My project still needs a lot of work. Can I get your feedback?
Hi Indiehackers!
I just launched www.oppslist.com. It's still needs a lot of work and I was wondering if I could get your feedback on it.
I'm hoping it will serve as a place to discuss and share business problems that need solving.
Some things I'm wondering about specifically:
Readability: Is it easy to read what is on the page?
Categorization: How should I categorize each "opp"? By industry? By upvotes?
Format: Is there a better way to present this information?
Value: Is this valuable? How can I make this more interesting to use?
Anything else you think of would be greatly appreciated!
Cheers!
-Cory
Hi Cory
Just wondering, how do you get people from the different industries share their business problems with you?
Cheers
Hey greenflow!
It's a mix between paid surveys and cold outreach. I'm hoping with oppslist we can begin to attract folks who want to share their software needs!
How do you plan to make money with this project?
Will you sell the leads?
Like asking the people that shared their business problems if they want to be contacted by a problem solver (developer), to further explore the possibility for this business or app idea?
I've played around with this idea a bit. It seems like one possible avenue, but Ideally I'd like to find a way to get a recurring revenue stream!
And, what are you doing in the meantime?
Good question! There are some "premium content" avenues I want to explore. So I'm going work on those for a week or two, put them on the site and see if people like it. Also, I'd like to improve the homepage. The majority of the folks aren't interacting with the content and I'm not sure why...
I would like to be able to sort the list with more than one tag, like for instance...
$100-1k + monthly + construction
Got it! I'll put better sorting on my trello board :D
Excellent.
This is really cool!
An intuitive categorization to me would be the skills needed to solve the problem. So if I think I'm good at "image processing" work, I'd probably want to click that as a tag and see these:
Also, can developers connect with the people with the need? Some, like the biologist one seem pretty difficult to complete if you can't talk directly to the person who wants the software.
software that can scan a license and automatically populate a traffic stop form... hmm Open CV, people through crowd sourcing assuming internet connection/ update later.
that would be cool to do, not my field though
Hi mtlynch!
I hadn't thought about categorizing by skills, but that makes a ton of sense!
So, these postings have already been sent to the Opps Daily e-mail list, so by the point they hit the site they're either over-contacted or unresponsive. With that said, one of my main goals is to provide a simple submission process that I hope entices people with problems to post and engage with the community.
Thanks for the feedback :D
Solid MVP Cory. Just out of curiosity, how long did it take you to put this MVP together?
Thanks! :D
It took about a month. I've had an abundance of free time lately so I finally got around to putting real hours into it.
I think the hardest part about it was not knowing what I was building. I'm still trying to figure out the best way format for this data.
I think I spent the first 2-3 days just just drawing in a notebook and setting up a blank app.
Then learning how to build an upvote / commenting system took a fair amount of time.
If I had to do it again, it'd be much faster.
Thanks Cory. I've built a commenting system with upvotes recently. It was surprising that the operation of a commenting system seemed simple, but the process of building it actually took some serious thinking and time.
I like it! I've been getting the Opps Daily email for at least a month now and it's been interesting to read.
A few questions:
How do you get in contact with the person who submitted the request? It feels a bit weird to write a comment there showing your interest. I would think something like that should be private.
What is the purpose of the upvote? I think a better number would be to see how many developers have shown interest in working on it and getting in touch with the submitter. Similar to how you can see the number of people who have applied to a job on a job posting site.
What's the difficult part of making the connection? You mentioned in your blog that there was only one successful connection this week. Does that mean that there isn't enough interest from developers? Or that the submitters aren't responding?
Keep up the good work! It's awesome that you've been able to find so many people who have shown an interest on both sides (developers and submitters)
Thanks Marz0!
I haven't built this in yet. What you see on the site are old Opps from oppsdaily. Most have either been contacted or are unresponsive. The end goal is to have a place where both sides can meet and collaborate, but for now these are just for inspiration / discussion. I should note that somewhere!
I think it might be better as a heart, or thumbs up or something. Basically, I want to know what interests people and what they find valuable.
Depending on where I found the submitter, it can be tough to contact them. Alternatively, sometimes there is a submitter who really wants to solve the problem, but devs aren't interested.
Thanks for the feedback :D
I think it's a solid MVP!
The problem now is that (sorry for the brutality) it looks like one of those cyber-squatting pages you get when you typo a URL. Nearly every element on the page is a text-based hyperlink.
Maybe look at getting a noun project icon for each tag and putting them next to each link? Just anything to break up what looks like a massive directory.
If you can think of a better way to write the titles or otherwise present the opps that'd be good too. "X needs Y" makes sense, but having them all like that makes it look computer-generated and fake.
I think you might benefit from having a short landing page too - explaining the idea and why it's useful, then "take me to the opps!" as a CTA. This'll help people find it via search engines too.
I think another thing to think about is that you've got a great resource of evergreen content here, but you're presenting it like HackerNews... I can't imagine why hotness would be the most relevant dimension for sorting, if anything you'd want to sort by the least upvotes. I'd think about adding search through algolia or something first and browsing by tags second, then some kind of "what's new" or "what's trending" after that.
The individual opp pages present a lot of long-tail SEO opportunity for the supply-side too. If the opps are solid, there'll be potential customers searching for stuff like "hospital patient data management solution" - if you can get https://www.oppslist.com/opportunities/21 to rank for that, then hopefully you can capture them and connect them with people building that solution and massively improve the utility of your site.
Thanks for the feedback Alex! :D
Haha I love the brutality!! I'm going to take your advice and incorporate a few icons into the design to liven things up.
Also, I think you're right in that there has to be a better way to present each opportunity.
I suppose I added upvotes in the hopes that the community might help sort the content based on quality, but maybe I'll switch it to a "like" system? Also I'll check out algolia search.
Great call on the SEO. I don't know too much about it, but I'm hoping to garner some traffic just through cropping up in searches.
Thanks again, this was super helpful!!!
Cory, it was great meeting you on Saturday at the meetup in NYC.
I took a look at the OppsList this morning.
I think the font size is good, I am reading it on a nexus 5 phone.
Does the list represent opportunities that are not being actively worked on by other developers? I would want to know that from the perspective of a developer looking for a project to work on.
I would move the category sort widget to the top as the scrolling on the phone is quite long to reach it.
Is there a way to display the amount of money in say a range for each opportunity? I think showing that and being able to sort on that would be appealing.
One last thing that comes to mind, if I were just signing up to Oppsdaily newsletter for first time, having a link to the OppsList at the bottom of each daily newsletter with a call to action to see recent opportunities would be huge.
Hey Tyson!
Agreed! That was a blast. Thank you for suggesting that :D
Does the list represent opportunities that are not being actively worked on by other developers?
Good question. There are few that I know are being worked on but the majority aren't (to my knowledge). I may add a method for users to flag a post if they are working on something / interested in working on something.
I would move the category sort widget to the top as the scrolling on the phone is quite long to reach it.
Done!
Is there a way to display the amount of money in say a range for each opportunity?
Great idea! Adding to the to-do list.
having a link to the OppsList at the bottom of each daily newsletter with a call to action to see recent opportunities would be huge.
Good thinking. Adding to the list.
Thanks again :D
anytime, we should do another meetup soon.
I like what you've done mate. I would suggest putting front-and-center an email subscription form. I couldn't tell if you already do it, but this is the sort of thing I wouldn't mind delivered to my inbox, like https://nugget.one/ and http://www.oppsdaily.com/ if you could add extra insight that would be good, upvotes don't really mean much to me but if you could pose the idea and then do an analysis of the industry for each idea that would be helpful, things such as 'companies already in this space or solving this problem, or competitors' would be good.
Hi deadlysyntax!
Thanks so much for the feedback :D
I'll include a link to oppsdaily (my other project) in there. And maybe I'll do a once a week roundup e-mail for oppslist.
Thanks for the insight about the upvotes. I'm trying to figure out which opportunities people seem to like, so I can post more of them. Maybe upvotes aren't the best way to express that.
I'm going to try and analyze the most popular opps, providing market size, demand, and competition.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
Hey ploggingdev!
Sorry about that! I've been pretty neglectful on the blogging front. I've been putting a lot of that time into opps list. I may move my blogging efforts over there and cover both products in my posts.
Here are some recent stats:
The list is still growing, we're at about 4250 subscribers.
I really haven't made too much more money because I stopped offering the prospecting service (too much time, too little $).
The connection rate continues to drop, so I'm hoping oppslist can help solve that in a few ways.
Stay tuned for more blog posts soon :)
I'm curious what you do as the developer if you wanted to solve one of these tasks?
Your menu is squished (needs bottom padding), also why are the options on the left when the menu is on the right? (responsive issue at split screen, (portrait half of 1920x1080)
Also do you handle billing on your site, or is that managed by the parties joined by your site?
I'm kind of curious how this compares to UpWork/Freelance... not saying they're the same but the idea of "demand for service, developer replies..." how is that handled?