Ask HN: Please review my new startup. [Free account for HN community]

http://www.customerfind.com

by zackattack • 17 years ago

38 97 17 years ago

customerfind.com

zackattack33• 17 years ago

STEPS TO GET YOUR PAID ACCOUNT

1. REGISTER ON THE WEBSITE

2. WHEN YOU GET TO "STEP 3", WHICH ASKS YOU FOR PAYMENT, POST IN THE THREAD WITH YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS

My new website is CustomerFind.com.

Remember my web app HipHopGoblin.com? Well, about a month ago, I wrote up a blog post detailing what I had learned and posted it up on HN [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=824905]. In part, I explained how I had used Twitter to promote the website: I scanned for artists mentioning certain keywords, and then auto-followed them. This got me a lot of exposure, and a lot of gratitude from people who were glad to find the site.

Then I got contacted by the CEO of a web site, asking for me to sell him my scripts. "Sure," I said. "I can package them nicely and include the MySQL db-creating scripts."

"No, no," he refused. "I want a hosted solution." And thus was borne CustomerFind.com.

After a month or so of work, this is iteration #2 in my startup, this time having a paying customer from day 1. And I'm offering a 7-day free trial for all HN readers. Just reply to this post with your email address and I'll hook you up.

All feedback and criticism welcome, as well as suggestions for future directions of the product. I'm thinking of evolving it into a CRM tool, so you can communicate with the people who have followed you back (and are clearly interested in your product). But I don't want to write it unless I know that many will pay me for it ;)

Again, all comments welcome. Thanks for taking a look.

vaksel• 17 years ago

doesn't twitter ban people for doing this?

zackattack33• 17 years ago

Good question. In my experience, no. There are many other apps that do the same thing, and this one is especially geared towards finding high-quality keywords. In fact, we only follow 25/day, so that we can slowly figure out which keywords work and which ones don't. The ultimate goal is to follow keywords that convert at 20%+, which is easily doable.

That being said, Twitter reserves the right to do whatever they want at any time. But this is non-aggressive, and we're discouraging "spammy" behavior.

zaidf7• 17 years ago

zaid.farooqui at gmail

Would love to give it a shot!

zackattack33• 17 years ago

You got it. Register, and then once you get to the "submit payment" screen (step 3/3) let me know and I'll update your account.

simonk• 17 years ago

Registered.

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

paulhart2• 17 years ago

[REDACTED]

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

slig3• 17 years ago

Thanks!

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

JimEngland• 17 years ago

This seems interested, I'd love to help you beta test.

jimengland at gmail

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated!

dwynings• 17 years ago

Thanks!

zackattack33• 17 years ago

you're welcome & activated

bartman• 17 years ago

bart at customerfind.the-bart dot org

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

shafqat• 17 years ago

Registered - shafqat at newscred dot com.

Great idea btw... look forward to trying it out.

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated, and thanks

white• 17 years ago

prokhorenko at gmail.com and we'll see how this works out. :)

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated!

dc2k083• 17 years ago

[retracted]

zackattack33• 17 years ago

Did you go through the registration process yet?

nkohari7• 17 years ago

Wow. Your website is a very blatant ripoff of Basecamp's design. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but yours is a little over the line.

nkohari7• 17 years ago

Why in the world would my comment get down-voted? The layout and design elements are practically identical.

pclark• 17 years ago

did you look at http://basecamphq.com ?

The only similarity is the top header black bar.

rokhayakebe• 17 years ago

I did not downvote you. But I suspect its the tone in your feedback. Maybe you could have asked "Why did you choose to have a BC-like design?" then...

zaidf7• 17 years ago

I downvoted you because I did not think it is a "blatant ripoff".

nkohari7• 17 years ago

Go look at http://basecamphq.com/ again. The layout, fonts, and styling are all clearly pulled from the marketing website.

swombat• 17 years ago

I have to agree, it's a bit overly similar (mostly because of the top bar). However, I trust that Zack will be going back to that design and updating it over the next few days. A design is a pretty easy thing to change, and I don't see anything morally wrong with using someone else's design as a starting point.

zaidf7• 17 years ago

I noticed your company's site has a header too. It's just not colored black. There is not much difference between your site and CustomerFind in that sense.

In fact, your pricing page(http://agilezen.com/pricing) is clearly inspired by basecamp. Absolutely nothing wrong with it(I don't think it is in ripoff category). But for someone to have such stringent standards when evaluating others, it's odd.

nkohari7• 17 years ago

Sure, our pricing page is inspired by Basecamp... and practically every other SaaS offering out there. As I said in another comment, everyone (including myself) takes inspiration from other designs, but there's a difference between taking inspiration and taking a stylesheet.

angusdavis2• 17 years ago

Yeah, it means the guy is smart and is borrowing strength from what he knows works. 37 Signals published their conversion rates from the highrise landing page for a reason. Goal at this stage is to see if people will sign up for the concept. Once he proves that out (i.e. customer development), I'm sure he'll invest in some of his own graphic identity, logo selection, color schemes, etc.

nkohari7• 17 years ago

So you're saying that, until I have the time to invest in my own branding, I can just use the Coke logo instead?

zackattack33• 17 years ago

You got it. I'm reading steve blank's book (slowly...it's tough) and trying to formulate my own unique way of applying it to web applications. This reminds me: I'm gonna go spend an hour reading.

workhorse• 17 years ago

I would get rid of the horizontal bar.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3 GTB5

marram3• 17 years ago

Here is one problem: After I authenticated my twitter account, I got the following error message: """ You registered the Twitter screen name foobar but authenticated the Twitter screen name fooBar. """

I'm sure you know you should convert strings to lowercase before comparing them! :)

zackattack33• 17 years ago

Whew. Fixed. Anyway, your free account has been activated

marram3• 17 years ago

Some feedback: 1. It is not clear to me what happens after updating the keyword list. Would the program then go find people and follow them based on those keywords?

2. "People you have followed (controlpanel.php?p=following)" is empty. Shouldn't this fill up instantaneously?

zackattack33• 17 years ago

The program then goes and finds people and follows them based on those keywords, yes. It does so periodically with a cron job so no, it would not fill up instantaneously.

How can I communicate this clearer?

AlexBlom• 17 years ago

Registered alexanderdblom AT G MAIL

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

marcamillion• 17 years ago

Hey Zack, Firstly let me say that I love the idea. I can see it being very valuable. I am working on an idea myself, and I can definitely see us using this service once we are ready - who knows when that will be. I am sure you know how that process goes.

Secondly, I must also commend you for charging from the get-go. The price point seems good, what I was looking for though was a 'pricing page' that tells me what I am getting for my $20/mo and other plan options. I would also like to see other options, say only 3 or 5 keywords with a more limited account for $10/mo. Couple that with a 15-day free trial (7-days I think is too short) and you reduce the risk significantly for the customer. Imagine I am able to add a few new clients in the first 15 days...that's significant value-add.

Thirdly, I am sure you guys have thought about this already but I can see other things like 'recommended keywords' based on 'successful keywords' that the user has chosen. Those can be derived by finding a 'high correlation' between those keywords and other successful keywords chosen by other users for example.

Fourth, I am not too perturbed by your site design. You can always do a re-design, I would focus more on adding features to the $20 account, because it seems a little feature light at the moment.

That's all I can think of right now. Good job. I would love if when I am ready to use it (maybe a few months from now) I could get the 7-day free trial...or who knows maybe by then you have implemented a 15-day free trial on all accounts :)

One last thing...did you find the cofounder you were looking for and did you go it alone on this project? Would love a similar post to your hiphopgoblin post :)

zackattack33• 17 years ago

> Thanks, keep me posted.

> Yeah, I agree. I'll consider changing it depending on how things go with this first round. The important thing is to demonstrate the value up-front.

> Actually, what I am planning on doing is mining the data from tweets of users who have followed-back. Then, looking for common bigrams...

> I guess I could make the "keyword suggest" account $30/month and a "light" account $15/month. I don't want to add features just for the sake of adding features, but I do agree that there should be multiple account options - c.f. the study of The Economist alluded to by Dan Ariely in _Predictably Irrational_

> Yes, that's possible but if not just email me: zackster@gmail.cøm

> Found a couple great candidates but geography seemed to be a problem for everyone. I am actually moving to NYC now and would be open to finding a cofounder there, with whom I could partner up on projects.

jcoby• 17 years ago

jacob.coby at gmail.com

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

fjabre• 17 years ago

I like this if only for the fact that the idea was born of necessity.

For me at least it seems the ideas always come when I'm busy building other projects.

It also seems pretty relevant to where online marketing is headed.

Best of luck

flooha2• 17 years ago

flooha at gmail

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated!

Raisin• 17 years ago

fdcleary at gmail

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated!

marram3• 17 years ago

Oh oh. Seems to be down now.

zackattack33• 17 years ago

It's back up. I think my webhost just restarted apache or something.

gaz• 17 years ago

contact at tallstreet.com

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

ekpyrotic• 17 years ago

ekpyrotic at gmail dot com

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

tonyvt2005• 17 years ago

tonyhuynh29 at gmail

ABrandt• 17 years ago

austin [at] beatnex [dot] com

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

slig3• 17 years ago

Feedback: Let the user choose the language of the keywords.

miles• 17 years ago

"Free account for HN community" should read "Free trial account for HN community" in my opinion, as the former is rather misleading.

flooha2• 17 years ago

Agreed. The OP might also consider a longer trial than 6 days. I'm not sure I can really evaluate the system in that time.

keefe• 17 years ago

This lagged hardcore the first time for me. Pretty sure you are not supposed to hotlink this in production?

zackattack33• 17 years ago

thanks... changed to google repository

zachware• 17 years ago

zgware@gmail.com. Excited to check it out.

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

petekoomen• 17 years ago

I'd love to check it out: pete at carrotsticks dot com

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

uvince• 17 years ago

uvince AT yahoo.com

thanks for the free account!

zackattack33• 17 years ago

activated

paraschopra• 17 years ago

Great app, it seems. Just curious, what do you mean by "whitelisted by Twitter"?

NEPatriot2• 17 years ago

Seems like a great idea that would really give start ups a leg up when starting with the twitter world.

I wonder if the hubspot app has something like this? This is great because it takes one piece of functionality and lets users roll with it.

Just launched - will let you know how it goes. LiranBaron at gmail dot com

bdmac97• 17 years ago

Am I missing something or hasn't this already been done by others like Twittermass?

NEPatriot2• 17 years ago

liranbaron at gmail dot com thanks

Ask HN: Please review my new startup. [Free account for HN community]

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