Ask HN: Please review my Business Briefing

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1108215

by azeemazhar2 • 16 years ago

3 6 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hey HNers, One of the things I've just launched is a dead-simple Daily Business Briefing. We send out 12 stories a day after scanning 2-3,000.

Some questions: (a) Is it too simple? (b) Will people want/need to personalised it? (c) How should we get them to personalise it? (Explicitly or is there some better way?)

The link is here: http://bit.ly/Viewsflowdaily

azeemazhar23• 16 years ago

Oh. The link is http://bit.ly/Viewsflowdaily

romland3• 16 years ago

(pssst. I'd edit the story and include the URL there as well, even if it doesn't become clickable)

romland3• 16 years ago

a) No. I don't think it's too simple. I mean, look at Twitter? :)

b) I imagine people may want to personalize it, but I don't think that is something you need to worry about just yet. Keep it lean and mean. But that's my personal opinion.

c) Get them to flag individual items in the mail they get (I want more of this, I want less of this)

One thing I missed when going to the site was the ability to see what the last 2-3 days mails looked like. Before I sign up I'd like to see what I'm getting in to. :)

azeemazhar23• 16 years ago

Oh hey thanks. (D) is a good point. I will add that on the sign up page. Cheers

romland3• 16 years ago

When thinking more about personalizing (might be obvious, I don't know):

Bear in mind, though, I am the kinda person that likes clean and minimal and don't really like having to manage online profiles on a gazillion sites.

But say, next to the articles you send out, perhaps have a few tags that categorizes the article. For instance, if it's related to Europe, US, Global, automobile, IT, woodcrafting. Make the tags clickable (unique ID per user in the mail) -- a click on it means "yay, gimme more". How to undo a click, well, I dunno... Some down-arrow like at HN?

Ask HN: Please review my Business Briefing

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