| Overall: | 45 | 6 |
| Design: | 16 | 1 |
| Navigation: | ||
| Usefulness: | 16 | 1 |
45
6
We are focused on one thing. Putting people that are interested in and passionate about new websites together with the people that are creating them. Together you can help shape the tools you want to use. We make the feedback loop easy.
Hopefully you will find launchly to be an invaluable resource whether you are launching a new site or just interested in the latest and greatest new websites.
- When you first arrived was it obvious what the site was about and how to get started?
- What features would you like to see added to help startups succeed?
- What features would you like to see added to support the community?
- Did you find any aspects of the site confusing or intimidating?
- Would you use this site regularly?
This is one of the better online utilities I have stumbled upon in recently memory. Love the fact that you've made it easy for anyone to provide 'usability feedback' to website owners. You've also provide 'launch' tools for marketers -- someone that feels fresh and new as a business service. The site is intuitive to use and I can see Launchly being very successful.
Love the idea of this site. Would be interested in eventually seeing some case studies (maybe on the Lean Startup group) about how successful your twist on the freemium plan is working.
Thanks for the encouraging words. I hope you find a use for it in the future.
That's a great idea btw. I will probably turn it into a blog post at some point on the launchly blog (http://blog.launchly.com) and link it on the LSC for sure when I do.
I'd also love to hear any feedback/ideas you (or those guys) have on ways to make launchly even more useful to lean startups specifically.
I'm finding that the feedback boxes are too small for writing more than two sentences. I see that they're supposed to auto expand, but it's only working half the time for me.
Grr, I have noticed that as well. I think I'm going to remove the auto-expand until I can find one that works 100%...
Removed the auto-expanding boxes for now. Gonna check around and see if there are new alternatives...
Thanks, much better.
Another feature request - option to notify when someone has commented on your feedback. It's hard to rely on people remembering to come back and check.
Ideas - checkbox to subscribe to comments (feed or email); show replies on profile page; setting to allow for auto emailing of replies to feedback.
I agree, much better!
That notification is in the icebox already. How would you like to be notified? On the site or via email or via twitter or?
On your first idea, you can currently subscribe to each launch's comments via either RSS or email (at the top of the feedback section). Did you just mean you would visually prefer checkboxes or did you not see that option?
Those are great ideas btw. I'll add stories for them now. Might also be nice to be able to reply to a comment via email (if you elected to receive them that way) and have it post as a comment on launchly.
I think I's only have interest in comments on my comments. Very similar functionality to "Subscribe to Comments" plugin for Wordpress.If I've chosen to engage in a comment, then there's a good chance I'd like to keep seeing the reaction to what I've said.
Prefer email notification options.
Just discovered launchly a couple of days back and have been reading/giving feedback for the last hour or so. I think its a great idea and its pretty well executed.
It would be great to have a way to write to a member (for example I wanted to write to you).
Hi Sumeet, can you be a bit more specific? What exactly would you like to see added or changed there?
oh, I didn't notice the 'Avatar help' link before :P I thought that was missing. May be you can create an option for the user to change the way they created their ID. For example,I signed up using my Google ID and just in case if I want to use my twitter ID then I did have to sign up again using it. In the process loosing all my earned reputations. An option to change the account type from the control panel would be very useful I guess... ?
One more thing, in the text box where the user is being asked about the twitter account, it would be very helpful if you could mention in what format we have to enter it. For example, I have to enter my full twitter profile address or just entering @sumeetchawla would suffice?
At the moment I have entered my full twitter address and no latest tweets are being shown :|
Eventually I plan to support associating multiple third-party accounts (Twitter + Facebook + Google for example) to one launchly account. Not sure when that will get done but it's on the list!
Good idea on providing help for the twitter field. I will get that updated right away but it is just your profile/username so in your case "sumeetchawla" without the "s.
When tweeting out when a new site is launched it would be a very helpful to have a short description of the site.
Love the idea behind this site! Great customer service as well! ;)
Hey thanks for the compliment and the idea.
I've been considering a few options on that front to contend with the 140 char limit.
a) Determine length of bit.ly URL + boilerplate text and include as much of the site's short description as possible OR
b) Add a new Twitter-specific field with a shorter limit that the site owner can set to whatever they want when they create the site
Option b sounds good at first but it's one more thing to think about when you create a launch. Option a would be good but I fear just taking the first 100 (for example) characters of their short description might be meaningless (although still more meaningful than what I send out now).
Thoughts?
True... Well you could go with option A first and see if users like it, which in return might be create a demand for option B. Option A also might get users to notice that the first part is tweeted out so they will adjust the description accordingly.
Option B might stall the users to think "damn I gotta explain my site in 100 char?" Although every site owner should be able to.
Lot's of changes and improvements this iteration! Here's a (probably incomplete) list of what changed since the last iteration...
* Category navigation added to make it easier to focus on sites that you find interesting. Sub-categories coming soon.
* Home page layout changed to accommodate new sidebar.
* Tag cloud navigation added (in new sidebar) as another way to find interesting launches.
* Replaced Disqus comment system with our own so that we could have better control over the functionality and feature set.
* Feedback can be voted up/down by logged in launchly users.
* Feedback can have screenshots attached to better show what you are trying to describe.
* User's have profile pages (linked to from their feedback) which shows how much reputation they have earned and their activity history. Added extra profile fields that may be filled in such as location, a website, and a biography to tell us about yourself.
* Automatically submit new launches to su.pr (which gets you into StumbleUpon).
* Subscribe to feedback on launches via either email or RSS.
* Users now earn reputation on launchly while they are logged in. Check out the FAQ (http://www.launchly.com/help) for more information on the reputation system!
* Added new Basic launch plan which is free but costs 100 reputation to encourage community participation and discourage spam.
Hi Brian, it wasn't easy to figure out how to get to my profile from the home page. I expected a "edit profile" on the nav bar in the upper right, near log out. Don't know if that's just me, though.
Comment systems is looking really awesome, though, and I really like the auto-expanding textbox.
The what's new sidebar on this page is really busy/dense. Maybe let the users (in this case you) use redcloth or markdown or something like that so it's not just "* " but is an actual UL of LI's?
To be perfectly honest, I don't check launchly regularly, but I do monitor the twitter stream. Letting the company supply a custom 100 character description for twitter would be better than "#{whatever} has just been launched. Check it out at #{bit.ly link}".
Partnerships would be really useful, but are hard to get. I think part of the reason HN works well is that everyone knows that people who have real-world influence are reading. Getting a few semi-celebrities (successful startup founders, maybe YC veterans) to participate would probably increase launchly's value significantly. The launching companies will always be unknown, but people would come to the site just to see what the reviewers thought. Launchers would pay to get access to informed eyes. Maybe this is a pipe dream, though, since I don't know how hard it would be to get a regular slice of their time.
You are certainly right that getting to your own profile is, to say the least, tricky right now. That's a left-over from when the site really didn't have its own users and thus no profile was necessary. I need to update the top navigation to allow for this but want to keep it easy for launchers to get to their site's dashboard. That's next up on my list of things to tackle for sure.
The auto-expanding textboxes are a PITA since they don't seem to work properly half the time for me! Haven't been able to find a 100% working jQuery plugin yet and StackOverflow didn't really have any suggestions either.
You are 1000% right about the What's New box! I recently widened this column at the expense of the sidebar and it really hadn't been a noticeable problem until I put 293 pages worth of content in that box on my own launch haha. I will be shifting it back so that side is wider like it was previously at the very least.
That's a great suggestion on allowing the site to pick their own twitter message. Definitely make it optional because I don't want to make the new launch form any more intimidating than it may already be. The RSS feed is another option here since it includes their description. I appreciate your honesty here. I don't necessarily expect people to check launchly regularly either which is why the Twitter stream and RSS feeds are so important. Maybe including the category the launch chose would help too?
I totally get what you're saying about the HN experience too. I'm really hoping this reputation system helps draw people in. Getting some founders/VCs/etc. to frequent launchly is certainly something that I hope happens but as you said it's a tricky problem since they are typically very busy. I do not personally go to HN for the startup-celebs but the community in general and I hope to replicate some of that here.
Thanks for the feedback!
Another quick one: I just noticed that someone posted feedback on Stormweight's launch, but I didn't get an email because the "email me" thing on my profile defaulted to false. I changed it, but think it's reasonable to default it to true. I mean, the feedback is a big part of why people launch on launchly, right? I wouldn't find it spammy to get notifications of valuable feedback by default, and it certainly would make the site stickier for the launchers.
I think the problem with the jQuery plugin is that the textarea font styling doesn't get applied to the hidden div that they use to estimate the text height (just guessing, having written my own version of this in jQuery a while ago). If you can figure out how to describe that div, then you can apply your textarea style to that div and it'll resize right.
Regarding startup-celebs on HN, I agree that's not a primary draw, but I think it's part of what keeps the quality of the community high, on the whole.
Well I widened the sidebar which helped some but it still really does need to be a real ul like you said.
Also just changed the link when you're logged in from "Your Dashboard" to "Your Profile" and added a "Your Launches" tab in your profile with links to your launches.