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Hey guys, Marc from Firedrop here. I completely understand the negative comments here about The Grid. I was super excited when The Grid came out and paid up the

Hey guys, Marc from Firedrop here. I completely understand the negative comments here about The Grid. I was super excited when The Grid came out and paid up the $90 like a lot of people, only to be hugely disappointed when I actually used it. They're pioneers in this space and they've done a lot of really interesting and cool work... but they've misunderstood their users hugely and made too many assumptions about them regarding design decisions. We're taking a different approach where our platform listens and learns more closely from the users rather than whatever broad abstract data set they're using. It'll lead to less "out there" designs that people will be happy with.

metafunctor 10y ago
Kudos for going for it! What, in particular, would you say you're doing better than The Grid? Which design assumptions are you not doing, and how is your approach different in terms of learning and listening to the users?
- marc_firedrop 10y ago
  Thanks for the kudos! Hopefully we can deliver where The Grid couldn't. We actually paid close attention to what they did and think we've learned a few things. The main difference is that we are spending more time learning what the user likes first before offering design options. Options being a key word here, because The Grid doesn't really have much of a feedback system and even their latest V2 alpha resorts largely to guesswork, whereas our system will give you choices and ask questions like "Do you like this?" at the appropriate points. The experience we're going for is the one you get from working with a human web designer: at first it's a two-way discovery process and then, over time, the web designer gets to know and understand you and therefore becomes better at nailing what you want straight away. Simultaneously, the platform will learn from anonymised behaviours from its other users, mixed with analytics monitoring, to discover recommendations that it can pass on to you as a user. For example, imagine you're a restaurant owner and you have a button that links to your booking engine which is labelled "Reserve a table". Our platform learns, from other restaurant sites on the network, that "Book a table" has a higher conversion rate, so it can pass that recommendation automatically on to your site. That kind of thing.
daeken 10y ago
I've never used The Grid or anything like this, so I'm curious: How much of your landing page is designed using Firedrop itself? This landing page seems like it's the perfect use case, so it seems like a good opportunity for dogfooding.
sriku 10y ago
Nice to see another team go at this problem. Firedrop's marketing using the general term "AI" doesn't give much confidence. As a startup, you probably want to keep your cards close to your chest, but the current stance is too closed and not confident enough. Google published page rank algo in 1999. Even TheGrid published GSS. Anything worthwhile like that to point out?
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metafunctor 10y ago

Kudos for going for it! What, in particular, would you say you're doing better than The Grid? Which design assumptions are you not doing, and how is your approach different in terms of learning and listening to the users?

marc_firedrop 10y ago
Thanks for the kudos! Hopefully we can deliver where The Grid couldn't. We actually paid close attention to what they did and think we've learned a few things. The main difference is that we are spending more time learning what the user likes first before offering design options. Options being a key word here, because The Grid doesn't really have much of a feedback system and even their latest V2 alpha resorts largely to guesswork, whereas our system will give you choices and ask questions like "Do you like this?" at the appropriate points. The experience we're going for is the one you get from working with a human web designer: at first it's a two-way discovery process and then, over time, the web designer gets to know and understand you and therefore becomes better at nailing what you want straight away. Simultaneously, the platform will learn from anonymised behaviours from its other users, mixed with analytics monitoring, to discover recommendations that it can pass on to you as a user. For example, imagine you're a restaurant owner and you have a button that links to your booking engine which is labelled "Reserve a table". Our platform learns, from other restaurant sites on the network, that "Book a table" has a higher conversion rate, so it can pass that recommendation automatically on to your site. That kind of thing.

daeken 10y ago

I've never used The Grid or anything like this, so I'm curious: How much of your landing page is designed using Firedrop itself? This landing page seems like it's the perfect use case, so it seems like a good opportunity for dogfooding.

sriku 10y ago

Nice to see another team go at this problem. Firedrop's marketing using the general term "AI" doesn't give much confidence. As a startup, you probably want to keep your cards close to your chest, but the current stance is too closed and not confident enough. Google published page rank algo in 1999. Even TheGrid published GSS. Anything worthwhile like that to point out?

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