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Ask HN: Please review my new startup. [Free account for HN community]
- zackattack 17y agoSTEPS 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 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 17y agodoesn't twitter ban people for doing this?
- zackattack 17y agoGood 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.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- zaidf 17y agozaid.farooqui at gmail Would love to give it a shot!
- zackattack 17y agoYou 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.
- zaidf 17y agoDone...I think? After submitting step 1 and giving your app permission, I was brought back to step1.
- zackattack 17y agoLog in and try again. My app never got a pingback from Twitter (for whatever reason). What browser are you using, BTW?
- zaidf 17y agoI now get "Error: that twitter account is already in use." I am using Chrome. (To the dude downvoting this and other random comments of mine, stay classy!)
- zackattack 17y agoNo, I meant try signing in, not re-creating the account
- daveying99 17y agoi'd like to try it too. email: twitter@emoticards.com thanks
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- simonk 17y agoRegistered.
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- paulhart 17y ago[REDACTED]
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- paulhart 17y agoNice, thanks :)
- slig 17y agoThanks!
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- JimEngland 17y agoThis seems interested, I'd love to help you beta test. jimengland at gmail
- zackattack 17y agoactivated!
- dwynings 17y agoThanks!
- zackattack 17y agoyou're welcome & activated
- bartman 17y agobart at customerfind.the-bart dot org
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- shafqat 17y agoRegistered - shafqat at newscred dot com. Great idea btw... look forward to trying it out.
- zackattack 17y agoactivated, and thanks
- white 17y agoprokhorenko at gmail.com and we'll see how this works out. :)
- zackattack 17y agoactivated!
- dc2k08 17y ago[retracted]
- zackattack 17y agoDid you go through the registration process yet?
- dc2k08 17y ago[retracted]
- zackattack 17y agoactivated!
- dc2k08 17y agothanks. Is it one twitter account per customerfind account? Also I would love to be able to avoid following certain twitter accounts. Do you think there is a possibility you could add a field to input twitter accounts we don't want to follow? It would be useful to have some fields to follow only twitter accounts tagged with certain locations too, for eg, London, Berkshire, Brighton etc.
- zackattack 17y agoHappy to add this feature for you if you're willing to purchase a paid account. If so, email zackster@gmail.com
- nkohari 17y agoWow. 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.
- nkohari 17y agoWhy in the world would my comment get down-voted? The layout and design elements are practically identical.
- pclark 17y agodid you look at http://basecamphq.com http://basecamphq.com ? The only similarity is the top header black bar.
- rokhayakebe 17y agoI 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...
- zaidf 17y agoI downvoted you because I did not think it is a "blatant ripoff".
- nkohari 17y agoGo look at http://basecamphq.com/ http://basecamphq.com/ again. The layout, fonts, and styling are all clearly pulled from the marketing website.
- kyro 17y agoI'm sure he used their design as a template to get something somewhat presentable for the time being and that once he has some more time and traction, he'll give the design a bit more attention. Let's relax a bit and stop making this out to be some corporate scandal.
- workhorse 17y agoI 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
- marram 17y agoHere 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! :)
- zackattack 17y agoWhew. Fixed. Anyway, your free account has been activated
- marram 17y agoSome 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?
- zackattack 17y agoThe 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 17y agoRegistered alexanderdblom AT G MAIL
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- marcamillion 17y agoHey 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 :)
- zackattack 17y 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.
- many 17y agoI'm really poor. Can I have 90 days?
- jcoby 17y agojacob.coby at gmail.com
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- mishmax 17y agohalshura at gmail
- fjabre 17y agoI 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
- flooha 17y agoflooha at gmail
- zackattack 17y agoactivated!
- Raisin 17y agofdcleary at gmail
- zackattack 17y agoactivated!
- marram 17y agoOh oh. Seems to be down now.
- zackattack 17y agoIt's back up. I think my webhost just restarted apache or something.
- gaz 17y agocontact at tallstreet.com
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- ekpyrotic 17y agoekpyrotic at gmail dot com
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- tonyvt2005 17y agotonyhuynh29 at gmail
- ABrandt 17y agoaustin [at] beatnex [dot] com
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- slig 17y agoFeedback: Let the user choose the language of the keywords.
- miles 17y ago"Free account for HN community" should read "Free trial account for HN community" in my opinion, as the former is rather misleading.
- flooha 17y agoAgreed. The OP might also consider a longer trial than 6 days. I'm not sure I can really evaluate the system in that time.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- keefe 17y ago<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js></script> http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.js></script> This lagged hardcore the first time for me. Pretty sure you are not supposed to hotlink this in production?
- zackattack 17y agothanks... changed to google repository
- zachware 17y agozgware@gmail.com. Excited to check it out.
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- petekoomen 17y agoI'd love to check it out: pete at carrotsticks dot com
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- uvince 17y agouvince AT yahoo.com thanks for the free account!
- zackattack 17y agoactivated
- paraschopra 17y agoGreat app, it seems. Just curious, what do you mean by "whitelisted by Twitter"?
- NEPatriot 17y agoSeems 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 17y agoAm I missing something or hasn't this already been done by others like Twittermass?
- NEPatriot 17y agoliranbaron at gmail dot com thanks