Review my startup onehub.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=391557

by charlesmount • 18 years ago

27 19 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I read HN every day and would love feedback from the community on onehub.com. Onehub is a new web application for business users that provides secure, customizable workspaces called Hubs. Hubs can be used as an extranet, to send large files, receive large files, or as an FTP replacement. We have been working on the service for about a year and just finished our version 1 release this week.

There is a short overview video on the site. Anyone can create a free user account that includes one free hub and one GB of storage. Thanks and we appreciate any feedback from the HN community.

volida• 18 years ago

Security is important in this kind of services. However I don't see you emphasizing on it on the web site or even mention SSL. Or how you store data. I didn't check it a lot so maybe I missed it.

The front-end looks modern.

cturnr• 18 years ago

Security is important, and I have found that they have their clients covered. It is at the bottom of the Features > Details tab.

"Onehub provides role based authentication which means you can grant different levels of access to users as you choose. Plus, Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology protects your information with server authentication, ensuring that your data is safe, secure, and available. Onehub is hosted in a SAS 70 Type 1 compliant data center that uses firewalls and other advanced technology to prevent interference or access from outside intruders."

http://www.onehub.com/features/details#security

charlesmount2• 18 years ago

Volida, I agree that security is super important for any site storing business information. We use S3 as our storage backend but do a lot of work in the application to enforce permissions. For any paid account (starting at $19/month), you can enable HTTPS. For free accounts, all login traffic and account signup is over HTTPS but other traffic is done over HTTP.

pedalpete• 18 years ago

First of all, I love the look. clean and professional. The domain name is great as well.

The video tour does a great job of overloading me with information on what I can do with OneHub.

The damaging part is that after viewing the video, I don't have any take-away on how I would use the tools you've described, and you go through them so quickly that it is very difficult to keep up, and it doesn't seem that the screencast is helping with the voice-over. I realize they are in sync, but everything is happening so quickly that it is just too much stuff.

My advice would be to pick the 3 or 4 features that you think are the most useful for your customer base, and just go through those. Don't describe the feature and how it works, that is for another video tutorial. Tell me how OneHub is going to help me interact. Just telling me it lets me interact isn't good enough. I interact already. How is your interactions better.

That is a huge marketing challenge, and it is very difficult to do. I did a video demo for one of my previous companies and it was many, many iterations before I was getting the messaging to the users right.

[EDIT] volida's post points to what I'm saying. if security is the most imporant thing, single that out. You're giving visitors too much information. Maybe segmenting into a few videos would be best depending on your target audience.

Best of luck, keep up the good work. Pete

charlesmount2• 18 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. I agree our video overview needs some work. We will update this in the next few days.

blakeperdue2• 18 years ago

I have to agree with pedalpete. The video gave me too much information to digest. Picking the top 3-4 features would be good, but I would suggest instead, that you create a use-case video. Tell me what problem OneHub solves and then walk through how my company could use OneHub to solve it.

bjclark• 18 years ago

I have used your beta for a little while and I think you guys are making a very very nice product. Super polished and I really really like how you guys do the "edit" mode where you can add tabs and pages and widgets. Very nicely done.

From a UX point of view, I think there's going to be a little bit of a learning curve for new users to figure out how to modify the default template, but once they get into edit mode, I think it's pretty clear.

I think a $20/yr plan that gave people 1 hub and 1 gig of storage would be a good idea. It may be a little bit of a loss leader, but it would be good to get people over that initial hump of getting their credit card out of their pocket.

soundsop• 18 years ago

Is signup really necessary for the free account? You many want to at least consider reducing the amount of information that the user requires? You could omit asking for first and last name, the company name and phone number. A/B testing should tell you pretty quickly the loss of signups due to asking for too much information.

Suggestions for the pricing page:

1. I think free account should be a little more prominent in the table of options. I went straight to the pricing page and didn't see the free option at first.

2. List from most expensive on the left to least expensive on the right (see http://www.backpackit.com/signup). The less expensive items will seem comparatively cheaper.

tontoa4• 18 years ago

Great job on the site, I bookmarked it for future reference.

mcdowall• 18 years ago

Me too, excellent clean design by the way.

mmmurf• 18 years ago

looks like a useful product. Isn't it similar to the stuff Ray Ozzie was doing before Microsoft acquired him? I think it has great potential.

I haven't tried one hub yet but I plan to.

One killer feature would be drag and drop file sharing with automatic versioning.

bluishgreen• 18 years ago

fonts: the letters are sticking to each other in my firefox view. Look at YC news fonts. the letters never stick to each other. Try to fix this. This is very important when the overall feel is concerned. Eg.I would choose another site just because of the font, but many people would too - just that they wont identify what pushed them away.

drwh02• 18 years ago

yet another front end to amazon's cloud. when will it stop?

bprater• 18 years ago

When will the stupid comments stop? If you don't have something constructive to say, don't say it.

drwh02• 18 years ago

If you don't have something constructive to say, don't say it.

ESL classes are now being offered in your community

slackerIII• 18 years ago

I like the look of the site, too. Do you have a designer in-house, or did you use a firm? I'd love to hear anything you are willing to say about the process.

symptic• 18 years ago

From a design standpoint, the green on the homepage is too dark with the black text over it. Lighten up that green, or make it darker and change the font to white. Otherwise, at first glance it looks great. I can give a more thorough review if you'd like (just email me).

G'luck!

blakeperdue2• 18 years ago

Perhaps it doesn't look good on your screen, but on my laptop and 24 inch monitor it looks fantastic. I love the design, it's very pleasing to look at and relays the information well.

ajbatac• 18 years ago

I like the design. Simple and straight to the point. I'll have to say it's well done on the first impression.

Kudos to you and your team!

Review my startup onehub.com

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