Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

by mansigandhi • 14 years ago

43 51 14 years ago

alid2• 14 years ago

Hey man! I love it, great concept!

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Thanks a lot! We are really excited and launching next week. We set this up so that we can collect emails from Stanford students. Do you have any suggestions to improve it?

alid2• 14 years ago

None! (ok one ridiculously small thing - you could add a Favicon). It will obviously change as you scale to more campuses. Exciting! :)

graeme• 14 years ago

Really clear. The moving dots caught my attention, and explained the concept. At this point, I want to put in my email to find out how it works.

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Thanks. Feel free to leave your email. We plan to expand beyond schools once we finish with our beta launch at Stanford.

No spam. Promise.

wilfra• 14 years ago

I think it's fucking gorgeous.

On what could be improved:

-Too much text in the lower left. You can use less characters and communicate the same thing better. Such as...

-'Leave your email and we'll let you know when Shoutt arives' change to 'Request a beta invite' and change from 14px to 18-20px. Alternately, remove this text entirely and change button text from 'Submit' to 'Request Invite'.

-Logo could use a bit more spice

-Where you say 'what do you want to shoutt about', I'd use your logo in place of 'shoutt'

-'an app for you and your campus' can be moved under the logo and put it on one line instead of two. Alternately you can move 'Exclusively at Stanford University' under the logo.

-Make the button and email form a bit smaller in relation to everything else. And consider something with a more low-key/elegant look, like rounded corners and with effects when the cursor is in the box: see Bootstrap forms. I'd also change the placeholder text to a more low-key font color, same with the button color. It shouldn't draw so much attention (at least not if it says 'Submit' if it says 'Request Invite' drawing attention is good).

Just incremental improvements, everything looks great as is. Feel free to email me if you want to follow up or for future feedback.

Good luck!

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Hi Wilfra.

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback...really useful. We've changed the "Leave your email..." to "Request a beta invite". And we made the fonts slightly low-key.

We'll look into the other changes for the layout and incorporate them.

NaOH2• 14 years ago

Two minor tweaks. As long as "An app for you and your campus" is going to be split across two lines, change where the line break is. I'd suggest "An app [line break] for you and your campus." This brings greater emphasis to the idea of "you and your campus," plus it makes that line and everything which follows (beta invite, exclusively at Stanford, and what do you want) increasingly long (left to right), helping the eye move through that part of the page.

Edit: I should add, though I'm seeing it after some other folks have suggested tweaks, I think it looks fantastic. Well done.

benologist3• 14 years ago

Unless you're LaunchRock or similar your product is not a landing page. Feedback on a temporary "give me your email address" placeholder page is the last thing you should be asking for and especially acting on in any stage between deciding to make something and launching something.

Energy spent on your landing page is energy you should have spent preparing to delete it.

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Hi there. I think there's been a misunderstanding.

We're actually launching this week at Stanford (our app has already been approved by Apple). The launch page is to get the email addresses of interested people and to create a pre-launch buzz at the school. We also have our pre-launch marketing on the campus going on.

benologist3• 14 years ago

I think we do have a misunderstanding - I see this page as the modern day equivalent of an "under construction" page, that should be replaced as soon as humanly possible because every eyeball on it is an eyeball wasted.

Even the early signups have to be convinced twice to try your app, the fewer people who see your launch page instead of your launched page the better.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

If you have a launch date a countdown would be great, as would giving some sort of incentive to share.

jfornear• 14 years ago

> Energy spent on your landing page is energy you should have spent preparing to delete it.

This "Lean Startup" attitude is a great way to suppress inspiration, creativity, etc.

doctorpangloss• 14 years ago

The map sort of explains the concept. Don't have the points fade away: let them stack. Gives us time to read the texts, and let the messages aggregate on screen.

A real flourish would be to show a device with your app running on it. Same deal: phone, black background, white text box. Show the message text typing out on the phone, have it disappear, then fade in the message. Now the concept is crystal clear.

You can get rid of Fall 2012 probably. But otherwise really nice and polished. Looks great on a big screen.

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Hey doctorpangloss, thanks for the feedback!

Once we launch (this week) we're going to change the site to have much more information, including a demo of the app.

jaseemabid• 14 years ago

kickass!

electrum• 14 years ago

The text is blurry on the Retina MBP in Chrome. Looks fine in Safari.

dmerfield• 14 years ago

The following CSS will fit the background image to the page dimensions and eliminate the letter boxing for all viewport ratios.

   -webkit-background-size: cover;
   -moz-background-size: cover;
   -o-background-size: cover;
   background-size: cover;

Before: http://bit.ly/NY7ZtE

After: http://bit.ly/POyEaA

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Wow thanks! We made the change.

spohlenz2• 14 years ago

Not quite. You've added those to the body element (inline as well, which is a bad idea), whereas the background is on the #wrapper div. I'd suggest moving the background onto the body element, and adding the background-size definitions to the body element but within your CSS.

With that fixed, it looks very nice indeed.

efader• 14 years ago

Why would someone use Shoutt instead of something like Twitter or Facebook?

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Shoutt is a location based app. We are bringing the concept of shouting to your mobile phone - when you shoutt, only the people around you can hear you.

It's basically an information platform to share with people around you. It would work best in existing communities like colleges, neighborhoods and even cities. The network moves with you and connects you to the people you share the same time and location with. Also, there are no friends or followers. On Shoutt what you share is more important than who you are.

It's also a great way to find the most relevant information around you.

corporalagumbo• 14 years ago

This description (and justification!) is missing on the splash page, and could be helpful.

Eg something like this:

"Shoutt lets you hear and share what's happening around you, no matter who you are or who you know. It's a social network that moves as you move, connecting you to the people around you."

Also, can I ask why Shoutt instead of Shout? The double T doesn't really appeal to me.

simplegeek• 14 years ago

Awesome. I'm just curious did you consider buying http://shoutt.it (if it was available)?

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Thanks. It was, and we just bought it!

lionel_lei3• 14 years ago

Love it, orange and black is my favorite color combination. Idea seems interesting, too bad I am not stanford student.

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Feel free to leave your email. We do plan to expand beyond Stanford in the future.

Meai• 14 years ago

I think it would be best if you didn't loop the little location aware hints. After a while, show one that says something like "Activities all around campus, now in realtime." (or any other better marketing slogan)

vinaykuruvila• 14 years ago

I like the concept.

We recently A/B tested the hell out of our landing page at Sidelines (http://sidelinesapp.com), so there are some interesting things we learned that may be applicable to you:

1. Coming up with an effective single-sentence explanation of your product will affect your conversion more than anything else. I don’t think you’ve quite nailed it with “An app for you and your campus.” Figure out what the most compelling use-case of your product is and make that clear on your landing page.

2. Make sure your landing page looks great on mobile browsers (especially since yours is a mobile product). Right now, on Safari on my iPhone, I don’t even see the map.

3. I would get rid of “Exclusively at Stanford University”, since I think it will turn off people from other schools. You should experiment with removing it or even better, showing it only if the IP of the person clicking the ad is in the Bay Area.

4. I would get rid of the “What do you want to shoutt about?” I think for most people using these kinds of apps for the first few times, they start of as consumers of info/content and you later have to convert them to producers of content. Your value prop with “What do you want to shout about?”” here is all about the producer side, and I think that may not be as appealing for brand new users. Look at Twitter for example. Their landing page is all about the consumer value prop, and doesn’t mention the sharing aspect (“Find out what’s happening, right now, with the people and organizations you care about.”)

5. A launch date and countdown would be awesome.

6. Get people to connect their FB accounts instead of just giving you their email. This way you could potentially send them FB notifications as well when you launch.

7. Try putting your messaging front and center instead of to the bottom left. We got great results with this.

8. Experiment, experiment, experiment. Anything I or anyone else here may tell you would just be intelligent guesses at what we think will work. You’ll get way better results from doing some quick A/B tests. We went from about 7% conversion to our landing page to about 55% conversion just by running a series of A/B tests.

Good luck!

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Hey vinaykuruvilla. Thanks for the awesome feedback. We'll start A/B testing soon. Your landing page looks great btw.

We checked the landing page on a mobile browser (Safari & Chrome - iPhone) and maps loads fine. I think the server is getting overwhelmed with the response from HN.

ilovecars• 14 years ago

If I were you, I would keep "Exclusively at Stanford University". The more niche you can make your target market, the easier it is to market and gain traction. If I was a Stanford student, I would be way more likely to submit my email. This is how Facebook first got traction.

lionel_lei3• 14 years ago

I learn a lot from this reply that I think I could use in my own projects, thanks a lot for sharing.

lionel_lei3• 14 years ago

I don't agree with 4. I think the the name "shoutt" suggests that the app is heavily focus on content producing. The animated dot on the map further reinforced this impression. So I don't think it's necessary to tailor to the content consumption aspect. My understanding is that this app is strictly for expressing oneself, so who wants to "shoutt" if everyone else is shouting and nobody listening? There is still value prop in this case, if the app is intended to aggregate what people shoutt about and somehow connect people with that? Still have to see the demo video to find out exactly what it does.

freeslave• 14 years ago

built something kinda similar a year and a half ago but never put any effort into marketing it - http://shoutfast.com/home - anyway landing page is slick - good luck!

Tiz• 14 years ago

You did some great work dodging most types of injection, something any (what I assume to be) college student should be proud of!

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Haha. Thanks! We know the tendencies of college students.

DanielRibeiro• 14 years ago

Reminded me a lot of Like a Little[1] (YC S11) [2], before it became known as Circle[3]

[1] http://likealittle.com/

[2] http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/28/likealittle-funding/

[3]

sumrania• 14 years ago

I was also reminded of Like a Little and Shoutflow. Apparently, their website is defunct now but I found an old article about it: http://www.addictivetips.com/mobile/discover-like-minded-peo...

It would be helpful to research why some of these social discovery apps did not work and ensure Shoutt doesn't make the same mistakes. Like a Little went on a rage for many months and then started plummeting. Personally, I love the idea though! Good Luck!

humaknlght2• 14 years ago

I noticed that the page took a long time to load. Page Speed has some good recommendations for speeding it up: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/

humaknlght2• 14 years ago

Direct link to results: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights#url=h...

mansigandhi18• 14 years ago

Nifty tool! We'll use it to improve the page load times.

Ask HN: Landing page for our upcoming app. What do you think?

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