effective for return visits. even a simple best of the week gets high open/click through rates. I do agree with you right off the bat is not ideal. However, given the space I play in, I cannot be in the etsy transaction phase to get sign ups --> see fancy (they now have 10m users - what is your opinion of their strategy)? when i showed the first click through page for 10 seconds , my bounce rate dropped to 60% from 70%. do you know what i should be shooting for? 2. great. thanks for the insight. will do. 3. what's interesting is that i have the email sign up option but i guess it's not clear enough. only thing is fb is great from a social user acquisition standpoint. there's embedded virality aspects within the site such as collection and commenting that works great in acquiring super targeted users (their friends). 70/30 of our users opt with the facebook sign up. but you seem to say that we should make email sign up much more prominent bc sign up is better than no sign up. maybe like a wanelo.com look? do you know the efficacy of having google+ / twitter as well or stick to the most effective one on my platform and then just give email. i'm not in the flash sale business. i'm in the discovery commerce business (what i want to do is create a platform for local retailers to properly market their products/stores without having to get into a groupon scenario to get discovered. gilt/fab naturally has to move toward a marketplace concept because of growth and market conditions: need to move bigger amount of inventory and in a booming stock market scenario, inventory with good deals is not that readily available. thanks again so much for your comments and i hope to incorporate a lot of the changes as fast as possible. btw do you know anyone who is a pro tablet/mobile/cross browser interface guy that can make my site usable in other states than just laptop on chrome/firefox? my guys do not have that experience. also if you would like please use the username: rebecca@reppio.com password: guest to peruse the site. your feedback has been super helpful so far.
davidsmith8900 13y ago
- No it doesn't suck.
- man_bear_pig 13y ago
  thanks. what would it take to go from "not sucking" to you wanting to recommending it to someone... what do you think is missing?
davidsmith8900 13y ago
- No it doesn't suck.
ereckers 13y ago
Browsing from an iPad is a hair pulling experience. The login is bad enogh, but the fact that your login/signup modals simply dont work doesn't inspire confidence. I could see never returning.
- man_bear_pig 13y ago
  thank you for your honesty. i haven't had time to optimize for mobile / tablet. just wanted to get it to market as soon as it was laptop friendly. if you don't mind, i would really appreciate it if you would give it another try on your laptop as i respect the honesty in your answer. please use the site using the following login info- login: rebecca@reppio.com password: guest thanks.

7 points by man_bear_pig 13y ago

www.reppio.com honest opinion/feedback would be appreciated. i want to know what i can do to make it better.

uchinerd 13y ago

I'm not much of a shopper, but this stuff looks cool. What's the process for inclusion on the site?

man_bear_pig 13y ago
inclusion? you mean onboarding vendors? a lot of hard work and sales efforts as well as some easier affiliate models.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

tehwebguy 13y ago

Did you make 2 fake accounts to comment on this? Both accounts that commented here were made 3 hours ago and have only commented on this post and your duplicate here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6781847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6781847

minimaxir 13y ago
Most likely yes. One of the two comments on this post was deleted. This is the weirdest attempt at reverse psychology growth hacking ever.
- man_bear_pig 13y ago
  have you had a chance to check out the site? any advice there? 7,000 sign ups since we launched at noon but conversion ratios not that great. wondering what i can do to improve that (i.e. where should the sign-up modal pop up)... maybe that should be it's own thread.
  - minimaxir 13y ago
    1. I don't believe you received 7,000 legitimate signups in 4 hours. Not even startups which launch on TechCrunch receive that kind of engagement that quickly. 2. I would not recommend making another thread, since that is bordering on spammy.
    - man_bear_pig 13y ago
      1. you are wrong about tc bc some actually do. (however, legitimate sign ups - you're probably right but how many are legitimate sign ups from tc in the first place. next how many of those legitimate sign ups become return, loyal users? very low %). ask the guys at fab.com what % of their 150,000 launch users came from tc. < 2%. 2. i'm a lifestyle site. why do i care about going to techcrunch or any other tech site to debut my site? it's irrelevant. we also had a landing page up for 2 months while working on the site to grab email addresses where we mixed giveaways and share options to get users. how many of these are "legitimate?" 7,000 are technically speaking; out of the much greater number that just input their email addresses and has yet to verify. time well tell if they're "legitimate" - but shooting for more than 10% at max is probably out of the question. nevertheless, don't question my numbers. why can you not help by answering my question? isn't that what hn is for? if you downvote a guy who had 1 fake account set up to get things moving (which in fact i technically didn't. just had one of my friends sign up and comment so the aforementioned comment is not valid). if you cry foul play than you should never vote on reddit since the entire site launched with fake comments to begin with. you should also go on and comment on dropbox acquisition of mailbox bc mailbox's counter. yeup that was fake. you should then monitor techcrunch every time a tinder article gets published and comment there since the entire supply side was created with fake hot girls to begin with. oh yeah btw. techcocktail. their monthly stupid competition that is the core part of their business? it's all fake. mechanical turk wins the race on the last day of voting after 11am. true story.
      - wh-uws 13y ago
        how did you get 7,000 people that fast though? Legitimately curious

Geee 13y ago

Ditch that members-only bullshit.

man_bear_pig 13y ago
haha. i've been thinking about that. what do you suggest i do to get users registered? did it really make you not sign up?
- darylfritz 13y ago
  If your product catalog is good enough, users will sign up. Don't force Facebook authentication either. Also, I can't tell if your site is like Pinterest, where I flag things I'm interested in, or like JackThreads, where the store's product selection is nicely curated.
  - man_bear_pig 13y ago
    it's like a mixture of both. it's more like a local version of fancy. we have to curate bc to be honest 90% of local shopping is crap. so we do the hard work of finding only quality vendors. then from there users can collect and share the things they like and follow stores (to get updates on new arrivals and exclusive deals). vision is to link this browsing when bored model to geo location mobile device so whenever you want to go shopping you can see the shops you liked, items you liked (as well as your friends) and then be able to go into them. we give options for both fb and email but i guess it wasn't clear. power of fb is that one can easily share with each other (product pics as well as comments - if you look at our comment box - you can @mention and it'll get communicated to that person so it reduces the friction to sharing). thanks so much for your input. last question: did you think that the product catalog was unique and well-balanced? what did you like or not like?
    - blueicelt2004 13y ago
      Agreed remove the member only stuff. I went to your site, clicked and found only member stuff and that I needed to signup and bounced.

epc 13y ago

Seems pretty much every link which would tell me something about your inventory/stores/whatever leads to the signup page. I don't sign up for services which don't tell me anything of value of why I should sign up for them. Your photo of NYC on the homepage seems to be ~18 months out of date. WTC1 is finished as is WTC4

man_bear_pig 13y ago
that is a pretty fking good observation on wtc. wow. the value is that you get to see inventory that you can't find anywhere else and all consolidated onto a single platform. 500 shops. all in 1 place from ny, la, chicago. is it better to show the inventory? or have a deeper landing page with more info? we have 10,000 curated lifestyle products with a catalog and guide. what is the best way to communicate that without getting to wordy? when i had the signup modal two steps in, noone wanted to sign up bc they can get most of their daily dose of cool items fed to them on 1 page. would it be better to have sign up modal pop up after x time? would that help even if it was 10 seconds?
- epc 13y ago
  This is an extremely personal opinion but: I truly detest the trend towards the page-obscuring modal dialog box, whether it's an account creation signup or get-this-newsletter or whatever. Just my $0.02. However there's extensive UX research that the "you must create an account to continue" step in e–commerce is the single greatest reason for shopping cart abandonment (it's not quite apples-to-apples for your site but consider it). As far as communicating: I just so no reason to interact with the service, it seems like a splash page with a sign up. I get no sense of the sorts of stores you represent, the inventory of items available. Why should I trust it? Why should I do business here? I'm probably not your typical user, I live in NYC and frequently travel to Chicago so the other question in my head is: why would I use this when I probably can walk down the street (metaphorically) and shop direct? What's the value add to me? What do I get by adding your service as an intermediary between me and the store? Put another way: if I were to come across this site outside of HN commentary, I see nothing that would cause me to interact with it. You don't have much if any press to go by to judge reputation. Your twitter feed is mostly launch promotions. Your tumblr feed could be interesting but all of the images link just to your homepage, so even if I had an account I'd have to rummage around to find the item I just clicked on. I went ahead and created an account and what I find are: - yep, the tumblr links just go to your homepage - you have my gender but still display dresses to me - I clicked through both stores and items and: meh, I don't see a strong value here to buying here. A final comment: you don't have an SSL side set up on your site. There is zero chance I'll "add a credit card" to a site running without SSL.

matttheatheist 13y ago

Uhhhh... clearly I'm not in your target demographic. But as someone whose girlfriend spends hours online browsing for the latest fashion crap, I think you might be on to something.

man_bear_pig 13y ago
"latest fashion crap!" i love it. your gf must be hot then. btw. can i ask you if you were deterred in signing up bc of the modal that popped up? other people here seemed to be pissed. i've tried to test so many different ways. it seems like if there is a story written about us (pr piece) conversion skyrockets. otherwise, conversion goes down. but if i show inventory and other parts of the site, a lot of people are lazy bc we have a forever scroll function on the shop page so people just browse what they want for 5 minutes and they leave. any insight would be super helpful. thanks for the compliment!

bbissoon 13y ago

Pro User Interface Designer/Hacker Here: If you want to increase engagement, ditch the viewing of your catalog by way of sign up. There's tons of techniques to allow your users to browse what you offer and limit purchasing to members only. 1. Having to sign up to see what you all had turned me off from the jump. Just skipped it. If your product isn't a necessity - don't make registering to use it one. 2. Kill unnecessary fade ins and outs like on the menu structure at the top. Give me a solid look that's as short and fast as a typical user's attention span. 3. As many others have stated, kill the facebook only registration. It's there for a convenience, but making that mandatory is a buzz kill. Facebook isn't for everyone. When those 3 things are addressed, I'll happily create an account and survey the rest :) I can't comment on the usefulness because GILT and Fab and the flash sale craze has finally killed itself, but if you market yourself to the right hipsters, I don't see why this venture wouldn't grow in those locations. Think Hyperbeast.

man_bear_pig 13y ago
Amazing feedback. Thank you so much. 1. social commerce sites typically have a fraction of the conversion rates to normal e-commerce sites. e-mail re-engagement is very effective for return visits. even a simple best of the week gets high open/click through rates. I do agree with you right off the bat is not ideal. However, given the space I play in, I cannot be in the etsy transaction phase to get sign ups --> see fancy (they now have 10m users - what is your opinion of their strategy)? when i showed the first click through page for 10 seconds , my bounce rate dropped to 60% from 70%. do you know what i should be shooting for? 2. great. thanks for the insight. will do. 3. what's interesting is that i have the email sign up option but i guess it's not clear enough. only thing is fb is great from a social user acquisition standpoint. there's embedded virality aspects within the site such as collection and commenting that works great in acquiring super targeted users (their friends). 70/30 of our users opt with the facebook sign up. but you seem to say that we should make email sign up much more prominent bc sign up is better than no sign up. maybe like a wanelo.com look? do you know the efficacy of having google+ / twitter as well or stick to the most effective one on my platform and then just give email. i'm not in the flash sale business. i'm in the discovery commerce business (what i want to do is create a platform for local retailers to properly market their products/stores without having to get into a groupon scenario to get discovered. gilt/fab naturally has to move toward a marketplace concept because of growth and market conditions: need to move bigger amount of inventory and in a booming stock market scenario, inventory with good deals is not that readily available. thanks again so much for your comments and i hope to incorporate a lot of the changes as fast as possible. btw do you know anyone who is a pro tablet/mobile/cross browser interface guy that can make my site usable in other states than just laptop on chrome/firefox? my guys do not have that experience. also if you would like please use the username: rebecca@reppio.com password: guest to peruse the site. your feedback has been super helpful so far.

davidsmith8900 13y ago

- No it doesn't suck.

man_bear_pig 13y ago
thanks. what would it take to go from "not sucking" to you wanting to recommending it to someone... what do you think is missing?

davidsmith8900 13y ago

- No it doesn't suck.

ereckers 13y ago

Browsing from an iPad is a hair pulling experience. The login is bad enogh, but the fact that your login/signup modals simply dont work doesn't inspire confidence. I could see never returning.

man_bear_pig 13y ago
thank you for your honesty. i haven't had time to optimize for mobile / tablet. just wanted to get it to market as soon as it was laptop friendly. if you don't mind, i would really appreciate it if you would give it another try on your laptop as i respect the honesty in your answer. please use the site using the following login info- login: rebecca@reppio.com password: guest thanks.