Ask HN: Review my start up www.Varely.com

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4636463

by michaelperalta • 14 years ago

8 13 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

We just launched a little over a week ago and have gotten some good response to the actual content. We've seen an alright amount of traffic but haven't been able to get many sign ups so far. I am curious to see what everyones opinion is and any feedback you may have. Thanks!

ccheney• 14 years ago

What's the incentive to put my blog content on your website?

You say you're trying to provide a platform that is maintenance free but what about say, tumblr, twitter, blogger, reddit, and all-the-others? Maybe you have more planned for a future release but I think you need to incentivise in someway. The topic categories seem restrictive or too broad. Hope that helps, good luck :)

michaelperalta6• 14 years ago

yeah I agree I need to create more incentives, like you've mentioned I have more coming in the future but the difficult part seems to be to get the following necessary to make those things possible.

I would say some of the benefit, and again this comes more with scale is that the content will be arranged mainly in two ways being by popularity and newest which when compared to reddit is similar though the culture for reddit is more of posting links and discussing other peoples content where I'd like original content on Varely. Definitely do need to think of clearer incentives.

Also the topics are just popular ones but you can post about anything you'd like and tag your post with it. I should also clear that up too. I really appreciate the feedback!

codegeek2• 14 years ago

clickable http://www.varely.com

codegeek2• 14 years ago

For now, I will rather have your about page (http://www.varely.com/about) as your landing page. The current homepage does not tell me anything about what it does. I had to go to about page.

michaelperalta6• 14 years ago

I was torn between doing that or just leading with the content to peak interest and then having them inquire more about the concept. Thanks for the help!

hodder• 14 years ago

I agree that incentivizing writers is the hard part about your site.

I assume the blog will be monetized with advertising. If so, have you thought about a revenue sharing agreement with your writers based on ad clicks? Sort of like Huffington post, but instead of paying the writers on articles submitted (or nothing at all), you could pay them a piece of the ad revenue they generate. Sites like squidoo.com and newsvine.com follow this model.

The revenue sharing article market appears crowded, but can turn out to be lucrative if you differentiate in some way (like gurufocus).

michaelperalta6• 14 years ago

That definitely is a monetization route and incentive that we've considered using to attain users. Going forward with a larger user base that is definitely something we can pursue. The goal is first to get to that user base because obviously now that is the difficult part. Our main concern now is gaining traction and a following. Thanks for the idea, I appreciate the help.

mnicole2• 14 years ago

Initial suggestions:

Summarize the contents from your "Why Varely?" section into a sentence or two introduction for the top of the page that goes over a) what is this b) the problem are you trying to solve and b) what can bloggers expect to gain from using the service.

The layout puts emphasis on the navigation, not the content, which is a turn off to both readers and writers. I'd also nix the logo/headline typeface you're using; it's really unflattering and the antialiasing effects from Photoshop don't help it. Bump up the size of the actual user content all around.

It also looks as though if the blogger doesn't know how to format a post, it will all end up being one big block of text, so look into a way to streamline that (Redactor.js, Markdown, etc) so that they don't feel like there's a learning curve. I'd also consider making the profile pages a little bit more flashy/ego-friendly to make the authors feel better about contributing.

Hope that helps!

michaelperalta6• 14 years ago

That definitely does help, I appreciate the tips. As far as the Why Varely sentence at the top of the page do you mean like the home page where the content is you think it should be at the top there?

mnicole2• 14 years ago

Absolutely. Just a one or two sentence blurb or even just a relevant tagline under the logo.

eranation• 14 years ago

Two major issues

Links on posts are not auto linkable

No mobile view

michaelperalta6• 14 years ago

Those are two good suggestions, definitely will get to work changing that. Thanks for the help, appreciate it!

Ask HN: Review my start up www.Varely.com

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