7 ms·

Show HN: Mocksup, my mockup prototyping & review webapp

95 points by adamhowell 16y ago

michael_dorfman 16y ago
This looks very slick. I think you might be leaving some money on the table in terms of the pricing, though-- I imagine that heavy users would be willing to pay more than $19/month for the "Unlimited" plan.
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Yeah, we released a huge update yesterday and are just now getting to the point where we have enough features to make the unlimited plan compelling. We undercut our competition by a good amount, so we've certainly been talking about it.
  - mmelin 16y ago
    I think this is one of those products where a combination of one-off and subscription pricing makes a lot of sense. This lets you raise subscription prices significantly while still keeping a way to get some money out of customers who're scared of monthly subscriptions. It also makes for a fantastic upsell position when you can tell a returning one-off customer how much they'd save by getting a subscription.
  - paraschopra 16y ago
    Please don't undercut your competition on price. I remember a quote by Tony Wright (of RescueTime) where he said that "Getting traffic on and off is okay but for a business to survive, it needs a predictable source of potential customers and leads". If you are selling your service for $19/month, you will be forced to keep your cost of acquiring new customers less than that. Which of course means less budget for marketing. Note that mockups is not something that can go viral, so your marketing costs will linearly scale with every new customer. $19/month looks great if service is viral but for business apps like yours it can prove to be a growth bottleneck. Rambling aside, suppose 6 months from now when the hype around the cool new mockup tool has died, how do you plan to get new customers? (Hint: whichever method you choose, chances are than you are going to pay for it and that will come out of your revenues)
    - michael_dorfman 16y ago
      I agree completely. I was thinking $49/month would be the sweet spot, but that's without any real analysis.
      - bombs 16y ago
        It's a lot easier to reduce the price than to raise it!
        michael_dorfman 16y ago
        Not always. Reducing the price on a subscription-based product like this can make the early adopters feel like suckers-- whereas it's easy to grandfather them in on a raise in prices.
        Mc_Big_G 16y ago
        How do you feel about retroactively applying the new, lower cost to early adopters? I'm on the verge of doing some extensive A/B price testing and plan to do this with any users who buy at a higher price.
        michael_dorfman 16y ago
        I'm not sure how I feel about that, actually. I'll be interested in hearing what your experience is with it.
    - adamhowell 16y ago
      Great points. But, of course, the other side of that is you charge too much for a product out the gate that no one's willing to pay for, there's no hype at all and you lose the motivation necessary to make it worth paying for. Then again, I'm really glad Mocksup appears to be worth this discussion. Since this is a side-project for both of us I'd much rather you guys fuss at our pricing then just about anything else!
    - 16y ago
bemmu 16y ago
I signed up and was surprised to learn that all the mockups would need to be created in an outside program. I guess that serves a purpose too, to be able to create a clickable thing to show your colleagues, but it wasn't immediately clear to me that an actual mockupping tool isn't included.
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Yeah, I made sure to put "With Mocksup you can upload website mockups" in the subhead on the homepage, and was hoping the Examples page would help alleviate that a little bit. But I know no one reads marketing copy. Good feedback, I'll keep tweaking that.
  - raheemm 16y ago
    Do you plan to add a mockupping tool? If not, perhaps you can call your site "make your mockups live" or protomockup.com (available) or "quickly prototype your mockups", etc. I really like the design - it was easy to navigate and find stuff. But I had a hard time finding the signup button. Mockups and Mocksup is a confusing read.
    - k33n 16y ago
      I think Mocksup is a great name. Mocks up. As in, upload your mockups. That's what I got from it anyway.
    - humblepatience 16y ago
      For some reason I think "mock soup"
- brandon 16y ago
  I made the same mistake; I suppose I shouldn't have expected wireframing when it's not explicitly called out anywhere. An additional note, though: your upgrade page doesn't render correctly when I click through to it via the account page (was looking for a Delete Account button).
petervandijck 16y ago
Like it. Good concept, well executed. Aimed at designers. Hope it works out for you, good luck with the marketing!
k33n 16y ago
Great site. I just use email to send mockups 99% of the time, and sometimes I have them printed in hi-res. Good luck though! I'm sure there are plenty of people looking for something like this.
iamjustlooking 16y ago
That whole select box background change thing is slick! Very cool design.
Vistico 16y ago
It looks great alot seems to be in place and it's obviously well thought out. The two things I would consider is maybe re-wording the header, I think the objective of that was to fill up the empty space with bigger words, and then have the smaller text as a description. It seems most of the big text is just fluff I think you so reword it to include a quick pitch of what it can do via iphone/website/logo mockup-wise. Furthermore maybe the process to go signup could be one click faster if here was a signup button on the home page.. instead of a "login button/ see pricing plans button" I mean the pricing plan button works as a sign up it just doesn't say so.. maybe that is just me I clicked the login button at the top right since usually the login/signup is at the top right. Good luck with this project!
adrianwaj 16y ago
Perhaps contributors should be able to submit their mockups, that way people can discuss the different ones from different people. Otherwise, I wouldn't call them contributors, perhaps observers.
- adamhowell 16y ago
  We're going to solve this problem instead with multiple admins. It's on our short list.
blackswan 16y ago
Allowing such easy changing of the homepage is a great idea - it helps contextualise what the app does into something that might be useful to a user really fast. Good luck!
- Timothee 16y ago
  I agree, though I'd do one change: once I go from "Band's website" to "new iPhone game", put the third option in the second position, rather than swapping the first two. That's just a gut feeling of course, but I feel that a visitor who wants to see a second option would be interested in seeing the three options as well. By just switching the first two options, you make the third one just a bit harder to reach than the other two. (especially considering the size of the control)
kirkR 16y ago
Good Job! The site looks great.
brosephius 16y ago
I like the concept. it's not clear that you have to use an offline editor though, I first thought you could do the mockup work in my browser. maybe I missed this, but can you add notes to the mockups you put online, for example to guide a user through the design? I noticed an "Add note" feature in the screenshot of the editor, but it's not clear if those get copied to the online shared version.
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Yes, notes show up on the version of the mockup you're sharing. I'll try to make that clearer, thanks.
city41 16y ago
The site looks fantastic, great work. Have you looked into sketchflow? It's kinda/sorta a competitor, and kinda/sorta something you could incorporate into your site. I could see a demand for a nice, easy, secure place to host sketchflow mockups. All they require is an html page and a silverlight xap bundle. (sketchflow is bloody fantastic btw, I think it's going to make some serious inroads into how people make mock ups)
freshfey 16y ago
Really cool project and a great design! I would limit the free version a little more though (just 5 mockups, no iPhone support) to make the premium features more compelling!
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Good point. Our mobile support is brand new so once we see how users react to it we'll probably refactor our plans.
terpua 16y ago
Getting 500 error
duck 16y ago
In IE7 I get a 406 error when trying to view the examples: This error (HTTP 406 Not Acceptable) means that Internet Explorer was able to receive information from the website you visited, but the information was not in a format that Internet Explorer can display.
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Yes, sorry about that, we saw that last night and will hopefully fix it tonight. Had never seen that error before and I think it only happens on IE7.
richlittlehale 16y ago
Great website - very simple + nice interface which is huge for a website like this. I especially like the contributor's functionality where you can send out the mockups for feedback. In the past, where I've been on teams that had to send out jpgs of the designs plus maybe a surveymonkey survey, your website puts it all together for the necessary feedback people need. Even better is the create a "clickable" website part. I didn't really see that until I made an account (though I just looked back and saw it on the homepage). I think it's really important to have this functionality. I used to copy jpgs into powerpoint to try to simulate this somewhat. I agree with the comments about pricing above perhaps being a bit low. When I saw this "Compare" page: http://mocksup.com/compare http://mocksup.com/compare, it's obvious that Mocksup has a lot more features, but is lot cheaper than the other services (none of which I had heard of). I guess on the one hand low pricing is good, but it's almost too low because it made me think, why would these others be able to price so much higher? That almost made me want to go to the other sites and compare, when I probably would have just signed up with yours right away (I didn't though as I was really impressed with Mocksup). Great stuff over all. I'm a new user.
iworkforthem 16y ago
One improvement you could consider;- 1. there isn't a inbuilt mockup tool. you could provide some default templates for different browsers, iphone, android, etc. that will really help us developer get straight into mock up. I like the simple, straightforward approach in the web app, just let me focus on the mockup with its versioning & sharing features. Nice!
webwright 16y ago
Not only do you not support 1024 wide, you do it with backgrounds on your "how it works" page, so I can't even scroll sideways if I want to. Note: I'm a design/product guy currently on a netbook (i.e. I'm your target market). RescueTime, the company I just stepped down from, has about 8% of its users visiting with 1024 screens. This percentage WAS trending down but has flattened (Netbooks? iPads?).
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Yes, there's one page that's too wide, thanks for pointing it out. Eventually those background images will be images and text, I just didn't have time to get it in before launch. I'll work on it.
  - xinsight 16y ago
    The content is also quite tight on an iPad. (e.g. The mockup logo is touching the left side of the screen, or is maybe chopped by 1px.) Also, the examples are blank for me. (not sure if that is an iPad or general problem.)
qjz 16y ago
The website promises "smarter versioning" but each of the examples have only a single version, so there's no opportunity to review this feature.
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Haha, I knew somebody was going to notice! Time constraints, hope to get to it tonight.
jaspervdj 16y ago
Something wrong with the font size/line height here. Browser is epiphany 2.30.2 using webkit 1.2.1. http://i.imgur.com/rK3gD.png http://i.imgur.com/rK3gD.png
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Thanks for taking the screenshot. I honestly didn't even know there was a browse called Epiphany. I'll see if I can tweak that.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
terrellm 16y ago
Nice site and interesting app. It seems like more of a mockup organization system than a tool for creating mockups (like Balsamiq or Mockingbird), which was my initial thought looking at the name. Perhaps you can interface with them somehow? I'm not big on the product name though as my first thought was "oh cool mockups" which then turned to "oh wait it's a typo / misspelling of mockups". It's further confusing because you spell "mockups" correctly throughout your site. You also run the risk of a competitor buying mockups.com and building their own mockup software (logical development option). You've put together a great tool and well designed site, don't sell it short with a typo'ed product name.
dharma1 16y ago
Tell you what I've always wanted.. You know the awesome Skype screen sharing function? Imagine everyone in on the call being able to draw and write on top of the live screenshare. It'd be a great way to annotate/draw on top of designs live, while simultaneously talking about them with remote participants
- balsamiq 16y ago
  You can do this today with Adobe ConnectNow.
  - dharma1 16y ago
    thanks tried it - seems a bit buggy. The screensharing starts feeding back for instance.. the image quality could surely be better with h.264.. and I couldn't find an obvious way of drawing directly on top of my screen, almost like drawing on a transparency. I have to say in terms of ease of use and speed, I prefer Skype's native code to Connectnow's Flash/Flex by a long stretch
bwag 16y ago
Funny how "Not written in Flash" has become a feature. http://mocksup.com/compare http://mocksup.com/compare
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Haha, that was just me having a little fun. Two of the competitors in the list are, so it was just a slight jab ;)
fjabre 16y ago
Love the design and the idea seems solid but my first priority would be to put up a video explaining how it works.. The pictures, while well designed and thought out seem a little laborious to click through.. My attention span on the web is really short and I'm feeling lazy just now so about the only thing that I'd consider doing to learn about a new product/service like the one you're offering is to watch a video about it.
- adamhowell 16y ago
  Great point. We should provide both ways to learn about the product, through screenshots and text for people who hate videos or through video for people who don't feel like reading right then. I mentioned it above, but our old video was outdated and low production quality so I decided to shelve it until we could get something better. I'll get on it, thanks.
kadavy 16y ago
Beautiful site - I want to click through to a demo and start playing with it right away though.
railsjedi 16y ago
Nice. Another awesome RailsRumble project being fleshed out and productized. Best of luck Adam! I'll definitely be using this tool to link together photoshop comps to demo clients.
mtrimpe 16y ago
An odd comment perhaps, but I initially thought the drop-down selection box was broken and it took me a few seconds to realise that (unlike every other drop-down) the top element stayed selected.
Sriki 16y ago
HI THIS APP IS AMAZING

95 points by adamhowell 16y ago

This looks very slick. I think you might be leaving some money on the table in terms of the pricing, though-- I imagine that heavy users would be willing to pay more than $19/month for the "Unlimited" plan.

adamhowell 16y ago
Yeah, we released a huge update yesterday and are just now getting to the point where we have enough features to make the unlimited plan compelling. We undercut our competition by a good amount, so we've certainly been talking about it.
- mmelin 16y ago
  I think this is one of those products where a combination of one-off and subscription pricing makes a lot of sense. This lets you raise subscription prices significantly while still keeping a way to get some money out of customers who're scared of monthly subscriptions. It also makes for a fantastic upsell position when you can tell a returning one-off customer how much they'd save by getting a subscription.
- paraschopra 16y ago
  Please don't undercut your competition on price. I remember a quote by Tony Wright (of RescueTime) where he said that "Getting traffic on and off is okay but for a business to survive, it needs a predictable source of potential customers and leads". If you are selling your service for $19/month, you will be forced to keep your cost of acquiring new customers less than that. Which of course means less budget for marketing. Note that mockups is not something that can go viral, so your marketing costs will linearly scale with every new customer. $19/month looks great if service is viral but for business apps like yours it can prove to be a growth bottleneck. Rambling aside, suppose 6 months from now when the hype around the cool new mockup tool has died, how do you plan to get new customers? (Hint: whichever method you choose, chances are than you are going to pay for it and that will come out of your revenues)
  - michael_dorfman 16y ago
    I agree completely. I was thinking $49/month would be the sweet spot, but that's without any real analysis.
    - bombs 16y ago
      It's a lot easier to reduce the price than to raise it!
      - michael_dorfman 16y ago
        Not always. Reducing the price on a subscription-based product like this can make the early adopters feel like suckers-- whereas it's easy to grandfather them in on a raise in prices.
        Mc_Big_G 16y ago
        How do you feel about retroactively applying the new, lower cost to early adopters? I'm on the verge of doing some extensive A/B price testing and plan to do this with any users who buy at a higher price.
        michael_dorfman 16y ago
        I'm not sure how I feel about that, actually. I'll be interested in hearing what your experience is with it.
  - adamhowell 16y ago
    Great points. But, of course, the other side of that is you charge too much for a product out the gate that no one's willing to pay for, there's no hype at all and you lose the motivation necessary to make it worth paying for. Then again, I'm really glad Mocksup appears to be worth this discussion. Since this is a side-project for both of us I'd much rather you guys fuss at our pricing then just about anything else!
  - 16y ago

bemmu 16y ago

I signed up and was surprised to learn that all the mockups would need to be created in an outside program. I guess that serves a purpose too, to be able to create a clickable thing to show your colleagues, but it wasn't immediately clear to me that an actual mockupping tool isn't included.

adamhowell 16y ago
Yeah, I made sure to put "With Mocksup you can upload website mockups" in the subhead on the homepage, and was hoping the Examples page would help alleviate that a little bit. But I know no one reads marketing copy. Good feedback, I'll keep tweaking that.
- raheemm 16y ago
  Do you plan to add a mockupping tool? If not, perhaps you can call your site "make your mockups live" or protomockup.com (available) or "quickly prototype your mockups", etc. I really like the design - it was easy to navigate and find stuff. But I had a hard time finding the signup button. Mockups and Mocksup is a confusing read.
  - k33n 16y ago
    I think Mocksup is a great name. Mocks up. As in, upload your mockups. That's what I got from it anyway.
  - humblepatience 16y ago
    For some reason I think "mock soup"
brandon 16y ago
I made the same mistake; I suppose I shouldn't have expected wireframing when it's not explicitly called out anywhere. An additional note, though: your upgrade page doesn't render correctly when I click through to it via the account page (was looking for a Delete Account button).

petervandijck 16y ago

Like it. Good concept, well executed. Aimed at designers. Hope it works out for you, good luck with the marketing!

k33n 16y ago

Great site. I just use email to send mockups 99% of the time, and sometimes I have them printed in hi-res. Good luck though! I'm sure there are plenty of people looking for something like this.

iamjustlooking 16y ago

That whole select box background change thing is slick! Very cool design.

Vistico 16y ago

It looks great alot seems to be in place and it's obviously well thought out. The two things I would consider is maybe re-wording the header, I think the objective of that was to fill up the empty space with bigger words, and then have the smaller text as a description. It seems most of the big text is just fluff I think you so reword it to include a quick pitch of what it can do via iphone/website/logo mockup-wise. Furthermore maybe the process to go signup could be one click faster if here was a signup button on the home page.. instead of a "login button/ see pricing plans button" I mean the pricing plan button works as a sign up it just doesn't say so.. maybe that is just me I clicked the login button at the top right since usually the login/signup is at the top right. Good luck with this project!

adrianwaj 16y ago

Perhaps contributors should be able to submit their mockups, that way people can discuss the different ones from different people. Otherwise, I wouldn't call them contributors, perhaps observers.

adamhowell 16y ago
We're going to solve this problem instead with multiple admins. It's on our short list.

blackswan 16y ago

Allowing such easy changing of the homepage is a great idea - it helps contextualise what the app does into something that might be useful to a user really fast. Good luck!

Timothee 16y ago
I agree, though I'd do one change: once I go from "Band's website" to "new iPhone game", put the third option in the second position, rather than swapping the first two. That's just a gut feeling of course, but I feel that a visitor who wants to see a second option would be interested in seeing the three options as well. By just switching the first two options, you make the third one just a bit harder to reach than the other two. (especially considering the size of the control)

kirkR 16y ago

Good Job! The site looks great.

brosephius 16y ago

I like the concept. it's not clear that you have to use an offline editor though, I first thought you could do the mockup work in my browser. maybe I missed this, but can you add notes to the mockups you put online, for example to guide a user through the design? I noticed an "Add note" feature in the screenshot of the editor, but it's not clear if those get copied to the online shared version.

adamhowell 16y ago
Yes, notes show up on the version of the mockup you're sharing. I'll try to make that clearer, thanks.

city41 16y ago

The site looks fantastic, great work. Have you looked into sketchflow? It's kinda/sorta a competitor, and kinda/sorta something you could incorporate into your site. I could see a demand for a nice, easy, secure place to host sketchflow mockups. All they require is an html page and a silverlight xap bundle. (sketchflow is bloody fantastic btw, I think it's going to make some serious inroads into how people make mock ups)

freshfey 16y ago

Really cool project and a great design! I would limit the free version a little more though (just 5 mockups, no iPhone support) to make the premium features more compelling!

adamhowell 16y ago
Good point. Our mobile support is brand new so once we see how users react to it we'll probably refactor our plans.

terpua 16y ago

Getting 500 error

duck 16y ago

In IE7 I get a 406 error when trying to view the examples: This error (HTTP 406 Not Acceptable) means that Internet Explorer was able to receive information from the website you visited, but the information was not in a format that Internet Explorer can display.

adamhowell 16y ago
Yes, sorry about that, we saw that last night and will hopefully fix it tonight. Had never seen that error before and I think it only happens on IE7.

richlittlehale 16y ago

Great website - very simple + nice interface which is huge for a website like this. I especially like the contributor's functionality where you can send out the mockups for feedback. In the past, where I've been on teams that had to send out jpgs of the designs plus maybe a surveymonkey survey, your website puts it all together for the necessary feedback people need. Even better is the create a "clickable" website part. I didn't really see that until I made an account (though I just looked back and saw it on the homepage). I think it's really important to have this functionality. I used to copy jpgs into powerpoint to try to simulate this somewhat. I agree with the comments about pricing above perhaps being a bit low. When I saw this "Compare" page: http://mocksup.com/compare http://mocksup.com/compare, it's obvious that Mocksup has a lot more features, but is lot cheaper than the other services (none of which I had heard of). I guess on the one hand low pricing is good, but it's almost too low because it made me think, why would these others be able to price so much higher? That almost made me want to go to the other sites and compare, when I probably would have just signed up with yours right away (I didn't though as I was really impressed with Mocksup). Great stuff over all. I'm a new user.

iworkforthem 16y ago

One improvement you could consider;- 1. there isn't a inbuilt mockup tool. you could provide some default templates for different browsers, iphone, android, etc. that will really help us developer get straight into mock up. I like the simple, straightforward approach in the web app, just let me focus on the mockup with its versioning & sharing features. Nice!

webwright 16y ago

Not only do you not support 1024 wide, you do it with backgrounds on your "how it works" page, so I can't even scroll sideways if I want to. Note: I'm a design/product guy currently on a netbook (i.e. I'm your target market). RescueTime, the company I just stepped down from, has about 8% of its users visiting with 1024 screens. This percentage WAS trending down but has flattened (Netbooks? iPads?).

adamhowell 16y ago
Yes, there's one page that's too wide, thanks for pointing it out. Eventually those background images will be images and text, I just didn't have time to get it in before launch. I'll work on it.
- xinsight 16y ago
  The content is also quite tight on an iPad. (e.g. The mockup logo is touching the left side of the screen, or is maybe chopped by 1px.) Also, the examples are blank for me. (not sure if that is an iPad or general problem.)

qjz 16y ago

The website promises "smarter versioning" but each of the examples have only a single version, so there's no opportunity to review this feature.

adamhowell 16y ago
Haha, I knew somebody was going to notice! Time constraints, hope to get to it tonight.

jaspervdj 16y ago

Something wrong with the font size/line height here. Browser is epiphany 2.30.2 using webkit 1.2.1. http://i.imgur.com/rK3gD.png http://i.imgur.com/rK3gD.png

adamhowell 16y ago
Thanks for taking the screenshot. I honestly didn't even know there was a browse called Epiphany. I'll see if I can tweak that.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

terrellm 16y ago

Nice site and interesting app. It seems like more of a mockup organization system than a tool for creating mockups (like Balsamiq or Mockingbird), which was my initial thought looking at the name. Perhaps you can interface with them somehow? I'm not big on the product name though as my first thought was "oh cool mockups" which then turned to "oh wait it's a typo / misspelling of mockups". It's further confusing because you spell "mockups" correctly throughout your site. You also run the risk of a competitor buying mockups.com and building their own mockup software (logical development option). You've put together a great tool and well designed site, don't sell it short with a typo'ed product name.

dharma1 16y ago

Tell you what I've always wanted.. You know the awesome Skype screen sharing function? Imagine everyone in on the call being able to draw and write on top of the live screenshare. It'd be a great way to annotate/draw on top of designs live, while simultaneously talking about them with remote participants

balsamiq 16y ago
You can do this today with Adobe ConnectNow.
- dharma1 16y ago
  thanks tried it - seems a bit buggy. The screensharing starts feeding back for instance.. the image quality could surely be better with h.264.. and I couldn't find an obvious way of drawing directly on top of my screen, almost like drawing on a transparency. I have to say in terms of ease of use and speed, I prefer Skype's native code to Connectnow's Flash/Flex by a long stretch

bwag 16y ago

Funny how "Not written in Flash" has become a feature. http://mocksup.com/compare http://mocksup.com/compare

adamhowell 16y ago
Haha, that was just me having a little fun. Two of the competitors in the list are, so it was just a slight jab ;)

fjabre 16y ago

Love the design and the idea seems solid but my first priority would be to put up a video explaining how it works.. The pictures, while well designed and thought out seem a little laborious to click through.. My attention span on the web is really short and I'm feeling lazy just now so about the only thing that I'd consider doing to learn about a new product/service like the one you're offering is to watch a video about it.

adamhowell 16y ago
Great point. We should provide both ways to learn about the product, through screenshots and text for people who hate videos or through video for people who don't feel like reading right then. I mentioned it above, but our old video was outdated and low production quality so I decided to shelve it until we could get something better. I'll get on it, thanks.

kadavy 16y ago

Beautiful site - I want to click through to a demo and start playing with it right away though.

railsjedi 16y ago

Nice. Another awesome RailsRumble project being fleshed out and productized. Best of luck Adam! I'll definitely be using this tool to link together photoshop comps to demo clients.

mtrimpe 16y ago

An odd comment perhaps, but I initially thought the drop-down selection box was broken and it took me a few seconds to realise that (unlike every other drop-down) the top element stayed selected.

Sriki 16y ago

HI THIS APP IS AMAZING