5 ms·

Ask HN: Review My Startup: Bookhu

12 points by pmjoyce 17y ago

pmjoyce 17y ago
I submitted the same site in November last year - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172. Since then I've gone through several point releases, a refactor and a design overhaul (I'm hopeful it won't be compared to a domain parking page this time). I'd be interested in your thought and opinions. I'd also like to hear any thoughts on a marketing strategy. Looking at my stats, visitors seem to hang around on the site (as measured by avg time on site and pages/visit) for a relatively long time compared to any other properties I run and I get a fair amount of repeat visitsors. My biggest challenge at the moment is getting people to visit it in the first instance. I experimented with PPC (Adwords) in December - I'm no whizz so I ended up down, but only by a margin. The revenue model at the moment is amazon affiliate sales.
- Concours 17y ago
  your site looks good, clean interface but not selfexplaining , I don't know exactly what the site does either, and there's no about page where you could explain that. After sometime spent there, I then found the short description, well you yould make it somehow stand out, so when someone land on it, it doesn't feel and look like a Galerie showcase. Great Idea.
ryanelkins 17y ago
I would make the "How Bookhu works" box stand out a little more. One thing I've noticed with all of the "review my startups" is that we have no idea what we are going to initially generally, and when we get there the first thing we want to know is - what does this site do. You explain it well enough, I would just make the box pop a little more visually so I don't spend as much time hunting around for it. I found the site interesting enough to poke around a bit. Visually I thought it looked pretty good. I would probably make the call to action more obvious as well. Don't be afraid to tell people what you want them to do. The buy links are pretty small and not even very clear that I am buying them by clicking on them. Make them very obvious. The "Leave a Reply" at the bottom doesn't make sense to me. What am I replying to? Is it just a spot for people to leave their thoughts on the book? Again, tell me what you want. Perhaps you could form it as a question. Try some different things and see what gets people to start submitting comments or reviews or whatever it is you're looking for there (or just take it out). Overall thought I thought it looked pretty nice and it will be interesting to see how you do.
fhirzall 17y ago
I think you should have a longer delay on each book preview in the scrolling list of books at the top. I made it through half of one and then it switched over. 5 more seconds would be perfect. The "How it works" box isn't very obvious to a first time visitor - maybe you can hang this somewhere off the top next to the logo? I like the arrows on the left and right but I suspect that they would be too far to the sides on a widescreen monitor - I suppose you would know better what resolutions your visitors are using. Otherwise I think the concept is cool, you might benefit from putting this out in the various book forums online.
- pmjoyce 17y ago
  I'm spotting a pattern here. All the comments so far suggest that I need to explain what the site does. I guess after working on it for so long I developed a blind spot. Thanks for the input.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Vindexus 17y ago
First thing I noticed: "What Does It Do?" I wasn't really sure right away what it did. I found the "How Bookhu Works" box, but at first glance I thought it was an ad so I didn't even look at it. My recommendation would be to put a small tagline below your banner. Maybe "Book reviews broken down by gender" or something. That said I think the design is really good. I'd add some title attributes to the scores in the listings. It would be nice when I hovered over the 5 stars I could get a tooltip saying "3.4 out of 5 stars (from men)" or similar. Also the colored box with the percentage or men or women readers could use the same tooltip. At first glance I thought that was a rating out of 100. I know most people don't bother with tooltips, but do it for me? I was on this page: http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4/ http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4... and when I clicked the "Select Bestseller List" it scrolled me down for some reason. I searched the source for an '<a name="menu">' but didn't find one. One the home page with the slider, the arrows are stretching to the edge of the screen, but the slider container isn't. Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/8JVjN http://imgur.com/8JVjN When I use the dropdown to change the bestseller type, it disappears on the listing page and moves to the right side, instead of the top left. I'd keep it in the top left and put the list title right beside it. For advertising I'd have to say that you should definitely start a blog. You've got some pretty cool data and you could run some interesting blog posts. Maybe do some queries and find the words that are likely to appear in men's favorite book titles, but not women's. You could also do some sort of contest. I'd make it a "Men vs Women" thing to try to get people into it, and spreading it. Maybe a giveaway of a couple of books, or maybe Amazon gift cards. Maybe pit a predominantly male book against a female book and based on which one gets more votes, give the gift card to a man or a woman. I know if you put Twilight against something you'd have a chance of going viral on Digg, Reddit or 4chan. Those people hate Twilight. Anyway, good luck with the site. It's well done.
- pmjoyce 17y ago
  That's some high quality feedback (and bug reports) and some good suggestions. Thank you. I like the idea of blogging the data - something similar to what they're doing over at okcupid will put my mind to it. As for the competition - I'll have a chew on it, sounds like there might be something to highlighting the gender rivalry aspect.
bgriggs1 17y ago
Why not move the "How Bookhu works" box to the top left? It doesn't seem like you need full width for the book scroller. For the book scroller, shouldn't you add some functionality there inherent to Bookhu, like the ratings? It just has descriptions right now, which makes it look simply like a catalog.
- pmjoyce 17y ago
  you're right - I should make it less generic and include some site specific detail.
Vindexus 17y ago
Here's a quick mockup of a possible redesign for the home page. I'd make the book thumbnail bigger than I put it at, but you get the idea: http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png
- ddemchuk 17y ago
  That's a great mod of the current layout! I would definitely recommend following this lead for a redesign, it will really help illuminate what the site's about. In other news, after 2 hours of sleep, I spent about 30 seconds trying to click the back button in the screenshot and wondering if my computer froze. Thank you for that.
- guiseppecalzone 17y ago
  This is a lot more clear than the current version. Although I'm not sure if I would use this site, this version only takes 3 seconds for me to understand what it does.
andrew1 17y ago
A few questions (I don't mean to sound overly brief or critical - it's a nice site - but I'm at work so can't spend ages writing): * Where do you get the data from about gender? Is it from users of your site? Is it from Amazon or something like that? I like to know where data's from so that I can make some judgement as to whether I want to disregard it. Data with no source definitely gets disregarded :) * What am I supposed to do on your site? Just look for books and then follow links to buy them? Or can I rate books? * Why are you basing the whole experience off of gender? I don't see why it's particularly useful to know what other men like, or what women like. I'd rather know what people like me like. i.e. like the whole Netflix recommendations thing. This just seems like a one-dimensional version of that?
- pmjoyce 17y ago
  At the moment the data comes from amazon but I'm just about to add a module that takes review data from goodreads. To answer your 2nd and 3rd questions; it came out of a requirement I had to be able to quickly segment/categorise books I might want for myself but I think other people also use it for gift inspiration. I found gender was a reasonably neat line for me to be able to segment. I've also found it a little more-ish to check up on books I've read in the past and see where it lie on the spectrum. This is not supposed to be a one size fits all in book categorisation and segmentation - it's just another tool. Some people seem to have fun doing it and find it useful - some are even clicking through to amazon to purchase.
ddemchuk 17y ago
What's going on on the SEO side of things? You need to get your meta info cleaned up, running a site:bookhu.com shows that you aren't even including your meta descriptions, and you have a bunch of duplicate titles. Additionally, why are only 46 pages indexed? Are there more indexed and I'm just not seeing them? You stand to get a lot of really good long tail traffic because of the nature of your content, but if Google can't see it, no one else will. Get all that stuff cleaned up and that way you won't have to spend as much on PPC. Shoot me an email if you want to discuss some of these SEO things, I can probably help you out: darrindemchuk AT gmail DOT com
- pmjoyce 17y ago
  Much of that was probably referencing the old version of the site - I don't think Google has crawled this latest version - it only went live a couple of nights ago. I've have tried to be a little better on the SEO side of things, I've included some structured meta in the header of each book detail page. The honest truth is I haven't made it a top priority - you're right, I think I probably should.
jfarmer 17y ago
Doesn't add value to my life. Can't really think who this'd be for. Or is this just a tech demo?
- pmjoyce 17y ago
  Not a tech demo but I am starting bite size with small set of features. The bit that interests me is that there are some people who just don't like it and almost take exception/philosophically opposed to it [1]. There are others I can see from my stats who spend a baffling amount of time browsing around the site jumping from one book to the next for way longer than I originally anticipated anyone would. Most people, of course, lie in-between and don't take it too seriously. My thoughts? It's just a novel way to browse for books (no pun intended), people like to categorise and it's fun. 1. http://twitter.com/debwhite/status/7202044020 http://twitter.com/debwhite/status/7202044020
billturner 17y ago
I'll probably dig into it a little more later, but initially, on one of the book's detail pages, the text (and everything else) is pushed all the way to the sides of the browser window (in Chrome on OS X), so your "Feedback" side button obscures the content. See this screencap: http://i46.tinypic.com/oixe77.jpg http://i46.tinypic.com/oixe77.jpg
- pmjoyce 17y ago
  ouch - thanks
MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
Are you married to the "bookhu" domain name? I think you might have troubles with the phonetic aspect of it. How does someone pronounce that? book-hoo? boo-koo? If you're totally set on that one, you might want to grab any phonetically similar ones like bookwho, bookhoo, etc. I'm not sure how important the phonetic aspect is, but if it's too difficult to guess the domain from the sound of the name, you'll lose any possible traffic from "Hey, you should check out bookhu, I think you'd like it..."
- pmjoyce 17y ago
  this is a perennial issue for me - I'm never sure how much weight to allocate to domain names, or how many bases to cover.
  - MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
    I'm no expert either. All I try to do is avoid names that are ambiguous or tough to spell. Think "del.icio.us" - Are you going to have to explain to someone every single time what your domain is, or will a casual mention be enough? Side note: this is why I think non-.com domains are almost worthless. On my startup, DoLeaf, we got "doleaf.com" and "dewleaf.com". Probably a good thing, too, as there seems to be a decent size minority that reads "doleaf" as "doh-leef", like Homer Simpson.
Goladus 17y ago
Where's the data coming from? This is interesting as a sort of bookstore web-storefront, but the numbers look funny to me. Catcher in the Rye readers are 75% male? Poor Little Bitch Girl (by Jackie Collins) readers are 100% male?

12 points by pmjoyce 17y ago

I submitted the same site in November last year - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=902172. Since then I've gone through several point releases, a refactor and a design overhaul (I'm hopeful it won't be compared to a domain parking page this time). I'd be interested in your thought and opinions. I'd also like to hear any thoughts on a marketing strategy. Looking at my stats, visitors seem to hang around on the site (as measured by avg time on site and pages/visit) for a relatively long time compared to any other properties I run and I get a fair amount of repeat visitsors. My biggest challenge at the moment is getting people to visit it in the first instance. I experimented with PPC (Adwords) in December - I'm no whizz so I ended up down, but only by a margin. The revenue model at the moment is amazon affiliate sales.

Concours 17y ago
your site looks good, clean interface but not selfexplaining , I don't know exactly what the site does either, and there's no about page where you could explain that. After sometime spent there, I then found the short description, well you yould make it somehow stand out, so when someone land on it, it doesn't feel and look like a Galerie showcase. Great Idea.

ryanelkins 17y ago

I would make the "How Bookhu works" box stand out a little more. One thing I've noticed with all of the "review my startups" is that we have no idea what we are going to initially generally, and when we get there the first thing we want to know is - what does this site do. You explain it well enough, I would just make the box pop a little more visually so I don't spend as much time hunting around for it. I found the site interesting enough to poke around a bit. Visually I thought it looked pretty good. I would probably make the call to action more obvious as well. Don't be afraid to tell people what you want them to do. The buy links are pretty small and not even very clear that I am buying them by clicking on them. Make them very obvious. The "Leave a Reply" at the bottom doesn't make sense to me. What am I replying to? Is it just a spot for people to leave their thoughts on the book? Again, tell me what you want. Perhaps you could form it as a question. Try some different things and see what gets people to start submitting comments or reviews or whatever it is you're looking for there (or just take it out). Overall thought I thought it looked pretty nice and it will be interesting to see how you do.

fhirzall 17y ago

I think you should have a longer delay on each book preview in the scrolling list of books at the top. I made it through half of one and then it switched over. 5 more seconds would be perfect. The "How it works" box isn't very obvious to a first time visitor - maybe you can hang this somewhere off the top next to the logo? I like the arrows on the left and right but I suspect that they would be too far to the sides on a widescreen monitor - I suppose you would know better what resolutions your visitors are using. Otherwise I think the concept is cool, you might benefit from putting this out in the various book forums online.

pmjoyce 17y ago
I'm spotting a pattern here. All the comments so far suggest that I need to explain what the site does. I guess after working on it for so long I developed a blind spot. Thanks for the input.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

Vindexus 17y ago

First thing I noticed: "What Does It Do?" I wasn't really sure right away what it did. I found the "How Bookhu Works" box, but at first glance I thought it was an ad so I didn't even look at it. My recommendation would be to put a small tagline below your banner. Maybe "Book reviews broken down by gender" or something. That said I think the design is really good. I'd add some title attributes to the scores in the listings. It would be nice when I hovered over the 5 stars I could get a tooltip saying "3.4 out of 5 stars (from men)" or similar. Also the colored box with the percentage or men or women readers could use the same tooltip. At first glance I thought that was a rating out of 100. I know most people don't bother with tooltips, but do it for me? I was on this page: http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4/ http://www.bookhu.com/breaking-dawn-the-twilight-saga-book-4... and when I clicked the "Select Bestseller List" it scrolled me down for some reason. I searched the source for an '<a name="menu">' but didn't find one. One the home page with the slider, the arrows are stretching to the edge of the screen, but the slider container isn't. Here's a screenshot: http://imgur.com/8JVjN http://imgur.com/8JVjN When I use the dropdown to change the bestseller type, it disappears on the listing page and moves to the right side, instead of the top left. I'd keep it in the top left and put the list title right beside it. For advertising I'd have to say that you should definitely start a blog. You've got some pretty cool data and you could run some interesting blog posts. Maybe do some queries and find the words that are likely to appear in men's favorite book titles, but not women's. You could also do some sort of contest. I'd make it a "Men vs Women" thing to try to get people into it, and spreading it. Maybe a giveaway of a couple of books, or maybe Amazon gift cards. Maybe pit a predominantly male book against a female book and based on which one gets more votes, give the gift card to a man or a woman. I know if you put Twilight against something you'd have a chance of going viral on Digg, Reddit or 4chan. Those people hate Twilight. Anyway, good luck with the site. It's well done.

pmjoyce 17y ago
That's some high quality feedback (and bug reports) and some good suggestions. Thank you. I like the idea of blogging the data - something similar to what they're doing over at okcupid will put my mind to it. As for the competition - I'll have a chew on it, sounds like there might be something to highlighting the gender rivalry aspect.

bgriggs1 17y ago

Why not move the "How Bookhu works" box to the top left? It doesn't seem like you need full width for the book scroller. For the book scroller, shouldn't you add some functionality there inherent to Bookhu, like the ratings? It just has descriptions right now, which makes it look simply like a catalog.

pmjoyce 17y ago
you're right - I should make it less generic and include some site specific detail.

Vindexus 17y ago

Here's a quick mockup of a possible redesign for the home page. I'd make the book thumbnail bigger than I put it at, but you get the idea: http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png http://i.imgur.com/Xqy7r.png

ddemchuk 17y ago
That's a great mod of the current layout! I would definitely recommend following this lead for a redesign, it will really help illuminate what the site's about. In other news, after 2 hours of sleep, I spent about 30 seconds trying to click the back button in the screenshot and wondering if my computer froze. Thank you for that.
guiseppecalzone 17y ago
This is a lot more clear than the current version. Although I'm not sure if I would use this site, this version only takes 3 seconds for me to understand what it does.

andrew1 17y ago

A few questions (I don't mean to sound overly brief or critical - it's a nice site - but I'm at work so can't spend ages writing): * Where do you get the data from about gender? Is it from users of your site? Is it from Amazon or something like that? I like to know where data's from so that I can make some judgement as to whether I want to disregard it. Data with no source definitely gets disregarded :) * What am I supposed to do on your site? Just look for books and then follow links to buy them? Or can I rate books? * Why are you basing the whole experience off of gender? I don't see why it's particularly useful to know what other men like, or what women like. I'd rather know what people like me like. i.e. like the whole Netflix recommendations thing. This just seems like a one-dimensional version of that?

pmjoyce 17y ago
At the moment the data comes from amazon but I'm just about to add a module that takes review data from goodreads. To answer your 2nd and 3rd questions; it came out of a requirement I had to be able to quickly segment/categorise books I might want for myself but I think other people also use it for gift inspiration. I found gender was a reasonably neat line for me to be able to segment. I've also found it a little more-ish to check up on books I've read in the past and see where it lie on the spectrum. This is not supposed to be a one size fits all in book categorisation and segmentation - it's just another tool. Some people seem to have fun doing it and find it useful - some are even clicking through to amazon to purchase.

ddemchuk 17y ago

What's going on on the SEO side of things? You need to get your meta info cleaned up, running a site:bookhu.com shows that you aren't even including your meta descriptions, and you have a bunch of duplicate titles. Additionally, why are only 46 pages indexed? Are there more indexed and I'm just not seeing them? You stand to get a lot of really good long tail traffic because of the nature of your content, but if Google can't see it, no one else will. Get all that stuff cleaned up and that way you won't have to spend as much on PPC. Shoot me an email if you want to discuss some of these SEO things, I can probably help you out: darrindemchuk AT gmail DOT com

pmjoyce 17y ago
Much of that was probably referencing the old version of the site - I don't think Google has crawled this latest version - it only went live a couple of nights ago. I've have tried to be a little better on the SEO side of things, I've included some structured meta in the header of each book detail page. The honest truth is I haven't made it a top priority - you're right, I think I probably should.

jfarmer 17y ago

Doesn't add value to my life. Can't really think who this'd be for. Or is this just a tech demo?

pmjoyce 17y ago
Not a tech demo but I am starting bite size with small set of features. The bit that interests me is that there are some people who just don't like it and almost take exception/philosophically opposed to it [1]. There are others I can see from my stats who spend a baffling amount of time browsing around the site jumping from one book to the next for way longer than I originally anticipated anyone would. Most people, of course, lie in-between and don't take it too seriously. My thoughts? It's just a novel way to browse for books (no pun intended), people like to categorise and it's fun. 1. http://twitter.com/debwhite/status/7202044020 http://twitter.com/debwhite/status/7202044020

billturner 17y ago

I'll probably dig into it a little more later, but initially, on one of the book's detail pages, the text (and everything else) is pushed all the way to the sides of the browser window (in Chrome on OS X), so your "Feedback" side button obscures the content. See this screencap: http://i46.tinypic.com/oixe77.jpg http://i46.tinypic.com/oixe77.jpg

pmjoyce 17y ago
ouch - thanks

MicahWedemeyer 17y ago

Are you married to the "bookhu" domain name? I think you might have troubles with the phonetic aspect of it. How does someone pronounce that? book-hoo? boo-koo? If you're totally set on that one, you might want to grab any phonetically similar ones like bookwho, bookhoo, etc. I'm not sure how important the phonetic aspect is, but if it's too difficult to guess the domain from the sound of the name, you'll lose any possible traffic from "Hey, you should check out bookhu, I think you'd like it..."

pmjoyce 17y ago
this is a perennial issue for me - I'm never sure how much weight to allocate to domain names, or how many bases to cover.
- MicahWedemeyer 17y ago
  I'm no expert either. All I try to do is avoid names that are ambiguous or tough to spell. Think "del.icio.us" - Are you going to have to explain to someone every single time what your domain is, or will a casual mention be enough? Side note: this is why I think non-.com domains are almost worthless. On my startup, DoLeaf, we got "doleaf.com" and "dewleaf.com". Probably a good thing, too, as there seems to be a decent size minority that reads "doleaf" as "doh-leef", like Homer Simpson.

Goladus 17y ago

Where's the data coming from? This is interesting as a sort of bookstore web-storefront, but the numbers look funny to me. Catcher in the Rye readers are 75% male? Poor Little Bitch Girl (by Jackie Collins) readers are 100% male?