[HN Gopher] Show HN: Place to support and validate early startup...
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Place to support and validate early startup ideas
I made this for people like myself who keep a list of ideas for
apps / startups. I also made it for people who are curious to see
what projects others have "in their drawer"... and who may want to
have a say in which idea should see the light of day.
https://ideas.dynamate.io/ The site allows creators to anonymously
showcase their idea: Title. Description text. Maybe some
mockups... I've tried to make it so that it's quick and easy to
just dump an idea in there that's been sitting on some list of
yours for months - and hopefully get some feedback on it. If
someone else on the site sees your idea and likes it, they have
various choices of showing support: They can upvote. They can
subscribe to progress updates. They can tell you why they want it
(there's a questionaire that is loosely based on "The Mom Test").
And they can even send you money as encouragement. As the owner of
an idea, you can see how many unique upvotes, subscriptions, etc.
your idea has received. You get a nice table of all the ideas you
have on the site, sorted by feedback score. Also, in the case of
non-anonymous subscriptions or donations, you can get in touch with
early supporters. Publicly, though, neither upvotes nor any other
form of support for an idea are shown. This is so you cannot go to
the site and just grab the most popular ideas from there. And also
so that each idea can get the same amount of exposure and
attention. There are many great books out there on validating
startup ideas. And my site won't be a replacement for those.
Rather, it's designed as a low hanging fruit to get your idea out
there. I hope some of you find it useful. Feel free to test it out
on the ideas I've posted on there. And perhaps share some of your
own! Also curious to hear your feedback both on the idea itself
and the execution so far. The site is still early beta. Please let
me know if you run into any bugs. Also, and ideas how I can make it
better would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Author : leobg
Score : 43 points
Date : 2022-08-21 12:54 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ideas.dynamate.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (ideas.dynamate.io)
| hkgjjgjfjfjfjf wrote:
| spking wrote:
| This was executed nicely. The ability to include screenshots, a
| video or link is especially helpful to communicate a concept.
|
| One idea that could be cool would be some kind of forced ranking
| of features/functionality that idea posters could include so that
| interested users could indicate what would be most important to
| them. That would take it beyond high-level elevator pitch and
| into feature-product fit insights.
| leobg wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words.
|
| Let me see if I understand your suggestion correctly. You want
| users to be able to not only support the idea as it is, but to
| also be able so suggestion additional features, or to indicate
| what parts of the idea are most important to them.
|
| Right now, a user who wants to suggest specific features would
| select "share my contact info with the owner", or they'd fill
| out the "use case questionaire". In both cases, you as the
| owner of the idea would be able to reach out to them (an d
| they'd have indicated that they'd actually want you to do so).
| Though, as it is now, you'd be doing that outside of the
| platform then (say, through email, Zoom, or a Telegram group
| perhaps).
| peyton wrote:
| Not useful to post ideas where your customers aren't tbh
| [deleted]
| niemal_dev wrote:
| While it is nice to have a platform to explore ideas and talk
| about them, your point is very accurate.
| leobg wrote:
| I agree.
|
| However, when you post your idea, you also get a link that you
| can share elsewhere. In this case, you're essentially using the
| site as a quick and easy hosting service for your idea. And you
| get to piggyback on the built-in options for visitors to leave
| feedback (both anonymous and personal).
|
| If you have several ideas, and one of them is getting
| significantly better results, you'll have a lot more motivation
| to invest the time, energy and money to set up a more in-depth
| test for that idea.
| cdiamand wrote:
| Hey! This looks a lot like my old project https://oppslist.com -
| open them side by side ;)
|
| (which I no longer maintain, and yes I know it throws a warning
| when you open it)
|
| Best of luck with the platform! It's an interesting space, but a
| challenging one.
| leobg wrote:
| Oh wow. Even the same color! This is hilarious! :)
|
| Boy. You got lots of ideas on there. And you've got a slightly
| different angle, if I see it correctly. It's actually business
| owners who are posting things they'd like to get done.
|
| I imagine that it's hard to get businesses to tell you what
| they need. I imagine that they often not only understand the
| problem they have, or even the fact that they have one. Much
| less how it could be solved.
|
| Was that the challenge that you faced, and which caused you to
| give up on the project?
|
| It looks really well done. You must have spent many weeks on
| this!
| nicofo wrote:
| Hello! I have been working on something similar, in RoR, I have
| already implemented social logins, comments, gallery, rating and
| other things to help inventors reach people to help them.
|
| Greetings!
| huhtenberg wrote:
| I suspect it's not supposed to look like this -
| https://i.imgur.com/L4RJ5Ag.png
|
| This is in Firefox on Windows.
| leobg wrote:
| You're right. Looks like the header is missing. And the "thumbs
| up" icon is way too big. I'll look into it tomorrow. Thanks for
| sharing this bug, really appreciated!
| hlandau wrote:
| Nice site. I like the design. The speed of page loads is
| particularly noticeable to me; what does the stack look like?
|
| There's no visible border on the username/password fields on the
| login page for me, you might want to fix that.
| leobg wrote:
| Yeah, I'll fix those borders.
|
| Thanks for the compliments. Pretty much my first time making a
| proper app, actually. I stuck close the the Hacker News design.
|
| I used Flask and HTMX.
| jstanley wrote:
| I'm trying to sign up for an account, but when I click "create
| account" it just tells me "This field is required" next to each
| field, even though I filled in all 3 fields.
|
| EDIT: It's worked now. I think it didn't like "jstanley" as a
| username, but has accepted "James Stanley". Maybe it requires a
| space in the username field??? That's an... unusual choice.
|
| A few more things:
|
| Once I'd submitted an idea I got a page saying "Thank you for
| your submission", and it gave me a URL to copy to share with
| others, but the URL was "http://127.0.0.1:5500/item?id=25" - this
| probably wants fixing on the public version.
|
| Also it says my idea was submitted "2 days ago" even though it
| was only in the last few minutes (maybe the server's clock is
| wrong?)
|
| The "following" page leads to "Internal Server Error".
|
| This site is a really interesting idea, nice work. I like that
| the ideas are shown anonymously.
|
| I clicked to provide contact details to my own idea, but I can't
| find anywhere that I actually access the contact details that
| have been provided to the idea. Does this exist yet?
| leobg wrote:
| Thank you, James, for the nice words.
|
| I'll look into that names thing. It's not at all expected
| behavior, and "jstanley" should have been working fine.
| Something is off there. I'll fix it when I get to it tomorrow.
|
| I'll also fix the sharing link, the "2 days ago" thing, and the
| server error. I'm a bit embarrassed about those issues. Should
| have caught them before posting here. Thank you for pointing
| them out!
|
| Regarding the contact info thing: Exactly. I haven't actually
| implemented that feature yet. I had done a few Show HNs before,
| and they went nowhere. So I tried to stick to making the bare
| essentials work, and fixing the rest "in post", as they say...
| .
|
| What's missing is only the display. The actual sharing is
| already recorded in the database. So far, you can see under
| "ideas" a table of all of your ideas, along with the counts for
| upvotes, subscriptions, shared email addresses, and
| questionaires. What I need to add is a way for you to click on
| these numbers, to actually be able to open the questionaires,
| see the contact info, or send out the update. I'm going to add
| this tomorrow.
|
| In your case, it might not actually appear, because you clicked
| on your own idea. And I think I may filter or block upvotes
| etc. on one's own ideas. (Then again, I can see that one wants
| to see that it really works. So perhaps I'll leave it and add
| an option to hide or show your own test interactions.)
| davnicwil wrote:
| > Maybe it requires a space in the username field
|
| I was curious and thought it may be more likely that the
| requirement is the first letter must be a capital letter.
|
| Tried out some combinations and that is the case (pun intended
| :-)
|
| Not sure how I spotted this as being the likely thing, just
| intuition I guess from doing this kind of thing for long
| enough. For the OP, my guess at the cause would be a bad regex
| on username, if it's not intended.
|
| Also for the OP, I signed up with a couple of usernames
| starting dw with matching emails, if you want to delete those
| accounts :-).
| leobg wrote:
| Thank you for the detective work! I'll look into this. This
| is not intended behavior at all. In fact, my own username on
| the platform is leobg - so, no space, no caps. Whatever it
| is, I'll fix it!
|
| Also, thanks for adding a marker to your test domains. That
| was really thoughtful of you.
| mgl wrote:
| This looks really great but eventually there is one place to
| validate your startup which is The Market.
|
| No encouraging words from strangers will replace a candid
| critical feedback from someone who is in position to consider
| buying your product.
|
| My 2c: Stop sharing, start selling.
| tammer2022 wrote:
| Having built a successful web service I know two things: One,
| there is a long journey from idea to having something ready to
| test in the marketplace. This sort of site is great for that
| phase.
|
| Second: Those of us who have been through the roller coaster of
| entrepreneurship know how "encouraging words from strangers"
| are often just the tonic you need psychologically to keep going
| because in the real world the "candid feedback" can often sap
| your morale.
|
| Love the thing. I'll use it for real.
| leobg wrote:
| Thanks for the kind words! Hadn't expected this at all on HN.
|
| I generally also agree that the real test is the marketplace,
| i.e. real customers voting with their wallets. But of course
| you're right: Seeing that someone actually cares is sometimes
| worth more. Or rather, is what's needed to get to the stage
| where you actually dare to launch something on the actual
| marketplace.
|
| My own use case is that I have a list of 100+ ideas. There
| are a few I have some degree of conviction in. Enough at
| least to put together an MVP that I can put to the test. But
| all the others? I'll never find out. For all I know, there
| could be one idea among them that wants to grow big, and that
| has a huge marketplace. But I cannot see that. And on my
| list, it would simply fade away from me. So the idea of
| having a space where I can just dump such ideas and have a
| chance of someone reaching out is attractive to me. That's
| what I'm hoping to do with this site.
|
| It also isn't about giving creators false hope. Upvotes exist
| on the site because they're easy and non-committal for the
| consumer. But they count very little. On the other side of
| the spectrum, a consumer can fill out a questionaire and tell
| you exactly why they think they need your thing, what
| problems they are hoping to solve with it, how they are
| currently dealing with that problem, etc.. While it is
| encouraging if someone takes the time to write all of this
| down for you, it's also valuable information if you're making
| that thing.
|
| I would have also loved to implement a thing where consumers
| can buy shares in your idea right now (or rather, in you
| implementing it). Something like, they pay you $10 now, and
| will be eligible as beta testers once you build it. But there
| seems to be no off-the-shelf solution for user-to-user
| payments. So for now, there's just an option to send money to
| the owner of an idea via an Amazon gift card.
|
| The big challenge, of course, is going to be attracting
| enough "consumers" to the site - meaning people who go there
| to shop for potential solutions to problems they might have,
| or for ideas they want to see become real.
| Wronnay wrote:
| I miss features for commenting and downvoting. There are a lot of
| ideas on there currently which already exist.
|
| Like Companies data API, Daisy Disk for personal finance and
| Email parser with categorization and actions
| senecaso wrote:
| ya, a way to submit feedback/comments might be a good idea. I
| just submitted an idea, and immediately was wondering how I
| would be able to engage with the people who voted (or didnt)
| leobg wrote:
| First, thank you for trying it out and for submitting an
| idea. That's super cool.
|
| With regards to engaging with users:
|
| In the current design, the first two levels of interest that
| a user may show on your idea do not include sharing any
| contact information. Namely upvoting an idea, and signing up
| for updates. A user has to support your idea on level 3
| ("share contact info with the project owner") or level 4
| ("share your use case") in order for you to actually get
| their contact info.
|
| For now, if you go to your "ideas" section, you'll already
| see the count of each level of support your idea got
| (upvoted, subscribed to updates, shared contact info, filled
| out questionaire).
|
| The ability to actually send out an update to the users that
| requested it is actually still missing. Same goes for
| accessing the contact info of the users who shared it with
| you, and for accessing the info they shared with you when
| they filled out the questionaire. I didn't know if this Show
| HN was going to go anywhere. But I'm going to add these
| features. These contacts are yours. And they have entrusted
| me with forwarding their request to you.
| senecaso wrote:
| I was thinking more along the lines of a public dialog,
| where a user could post a comment like "This is a great
| idea! However, if you could make it do X and Y, it would be
| even better!"
|
| Getting access to people's contact information would be
| useful at a later point in the process, but early on I
| think immediate feedback would be the most beneficial. Even
| something along the lines of a HN thread like this one
| would be enough engagement at first. In fact, perhaps that
| is even sufficient :)
| leobg wrote:
| You are right. There should be a feature to quickly let the
| owner of an idea that there already exists a solution for this.
| Also, if you don't like an idea, there should be a way to
| remove it from your view. I'll implement this. Thanks.
|
| I'm thinking of a button that says something like, "Not a good
| idea? Tell the owner why". And when you click, you'll be asked
| to tell the owner why. That feedback won't be visible publicly.
| But it'll be shared with the owner of the idea. And also, if
| you used that button on an idea, it'll by default be hidden
| from your view in the future.
|
| If you have other suggestion on how to implement this, let me
| know!
| [deleted]
| pea wrote:
| Nice work on a cool side project! Just my 2c, but I would find
| this more useful as a place to validate and support early pain-
| points, as opposed to solutions. Validating that a genuine
| burning pain exists for a small group of people - with access to
| early adopters - would be really helpful, and I think would
| provide a nice play to do discovery. Going solution-first puts
| the cart before the horse imo.
| leobg wrote:
| Ok. Wow. That's interesting. I never thought about it from this
| angle. Can you give an example? I mean a pain point that you
| would like to validate, or would have liked to in the past, if
| such a tool had existed?
| pea wrote:
| I think many compelling companies come from rigorously
| testing lots of possible solutions for a problem that the
| founders understand deeply.
|
| You might experiment and fail with 10 different ways to solve
| that problem, before one of them sticks. But the important
| thing for building the right solution is understanding the
| context, situation, nature of the pain-point, implications of
| it, and why the world would be better served if it was
| solved. The benefit of solving your own painpoint is that you
| often understand these things instinctively, but it's helpful
| to talk to other people to understand how it is different for
| them. From there, the first solutions should be to validate
| this -- maybe the first version is a Google form or a manual
| inbox (i.e. "What can we test in 1 week vs. 1 year?").
|
| For an example from me, I previously had a start-up where we
| provided version control for PowerPoint documents. Our first
| iteration was way too complicated and we went in solution-
| first. We built all kinds of shit people didn't need, like
| slide-by-slide version control, git integration, etc. On your
| current site, I could ask people if they want a plugin into
| PowerPoint which gives slide-by-slide version control using
| git, and get a bunch of feedback on that specific solution.
| Instead, it would be more helpful to step back and try and
| validate that sharing PowerPoint documents over email leads
| to versioning problems. From there, maybe I could dig deeper
| into specific use-cases, verticals, and understand a wider
| problem space, before talking about how people need the
| problem to be solved. I think the learnings would be 100x
| more useful than getting some specific feedback on my myopic
| solution.
|
| Similarly, I have found that users often love talking about
| their problems more than they love giving feedback on
| individual solutions.
| PookMook wrote:
| I made what you describe a few years ago on a coding stream
| during a weekend. https://makeithappen.dev/ was the place,
| everything about the site is horrible but I liked the idea,
| maybe it's a thing I could revisit someday.
| [deleted]
| PookMook wrote:
| Great Job, I ran a somewhat related site
| https://makeithappen.dev/ (no longer maintained, this was a hack
| weekend project build on stream a few years ago) but there's some
| cross functionality in there. Really like your solution, this is
| rekindling that old makeithappen flame ahah.
|
| Best of luck and keep going! Cheers
| anon115 wrote:
| Is this the right interface for this idea?
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-21 23:01 UTC)