8 ms·

Ask HN: Showing off customer feedback useful to you? (new from YC 07)

38 points by robfitz 17y ago

SlyShy 17y ago
It's weird to me that you aren't using your own product on your website. Or if you are, I looked around for it for a long time and didn't find it. You don't think it would be a natural fit for your own start-up? ;-) You could display all the positive comments you are getting on your website, and updated in real time!
- robfitz 17y ago
  In short: Yes, it's weird, but there's a good reason! ;) We're integrating realtime content pretty deeply into our site. It's a full redesign and we're still in the midst of the makeover. In the meantime, we wanted to start getting feedback from the community earlier rather than later. (edited for clarity)
  - PStamatiou 17y ago
    Rob is this your next startup? I ran into one of the fuzzwich guys last week at Startup Riot (forgot his name).
    - robfitz 17y ago
      Hey Paul. Same company, same team (http://habitindustries.com/about http://habitindustries.com/about), and still trying to make social advertising easier. It's been a winding (& interesting) journey of customer development from Fuzzwich to Habit Stream, which I'll probably post details of later this week.
  - SlyShy 17y ago
    Gotcha. I'm a big fan of the API examples in the meantime.
robfitz 17y ago
Hey guys, we've been working with London's agencies for the last few months to develop Habit Stream, which help find the nice things people are saying about your business and then re-broadcast the best bits (customer tweets, press coverage, Amazon reviews, etc) through more scalable channels (like widgets & ads). We've been getting a strong response from the agency side, but we're just starting to learn how we can best help startups, blogs, and small businesses. Basically, we think everyone should be able to benefit from the unsolicited testimonials that are popping up all over the web. So, we would really love to hear your thoughts. It's all self-serve and there's a free trial. Thanks! PS. You may have previously seen us as Minivid and/or Fuzzwich. Stream is a totally different approach to solving the same problem of making social advertising easier & more effective.
- gridspy 17y ago
  I'm interested in using Habitstream for Gridspy. It is quite a big price step between free, branded streams and unbranded commercial streams. It is a cool idea, something that I'll have to come back an explore as we start to take off.
  - savrajsingh 17y ago
    We're already using it at Wattvision (http://www.wattvision.com/info/about http://www.wattvision.com/info/about), and it's pretty cool. Feature suggestion: send me email reminders to approve new stream items. That would be a great feature. Like, "hey, you had 400 new mentions in the last week -- and here are some positive sounding ones. Click here to approve."
wheels 17y ago
Design nitpick: Don't use fixed size containers and variable sized fonts: http://skitch.com/scotchi/ns2be/habit-stream-curate-broadcast-your-brands-social-media-conversation http://skitch.com/scotchi/ns2be/habit-stream-curate-broadcas...
- hailpixel 17y ago
  Thanks for the screenshot. We'll clean it up.
revorad 17y ago
Hey that looks neat. How did you make that video?
- hailpixel 17y ago
  Thanks! We actually made it ourselves, believe it or not. Some screen shots and drawings mixed with After Effects.
  - staunch 17y ago
    I want a product that lets me create videos like that on the web in 20 minutes.
    - revorad 17y ago
      Exactly my thought!
      - staunch 17y ago
        Found this today (off TC) http://www.xtranormal.com/ http://www.xtranormal.com/ Kinda what I was thinking.
  - revorad 17y ago
    Wow that is brilliant. Well done!
jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
this is really really smart and a potentially big market. any smart site (ecommerce or whatever) has testimonials. the problem is, they're fairly static and people see them as possibly unsubstantiated. if i tweet "I <3 my iPhone" and its linked on your site, you cant ignore that. throw in the other sources too.
- robfitz 17y ago
  Hey Jason, thanks. Totally agree. I think there's also a certain value in the knowledge that the testimonials were unsolicited - just freely given to a friend in a normal conversation.
thinkbohemian 17y ago
Widgets, ad units, and stream API: should be clickable links IMHO, they look like buttons, and are what i was interested in immediately
jasonkester 17y ago
Cool, but I suspect we're not your audience. It would be hard to imagine your API being simultaneously simple enough to be less work using Twitter's API manually, and customizable enough to dump out exactly what I want easier than massaging the data and presenting it myself. But then if I was a guy in a band setting up our website, I could see this being really useful.
- donjaime_hn 17y ago
  I think the real selling point for them is their moderation tool for sifting through all the twitter/blog comment noise. I gave it a try and I liked it. I used it along with their API to make a "vanity quotes dashboard" for some open source projects I contribute to. plug :) -> http://gwtquotes.appspot.com http://gwtquotes.appspot.com
- seekely 17y ago
  To somebody just using Tweets (keep in mind that we currently also pull from Amazon, YouTube, Blogs, Blog comments and any RSS/Atom feed), we provide an extra safety net with our moderation. If you just incorporate the Twitter api directly on your site, you have to accept whatever users say showing up. With our moderation in between, you run no risk of the random or ugly comments showing up on your site. Also, if you do to use more than just Tweets, our API returns normalized data so you have a consistent and reliable set of fields no matter the source. You can see an example of results from our API here: http://www.habitstream.com/api/service/http?key=973dce2bcf7d162e1a2eff97facce32f&method=stream.stream.getContent&id=149&broadcastId=3 http://www.habitstream.com/api/service/http?key=973dce2bcf7d... If you look closely at any of the Tweets in the set, all the data you can get from the Twitter api is still there.
  - jasonkester 17y ago
    I found it strange that you don't pull from blogs themselves. We have our own "what people are saying about our thing" page, and it's entirely populated with blog content. If TechCrunch wrote up my app, it seems the only way I'd know about it from your service would be if somebody mentioned the app name in the comments. What's the motivation there?
jeff18 17y ago
I gave this an honest try because the video looked awesome, but sadly it is not useful to me. I basically just got a list of thousands of retweets for blog posts and a bunch of Disqus comments. Despite combing through many pages, I seriously could not find a single appropriate testimonial. Maybe you could add Google Checkout support? For example: https://checkout.google.com/reviews/merchant/endUserReviews?allowEmptyReviews=true&sellerId=204250837318315&s=All&q=&sortBy=Rating&isIncr=false https://checkout.google.com/reviews/merchant/endUserReviews?... I have a really low volume of Google Checkout orders, but even that is a gold mine for testimonials. Send me a message if you'd like some more info on my experience: jeff@wolfire.com
- robfitz 17y ago
  Hey Jeff, thanks for taking the time. Google Checkout reviews are a great idea... will definitely look into making that happen. Don't know if it's useful for you, but in the meantime you can grab Amazon reviews by putting the whole Amazon URL of your product pages into a new search. I'll send you an email w/ some extra questions - would love to hear more about your experience.
- seekely 17y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. For many searches, there is a lot of noise and very little signal. This is a big usability problem. As we progress the product, we want to get really good at identifying the signal and filter out the thousands of duplicate and irrelevant comments (as you unfortunately stumbled upon). The best searches for smaller companies right now will be those with unique names or those using a direct Amazon/YouTube/Rss URL, which is obviously not helpful for everybody. Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Google Checkout Reviews. I'll see if I can get that added by early next week and let you know.

38 points by robfitz 17y ago

It's weird to me that you aren't using your own product on your website. Or if you are, I looked around for it for a long time and didn't find it. You don't think it would be a natural fit for your own start-up? ;-) You could display all the positive comments you are getting on your website, and updated in real time!

robfitz 17y ago
In short: Yes, it's weird, but there's a good reason! ;) We're integrating realtime content pretty deeply into our site. It's a full redesign and we're still in the midst of the makeover. In the meantime, we wanted to start getting feedback from the community earlier rather than later. (edited for clarity)
- PStamatiou 17y ago
  Rob is this your next startup? I ran into one of the fuzzwich guys last week at Startup Riot (forgot his name).
  - robfitz 17y ago
    Hey Paul. Same company, same team (http://habitindustries.com/about http://habitindustries.com/about), and still trying to make social advertising easier. It's been a winding (& interesting) journey of customer development from Fuzzwich to Habit Stream, which I'll probably post details of later this week.
- SlyShy 17y ago
  Gotcha. I'm a big fan of the API examples in the meantime.

robfitz 17y ago

Hey guys, we've been working with London's agencies for the last few months to develop Habit Stream, which help find the nice things people are saying about your business and then re-broadcast the best bits (customer tweets, press coverage, Amazon reviews, etc) through more scalable channels (like widgets & ads). We've been getting a strong response from the agency side, but we're just starting to learn how we can best help startups, blogs, and small businesses. Basically, we think everyone should be able to benefit from the unsolicited testimonials that are popping up all over the web. So, we would really love to hear your thoughts. It's all self-serve and there's a free trial. Thanks! PS. You may have previously seen us as Minivid and/or Fuzzwich. Stream is a totally different approach to solving the same problem of making social advertising easier & more effective.

gridspy 17y ago
I'm interested in using Habitstream for Gridspy. It is quite a big price step between free, branded streams and unbranded commercial streams. It is a cool idea, something that I'll have to come back an explore as we start to take off.
- savrajsingh 17y ago
  We're already using it at Wattvision (http://www.wattvision.com/info/about http://www.wattvision.com/info/about), and it's pretty cool. Feature suggestion: send me email reminders to approve new stream items. That would be a great feature. Like, "hey, you had 400 new mentions in the last week -- and here are some positive sounding ones. Click here to approve."

wheels 17y ago

Design nitpick: Don't use fixed size containers and variable sized fonts: http://skitch.com/scotchi/ns2be/habit-stream-curate-broadcast-your-brands-social-media-conversation http://skitch.com/scotchi/ns2be/habit-stream-curate-broadcas...

hailpixel 17y ago
Thanks for the screenshot. We'll clean it up.

revorad 17y ago

Hey that looks neat. How did you make that video?

hailpixel 17y ago
Thanks! We actually made it ourselves, believe it or not. Some screen shots and drawings mixed with After Effects.
- staunch 17y ago
  I want a product that lets me create videos like that on the web in 20 minutes.
  - revorad 17y ago
    Exactly my thought!
    - staunch 17y ago
      Found this today (off TC) http://www.xtranormal.com/ http://www.xtranormal.com/ Kinda what I was thinking.
- revorad 17y ago
  Wow that is brilliant. Well done!

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago

this is really really smart and a potentially big market. any smart site (ecommerce or whatever) has testimonials. the problem is, they're fairly static and people see them as possibly unsubstantiated. if i tweet "I <3 my iPhone" and its linked on your site, you cant ignore that. throw in the other sources too.

robfitz 17y ago
Hey Jason, thanks. Totally agree. I think there's also a certain value in the knowledge that the testimonials were unsolicited - just freely given to a friend in a normal conversation.

thinkbohemian 17y ago

Widgets, ad units, and stream API: should be clickable links IMHO, they look like buttons, and are what i was interested in immediately

jasonkester 17y ago

Cool, but I suspect we're not your audience. It would be hard to imagine your API being simultaneously simple enough to be less work using Twitter's API manually, and customizable enough to dump out exactly what I want easier than massaging the data and presenting it myself. But then if I was a guy in a band setting up our website, I could see this being really useful.

donjaime_hn 17y ago
I think the real selling point for them is their moderation tool for sifting through all the twitter/blog comment noise. I gave it a try and I liked it. I used it along with their API to make a "vanity quotes dashboard" for some open source projects I contribute to. plug :) -> http://gwtquotes.appspot.com http://gwtquotes.appspot.com
seekely 17y ago
To somebody just using Tweets (keep in mind that we currently also pull from Amazon, YouTube, Blogs, Blog comments and any RSS/Atom feed), we provide an extra safety net with our moderation. If you just incorporate the Twitter api directly on your site, you have to accept whatever users say showing up. With our moderation in between, you run no risk of the random or ugly comments showing up on your site. Also, if you do to use more than just Tweets, our API returns normalized data so you have a consistent and reliable set of fields no matter the source. You can see an example of results from our API here: http://www.habitstream.com/api/service/http?key=973dce2bcf7d162e1a2eff97facce32f&method=stream.stream.getContent&id=149&broadcastId=3 http://www.habitstream.com/api/service/http?key=973dce2bcf7d... If you look closely at any of the Tweets in the set, all the data you can get from the Twitter api is still there.
- jasonkester 17y ago
  I found it strange that you don't pull from blogs themselves. We have our own "what people are saying about our thing" page, and it's entirely populated with blog content. If TechCrunch wrote up my app, it seems the only way I'd know about it from your service would be if somebody mentioned the app name in the comments. What's the motivation there?

jeff18 17y ago

I gave this an honest try because the video looked awesome, but sadly it is not useful to me. I basically just got a list of thousands of retweets for blog posts and a bunch of Disqus comments. Despite combing through many pages, I seriously could not find a single appropriate testimonial. Maybe you could add Google Checkout support? For example: https://checkout.google.com/reviews/merchant/endUserReviews?allowEmptyReviews=true&sellerId=204250837318315&s=All&q=&sortBy=Rating&isIncr=false https://checkout.google.com/reviews/merchant/endUserReviews?... I have a really low volume of Google Checkout orders, but even that is a gold mine for testimonials. Send me a message if you'd like some more info on my experience: jeff@wolfire.com

robfitz 17y ago
Hey Jeff, thanks for taking the time. Google Checkout reviews are a great idea... will definitely look into making that happen. Don't know if it's useful for you, but in the meantime you can grab Amazon reviews by putting the whole Amazon URL of your product pages into a new search. I'll send you an email w/ some extra questions - would love to hear more about your experience.
seekely 17y ago
Thanks for the feedback. For many searches, there is a lot of noise and very little signal. This is a big usability problem. As we progress the product, we want to get really good at identifying the signal and filter out the thousands of duplicate and irrelevant comments (as you unfortunately stumbled upon). The best searches for smaller companies right now will be those with unique names or those using a direct Amazon/YouTube/Rss URL, which is obviously not helpful for everybody. Thanks for pointing me in the direction of Google Checkout Reviews. I'll see if I can get that added by early next week and let you know.