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33 Comments

Disrupt My Business Idea And I Will Disrupt Yours!

Hey guys,

It's hard to stay objective while working on your own business idea. Believe it or not, but we're all biased when it comes to evaluating our own idea.
With our unique founder's-perspective we might oversee substantial problems because we don't have that 3rd person standpoint of what's going on.
As a founder you need to be aware of as many issues as possible that might be coming up during your early startup stages. Therefore I decided to create this scary and (maybe) painful topic: Disrupting each others startup ideas.

Are you ready to do the same? Here's how it works:

  1. Check out my business idea and give me productive critics or perspectives on what could go wrong or what I haven't thought of yet.

  2. After that, post your own startup idea (problem, solution, financials and your website if you have one)

  3. I will think about your idea and screen it from top to bottom. After that I will send you my line of thoughts with some advice.

Remember: The goal is not to tear dreams apart. It is to help us finding issues or struggles that we don't know about yet.

Alright, here is my idea:

I'm seeing a problem in the way how retail businesses interact with their customers when it comes to feedback. Customer-surveys and feedback-flyers are unattractive, repetitive and feel like a burden. Despite that it lacks of transparency after customers send their feedback.
I want to create a platform where customers can openly discuss about improvements and ideas for their retail stores, supermarkets, etc... . They communicate closely with the business and stay informed about their feedback. Customers can send their own feedback and vote for their favorites ideas. Each feedback sent, will earn them a point from the store. After having collected enough points, customers can redeem gift cards or products offered by their stores.
I will charge each business a monthly participation fee which includes analysation tools. The participation fee also includes a certain amount of points that will be automatically sent to the customer once feedback was sent. If the business is out of points before the next month started, it can buy more in the store for money.

  1. 4

    Do you have some data how many shop visitors would like to improve existing businesses? It seems like something you personally would see in action and you would do it, but I don't think there will be mass adoption for that. Don't get me wrong, I'm in the same situation. For people to start using it, you need to add HUGE reward. I believe customers are getting enough of redeem gift cards, collecting points and similar things. That's one reason, the second reason is - you target wide audience. You target young people (who don't care about those points), "internet savy" people who may use that opportunity, people who have only their email and fb account (with the same password, forgotten ages ago) who would like to get some discounts etc.

    What I'm saying, I would propose to tweak your rewarding mechanism and I have something in my mind just right now. You don't have to do it that way, but hopefully I'll provoke your mindset enough to start thinking in that way. And to tweak it, I propose two changes. One is the target audience who will give the feedback, and the second one is to change the nature of the reward.

    So, this is my suggestion: Target young people, social network users who like to compete with the number of views, likes, followers. Offer them a platform to provide feedback to business owners [you already have this]. If a business owner pick someones idea for improvement, the reword that person is getting is a physical space in the shops (some big posters or advertisement walls) where the winner can choose to put their social profiles. It could be their instagram profile, TickTock, Twitter account, Snapchat, whatever.

    That way you acknowledge someone that they are important to this shop. And they have that feeling. It's also a ripple effect, since that person will then brag about it on their social media and the business will get more exposure. Imagine the hype you can get to see your profile featured at local McDonalds, thanking you personally. Costs for businesses is the cost they would usually put to cover that wall or to print different material.

    ---

    oh boi, I wrote way too much text, I'm exhausted to write about my idea. What scared me for a moment was this text

    I'm seeing a problem in the way how retail businesses interact with their customers when it comes to

    Because that's the exact same line I would use to start writing about Bee Informed 😅

    I provide a platform that can send offers to the shop visitors who don't leave a digital footprint or any kind of contact at the billing counter (phone number or email address). Check it out, if you are interested, I'll write more.

    1. 2

      Wow @brunor, I don't know what I should be more stunned about: Your long response or your creative thought about a completely different rewarding concept. This is a brilliant idea and I appreciate it very much! I will definitely think more about the social/recognition reward concept that you have talked about.
      In regards to your questions, I don't have any data that might represent the shop visitor's willingness to leave feedback. I only know from my own experience that the current ways how stores deal with their customer's ideas/feedback are pretty much crap. Sometimes I hear people complaining about stores or coming up with improvement suggestions but I think that none of these are communicated to the shops. Either the employees you talk to don't really care or customers don't wanna spend their time on those text boxes of feedback flyers. I try to aim my platform for intrinsically motivated customers that get the extra benefit of earning rewards because I don't expect the rewards to be so HUUGE that it could compete with other reward platforms just like you have said.

      I have already build an app-prototype on how the feedback-community-platform could look like and I really want you to be one of the first people to show it to. Let me know if you are interested and I will send you a link. :-)

      Here are my thoughts on Bee Informed:

      1. Before I can actually start disrupting your idea, I need to talk about the website. It was very hard for me to get an understanding of your product. First of all: the upper half of the landing page is awesome. You describe the issue that there is a hidden majority which is quite hard to reach and use the illustration as a very comprehensible problem-explanation. When it comes to the lower half though things started to get confusing for me. You need to keep your explanation shorter. I would recommend a maximum of 4 point but without any subsections like 4a,b,c etc. Besides that small images are super helpful to make your explanation more vivid and easily to s absorb. There are plenty of great websites where you can get them for free. Here is a short list: undraw.co, humaaans.com, freepik.com, icons8.com, drawkit.io, sketchappsources.com

      2. Make sure you fully understand the reason behind why your potential user group is currently not willing to leave their data like emails etc. . Is the reason because they don't want to share their personal data or is the actual reason because they don't want to get showered with offers and other noisy emails in the first place. Hypothesis number one would be in favor of your mission but hypothesis number two might completely tear your business apart because the users problem is not the one you think it is. From my perspective, I don't like to leave my email address because I know that businesses will take advantage of my data. If I knew that the offers I would receive would actually be in line with what I am intereted in anyways it would be a way bigger benefit.

      3. Make sure that you don't allow businesses to take advantage of your customers. If your user group are cautious buyers anyways, you will will be on thin ice. These people are very sensitive when it comes to receiving offers. If it is too much or not beneficial enough they will never scan a QR code in the first place again.

      4. In my eyes the strength of Bee Informed is the smart approach on sending trageted and personal offers to individual customers. Customers will lthink of shop offers as random spam if they see that its a generic post. In my eyes you should just let the shop type in their offer and let your software do the rest. Send these offers with personalized text templates which makes it feel more natural and special.

      5. To sum it up, I would worry less about your customer segment rather than the user segment. You have decided to bring light to a very very large but sensitive and fragile group of customers. Therefore the market is still large and undiscovered. But you only have one try with each customers. If they don't like a single offer the risk is high that they will unsubscribe from the promo app unless you find a way to make it personally attractive and beneficial.

      1. 2

        Yeah, send me the link, I'll check it out. Since Bee Informed also has an app that end users should install, I've received a lot of feedback that people generally have friction to install yet another app. Just for your information.

        1. 1

          Alright I just edited my old post for you :)

          1. 2

            now thank you for your in-depth observations :D

            1. 1

              You are very welcome! I hope that this was helpful to you:)

  2. 3
    1. Aside from gift cards or products offered by the stores, how is this different from Yelp?

    2. Yelp got issues with corruption, like retaliation/bullying to certain businesses. (There are some laws against this in the US I hear but how about the rest?). How will you be able to control/eliminate this? Human inputs are unpredictable and emotional, Facebook and twitter got advance AI and people to detect hate and bullying but still hit/miss.

    3. Businesses are conservative based on my experience (depends on who runs it, some are daredevils and risk-takers but big businesses don't). Their entrance to your system is the monthly fee and products from them as a form of perks/gift cards/products. How will you convince them to join if Yelp is present?

    4. What will stop me from giving good reviews even if my experience is not that great just to get the sweet gift card/product cough bribe

    Thanks for taking the time to read my crap. Take care!

    1. 1

      Hey @webbrg, sorry for my late reply. Thank you for thinking about my idea. The problem is that people associate feedback with "reviews" and ratings such as smileys or star-reviews. As you have said yourself, there is a lot of corruption going on in this area. That's because businesses use feedback as a way to market themselves.

      With my idea I want to completely distance myself from these types of feedback. With my idea I want people to send their ideas, suggestions and wishes. So the moral is about how to improve rather than a simple star review.

      Besides that you are right. There are already yelp, tripadvisor and google review. These companies only focus on isolated reviews rather than creative thoughts that are discussed and developed by a community. Therefore I wanna give feedback it's main purpose back which is to help businesses improve. All the "review" bullsh*t is just taking advantage of a happy customer's voice.

      The way how we want to convince them to join our platform is to set the core values towards impact rather than image. There is so much more potential in letting your customer base be involved in innovation. It gives businesses valuable feedback rather than opinions and in the eyes of a customer it's way more appealing to buy at a store that is actually caring about their customers problems rather than buying at a store that doesn't care but that has some good reviews.

  3. 2

    Hi Jorim,

    My thoughts are that the biggest hurdle for this will be getting customers to participate. No one walks into a store and thinks I'd like to contribute to changing x y and z.. as a result your reward mechanism needs to be a significant carrot. Gamification of this might help but be careful you arent rewarding the wrong behaviour and make any feedback you receive difficult.

    To turn the idea on its head. Instead of physical stores you could concentrate on feedback for online stores. Produce a widget that let's people rate individual pages that are useful and collate the scores to provide to the business owner. Or allow visitors to record videos of themselves and their customer journey and their thoughts to identify UX issues. There are some companies already in this space but understanding visitors is still a problem in the ecommerce space.

    Other ideas could be to perhaps track purchases through a reward card that provides analytics on trends in store. Identifying patterns in behaviour for smaller stores is particularly difficult and there are few entrants in the market.

    Sorry to be so negative with your original idea, perhaps your own take on it can turn it into something viable but my initial thoughts are that you are up against it with the chicken and egg problem ( customer providing feedback vs business owners paying ) alongside existing well established players in the market .

    Hth
    Paul.

    1. 1

      Hey Paul, thanks so much for your feedback. You are totally right with the chicken-egg-problem. We were/are quite unexperienced when we started out with this project. We skipped some important steps and went straight into the development of an app prototype which might have been a mistake. Therefore I am currently planning to move some steps back by interviewing tons of stores in order to find out what their actual issues with customer relations are.

      The idea of concentrating on online stores is nice but there are already plenty of providers. Exactly thats the reason which motivates me to work on the physically existing stores because they don't use modern feedback softwares yet which gives me and many other customers a headache when it comes to communicating with the businesses. Despite that, do you remember the name of the companies which you have mentioned that are already in this space? This would be really helpful.

      Thanks again,

      Jorim

      1. 1

        I've tried to find some of the variants of different types of feedback tools I could think of. There are competitors in each space that a quick google will help you identify others.

        https://mopinion.com/
        https://feedback.fish/
        Contextual Feedback as a widget. Quick to implement

        https://canny.io/
        Bootstrapped X facebook engineers created this product that provides feedback on future features. Voting on a backlog essentially.

        https://userbrain.net/
        Paid users test your website and provide feedback on it.

        https://www.loop11.com/
        Your own users test your website and provide feedback on it.

        Record your visitors and play their sessions back
        https://www.inspectlet.com/
        https://hotjar.com

        Hope some of those trigger some ideas. Feedback is most definitely a problem in the digital space. I'd talk to some store owners, particular ones that have an online presence and determine where the pain points are before you pivot any further. FWIW I'm in the same position of jumping headlong into something and refining the product, so my advice comes from a similar place (albeit in a different space).

        Paul.

  4. 2

    I like this idea a lot, I wonder how you can integrate this into the normal workflow or what part of the custom workflow this could be built? Feedback mechanisms end up with surveys, phone calls, emails... maybe an incentive structure would help?

    One this I have seen that many customers already use is the loyalty customer program to get points every time you purchase something. Eventually I get a free smoothie at my local store is one example. This is relatively frictionless because all it requires is my phone number. Maybe add some kind of system around that?

    1. 1

      Hey @nyxtom, I'm happy to hear that you like the idea. What feature of the idea makes it so enticing for you? Feel free to let me know or share your thoughts on what could be standing in my way in order to make this idea a success.

      In regards to your questions, we have planned to make our software as integrateable as possible. It should at least be compatible with all the big project management tools (like Jira, etc.) and the big feedback tools (like Zendesk, etc.). These inegrations will probably be features for the future that we will develop after we have validated our startup.

      Loyalty progams are a great hint from you! The best thing would be, if users could automatically redeem their rewards right into loyalty programs of their stores. I'm not quite sure yet about how to approach this but if you have any great idea/advice for combining the rewards with customer loyalty programs feel free to let me know. Besides that I don't know if these loyalty programs actually allow 3rd party softwares like mine access.

      If you have an idea that you want me to evaluate/screen, feel free to post it in the discussion :)

      Cheers,

      Jorim

  5. 2

    I see others have gone into great detail in answering you so I will try to keep mine short and sweet.

    I like the idea, its Yelp-esque. People like and use these types of services.

    However, I don't think your feedback loop, or rather how you motivate users to participate will work. For example, If I visit a retail store and I have a good/bad experience I am likely to log on to your app and leave a review/feedback. However, the next time I visit that store I am very unlikely to do this again, I've already done it. Furthermore, what value does the business get If I just leave another similar review.

    Unless something drastically changes, and it is noteworthy enough for me to update or add another review, your system breaks down here.

    Anyways, I agree with you. Retail feedback could be much better.

    Let me know if you check out https://www.partizion.io/

    Cheers!

    1. 1

      Hey @Matthewbf, thanks for your reply and your thoughts on my idea. My platform doesn't intend to actually gather reviews or ratings, we want customers to be creative and to shape their own stores with their ideas/wishes and suggestions. Therefore we try to clearly separate from that Yelp/Google Review style. I totally agree with you that giving multiple reviews would be quite meaningless and boring for the shop visitors. Therefore it's all about your thoughts on what could go better and as you have written, there is a lot that could be done better in physically existing stores. Maybe this will help you to validate/disrupt my idea. :-)

      Alright let's face Partizion:

      1. Partizion wants to enable users to get more focused and organized when it comes to managing your browser tabs. I just downloaded your add-on and the principle/thought behind it is quite nice. Despite that there is still a lot to do when it comes to User Experience and usability in general which I will talk about a little bit later in my screening.

      2. As you know, companies like google, etc. are very frightening when it comes to user data. If I was a consistent User of partition, would partizion save analyse my workplaces or how secure will my browsing history be? Make sure that you state that early enough on your website otherwise this might be a problem later on.

      3. Alright let's check out your User Interface: What I don't like after I open the add on is, that partizion is suddenly everywhere. Especially when I just want to open another tap in order to google something, partizion is kinda putting it self in between my goal. Users don't like huge changes even if they might be beneficial for them. They will only allow larger influence of your add on, once they get used to work with the workspaces. Keep in mind that an add on should not replace your whole browser. So in order to fulfill the users first expectations I would make the add on a little bit more subtle. Instead of taking over the wholebrowser when opening a new tab I would definitely recommend Using an Icon next to the bookmark space.

      4. It was unsure for me how to add another weblink to a workspace. Just ad a "+" icon under the tabs so that its easy to add a new link.

      5. Same applies to the "add new workspace" icon. It souldn't be that hidden in the llower right corner. Just put it next to the last workspace so that the interaction makes more sense for the user.

      I hope that this was helpful to you. :)

      1. 1

        Cheers, thanks for the feedback! I appreicate it.

        Yes some users love having Partizion on the new tab page and some prefer not to, just like you said (for various reasons). I try to make this very clear in the onboarding and I allow users to turn on/off this setting at any time.

        Again, thanks for your time, I appreciate it.

  6. 2

    Hi @Jorsoi, Your idea sounds great as business ideally would always want to provide better value to their customers than their competition, and these key insights would be valuable to businesses. However, there are some businesses that have an unfair advantage and may not care as much as there are not in the game for all the right reasons. Getting customers to give their feedback is always a challenge.

    I agree with @Rishi_Uttam it would be useful to have more of a niche, for SME in a particle vertical although I can't speak much about the competition (I am sure there's a lot). My 2 cents (thoughts, take is with some salt) are although getting feedback may be a challenge, but if you have a creative way that makes giving feedback engaging and easy, and your idea seems to be heading in the right direction so it will be easier. I think what Rishi mentioned about offline business may be worthwhile and easier to launch with the approach suggested. I believe you would also have a great chance given you have some good client/partners which customers really care about (because of the value/deals) but the right marketing and position would be key and can easily help you get traction. Burger King/Hungry Jacks used to give out a coupon to its customers through its app for any customers that gave them feedback. After you gain some key local / well-known clients traction may become easier. The business revenue model seems like a great approach, of course, find out the key variables for the offering at different price points for your offering may more difficult. You could use a freemium model (maybe). The meta part is that once you get your first few clients you could use the platform to capture and analyse their feedback.

    My idea is to solve the problems a lot of consumer's faces especially during natural disasters/peak periods with the current courier express and parcel (CEP) delivery providers. If you or someone you know have ordered something and had to weight an extremely long time to receive your product when the store you ordered from, is in your state or country you will understand the frustration.

    Consumer side:

    • inconsistent pickup and drop off times; - huge delays during unexpected events such as; - longer delivery timeframes for same sate services >=24 hrs; - lost packages, and transparency; - Unable to receive packages due to timing/accommodation type
      Business order fulfilment:
    • getting orders to customers reasonable/faster timeframe at scale and/or when they are delays; - streamline regular and one-off jobs for SME's to execute consistently; - reliability of services; - better tracking & updates

    Solution
    'Swift' is a streamlined on-demand Peer-Peer (with chained deliveries (A->B->C)) B2C delivery system that ensures your parcels are delivered swiftly (<=6 hrs in the same state), in a reliable and transparent with tailored drop off times. Yes, we will deliver on time even during peak seasons.

    Swift will be capable due to deliver at a high volume due to its scalable workforce and scalable infrastructure. We would partner will local SME's clothing/stationary type business. The scalable infrastructure will be effectively a type of depot someone private property (eg. garages, homes, etc.) Of course, all users would be vetted. The above plus 24hr business operation hours means much faster delivery timeframes. Limitations would apply to business parcels with heavier parcels and larger sizes.

    Consumers will benefit from faster timeframes when they order through our app, or use the swift API on their site. We would charge the business a subscription fee based on delivers/parcels per month, consumers a delivery fee and take a percentage from every transaction for customers placed from our mobile app.

    Website is still in development (only one side of the market available)
    https://myswiftdelivery.com/shifttoswift

    1. 1

      Hey @uncommon_collective, what a nice and detailed post from you. I really appreciate your effort. You are totally right about having to find the first strong shop-partner that is willing to interact with their custumers as a community and should also be able to offer great rewards when points can be redeemed. The problem is we are talking about large shops or even small chains, where I can't just talk to the responsible authority. I am currently still struggling with finding first businesses that are large enough to actually grow a consumer-community. Do you have any tips on getting in touch with the first potential partners or how did you find your first partners with swift?

      And since I have evoked Swift, here are my thoughts from the screening:

      1. First of all I hope that you only use that written explanation to describe your startup for founders. As a potential user, I might get in trouble finding out what the actual business is about lol. Therefore I checked out your internet page and immediately understood your concept. Here is a good explanation with which even your great grandma will understand what you do (lol): You can imagine Swift as a food-delivery business but instead of food, Users deliver your package right in front of your door as fast and safely as possible.

      2. There might be a hidden danger in the delivery process. Swift might be super helpful in urban areas but when it comes to borrows that are located further out of the city, people have to use their own cars in order to deliver packages. But I see great potential in collaboration with Carsharing or transportation businesses that offer Swift-Users a discount for the first 10 rides or a reduced transportation cost.

      3. As a User I would not be willing to use my own car in order to drive around the dense city because Swift wouldn't cover my gas expenses which I have to subtract from the wage. Therefore I assume that your target group will especially be young people like students that want to earn a little bit of pocket money very fast while being able to use their bikes.

      4. When collaborating with big companies, you might get overwhelmed by all the working conditions that Swift must obey. If possible, try to avoid being accountable for liabilites like User-Insurance etc. If one of your freelancers gets involved in a car accident (which is pretty likely) you don't want to be repsonsible for that. Besides that make sure that your users take responsibility for any lost or damage package.

      5. Regarding damaged packages: If a package arrives and the content is not working, there will be a grey zone on who will be responsible. Is it the retailer, the shipping company or Swift?! The biggest danger which i see in your project is all the law stuff so keep a very close eye on this topic.

      6. I am living in German. During the corona crisis DHL (German Shipping Company) has also employed hundreds of freelancers that got payed for each package they delivered. Take this chance and learn from their system. I will send you a link from a german reporter that took part in delivering packages. Just turn the captions on and you should be able to understand everything. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7YFKyGwDLs

      7. Another tipp: Use less abbrevations in your website (P2P, AU, etc.) You are just shrinking your target market with that ;-)

      I hope that I was able to help you with my tips and thoughts. Feel free to keep me up to date on your business because I honestly really like the idea ( a little booster for you). ;-)

  7. 2

    Sounds like uservoice.com or BBB. But I agree these platforms aren't the best and could be brought to web3.0 standards. Don't charge any business upfront, until you have proven then you can generate traffic or customers for them in return in the long term.

    Are you focused on any particular business or market segment? like how tripadvisor does for the hospitality industry? Its quite a wide net you're casting supermarkets and retail and doctors offices, offline and online? I think you need to keep it focused, prove your self then cast a wider net.

    I like the feedback for gift cards or coupons. How do you handle fake false reviews? Will Both good and bad feedback be treated the same?

    Do supermarkets really think they need to improve? I don't see that happening, its the last thing retailers will spend money on right now.

    How do you plan to get these feedback forms in the hands of customers? Theirs always friction in getting them filled out, unless you do it online and have a popup but that would require the online store to install your script on their page.. there are thousands of companies doing this now.

    I saw, leave the online business, target offline, their feedback forms suck, and something can be done. Ask the retailer to add a QR code on the bottom of the receipt, and if filled out a coupon will be provided.

    Keep me informed.. You owe me feedback for my idea, i will collect soon!

    I say pivot right now and start gimmefeedback.com

    Cheers
    Rishi

    1. 1

      Hey @Rishi_Uttam,
      thanks for your detailed reply, you can't believe how helpful this is.

      Due to the broad range of potential use cases I decided to stick with physically existing businesses like retail stores, supermarkets, bakeries, etc. To be even more precise I decided to focus on medium sized retail stores first but the future goal is to havew a borad variety of businesses taking part in our community platform so that giving feedback to your business will only be one click away without always having to fill in your contact information and all the other bullshit that makes common feedback forms so unattractive. You are completely right with having a focus on a specific group. Unfortunately finding CEO's or store managers is not that easy for me so I'm still in progress of finding out how to reach out to these "decision-maker" contacts.

      In regards to filtering out fake/false/spam posts, we aren't sure about the approaches yet. We have two options in thought. Let me know which one you like more:

      Option 1: Implementing a karma system. Users that misbehave and get reported frequently won't be able to join a businesse's community because he doesn't meets the karma requirements. Karma will be regained either after time passed without any incidents or by interacting with the community (commenting/upvoting) without incidents. If Users consistently misbehave, they will be banned permanently or for a certain amount of time.

      Option 2: Businesses set a limit of upvotes that have to be exceeded in order to earn points. The limit can be set individually. A business can also set it's limit to zero which means that every feedback post gets immediately rewarded.

      In terms of market entry we decided to either stick qr-codes on the products or by setting up rollups next to the checkout. If you have any other creative thoughts or approaches please please please let me know. I'm always curious to hear the approaches of other like-minded Indie Hackers!:-)

      Now it's my turn. Let me know about your idea so that I can screen it from top to bottom :) I checked the website you texted "gimmefeedback.com" but was kinda confused because the content is not what i expected. Besides that, what do you mean with pivot now?

      Cheers,

      Jorim

      1. 2

        Hi Jorosi

        Great, think you are on the right track, feel free to bounce ideas of me in the future. As for gimmefeedback.com that isn't a real website, i was saying jokingly scrap your idea and launch this, because this post of yours has already generated interest and i do think their is a market for website feedback.

        In anycase here is my sight which hasn't launched yet, its super alpha version, so be nice :)

        Elevator pitch : ' The simplest way to send and receive files'
        Basically in my industry sending large files from Asia to the rest of the world has been cumbersome, blocked by firewalls, and often the websites are not in english.

        https://www.sinosend.com

        Looking for :

        • Speed of loading
        • Can you send a file to your self, does it work?
        • website UI/UX
        • Any obvious errors in your console

        bring on the feedback
        p.s. not mobile friendly yet.

        1. 1

          Hey @Rishi_Uttam, sorry for my late reply but I haven't forgot you. Therefore I have screened your website and did some thought research. Here is what I came up with:

          1. Your idea is very very similar if not the same compared with the big players like dropbox. How do you show your customers that you are different from them? Think like that: Why have you created your idea rather than just used dropbox. If you know the reason, nice: now emphasize that even more on you homepage.

          2. Be more generous to your customer in the first place. You advertize like that: Hey, with my program you can send big emails fast without having to make a detour to dropbox. It's free and you can use it as much as you want.

          The reality looks a little bit different though. It feels like your software is about 90% data-sending and only 10%email sending. This is basically what dropbox does. What you should focus on (in my eyse) is building an email service, that lets you send emails with big data attachements fast and efficient. With efficient I mean that people don't have to create a dropbox account, upload their files and create a link in order to send their data. You will only be able to offer them the benefit of saving time if you either:

          1. Build your own email service that allows users to send large files

          or:

          1. Build an add-on that allows users to upload their files into the "sinosend-attachement" which will be sent with your email.

          .

          1. Due to the high competition of dropbox you will only be able to draw attention if you allow users to send more file storage for free. When I arriveed at your website I was looking forward that I could send tons of my pictures to my other account but this happiness quickly developed into disappointment because sinosend only allows 100mb which is basically the same like dropbox. Therefore let me say it again: I think that your successs will depend on the time and effort which you can save your users.

          2. HEre is another thought. What if you let your users send the big data first an then let them pay. You need to make them comfortable with your software first before you can ask for money otherwise dropbox will be the better option for your users.

          3. I know that your MVP is still pretty new but I would change the background to something more like "Jira Atlassian" Style so that it looks like an organisation tool or something like that. Besides that its never good to have colorful pictures like that as your ain background because your textcolours might not be well-readable.

          Hope that I was able to shift you a little bit more into the right direction with your idea. I honestly think that there is potential if you seperate more from the old and common dropbox-style and focus more on an email platform that allows you to send files as big as possible without having to pay.

          1. 2

            Hi Jorsoi, thanks for your feedback on our site.

            How is your development going? have you starting coding it yet , now that you have had time to read all the feedback, hope most of them were worth your time.

            As for your feedback on www.sinosend.com, thank you.

            I have used the last week to take your suggestions in to account :

            • Removed the 100mb limit for non signup users, and increased it to 5G, this is many times more than dropbox and 2x more than we transfer for non registered users. I decided to create less friction, and let the user just send files, and hoping they will add their email address so we can contact them later, (rather then sending a link for which i cant communicate with them)

            • Removed the large background image when the user is not logged in.

            -Made the home page more clearer as to what we are proposing.

            • Lowered pricing

            • These are more ux/ui improvements

            If you have time , take a look, and I welcome all the criticism

            Are you using it on mobile or desktop,

            Thanks

  8. 2

    My idea

    Content Repurposing tool named Spread (https://www.spreadtech.online/). Automatically transform youtube videos into podcasts, podcasts into blogs, and blogs into twitter threads.

    MVP is releasing soon, and I'm hella nervous about technical validation. I don't think it will work as well as what people think it will within the MVP. It will probably be too clicky, clunky, and not automated :(

    ---

    Your idea

    The only thing I would say about your idea is that at the till a lot of retail outlets, they ask for an email to send the receipt to. Through this email, they also sometimes attach a feedback or survey link to it.

    This may be the actual best way of completing this, but I guarantee you could innovate on top of this.

    1. 2

      Hey @LouTromans,
      thanks for evaluating my idea.

      Here's my screening for Spread:

      1. I would worry about copyrights. Some users could use your tool to just steal content from youtubers and to publish it in their own blogs/podcasts.
        Another potentially illegal use case might be using Spread to avoid buying Youtube Music Premium. People might use your program to download music as a "podcast" in order to listen to it offline. Make sure that you don't take any liability for content that will transcribed and published. Otherwise musicians/youtubers/podcasters/bloggers might be able to charge you for distributing someone elses intellectual property.

      2. Build in an authentification so that only those who own the content will be able to describe it for their purposes.

      3. Your website should focus more on the problem that you're trying to solve. From what I see, Spread is about saving a content-creator's time by automatically distributing content to multiple media streams (youtube/podcasts and blogs). Mention the benefits first, after that you can talk about functionalities.

      4. What if I want to transcribe a youtube video directly into a blog? Your website tells me that I have to transform it into an audio data first. Cut this unnecessary effort by also offering a transcription from youtube directly to blogs.

      5. Spread has to be a very fluent software in order to acutally save people's time. Claiming that your transcriptions are with 95% accuracy is your competitive edge in my eyes. There are lots of online tools for video converters but I haven't heard about many audio-to-text converters yet. In my eyes you should definitely focus on that feature the most.

      6. Remeber: Youtube videos are way more "vivid" and "natural" than text. We simply talk in a different language than we write. Therefore word to word transcription won't be very helpful for users. Make sure that your conversions feel like actual text rather than a recording from someones talk.

      1. 2

        Thank you so SO SO MUCH, for this extremely detailed reply.

        it means the world to me thank you. I didn't expect it one bit, so I am very grateful.

        1. Disclaimers and authentication is going to be something we look into post BETA, and when we actually start to get real traction. I never thought of it the way you put it tho, so thank you very much!

        2. ^^ same as above. I will embark on after BETA. Thank you again.

        3. I agree, the main benefit is 'automatically and instantly tripling content output'. But this should be echoed throughout the landing page.

        4. In the small print next to the video content there is a line of text that details you can directly transform youtube videos into blogs! (Very easy to miss).

        5. The MVP isn't going to be fluent at all sadly. However, soon the whole process will be much more hands-free. Such as connecting your Youtube channel so whenever you upload a video it automatically gets transcribed within Spread and emailed to you ready to use, and other features such as that.

        6. Again in the future, AI and other functionalities will make the text more genuine and human-like. Easily removing "ermm"'s and "you know"'s will be automatic. Along with auto injecting titles and bolding of text etc. We already have automatic paragraphing in the MVP too.

        Again, thank you mate. Please roast my product some more hahaha

        1. 1

          No worries. It's always a pleasure to be helpful :) Just another tip for Point 6. Instead of building an AI program yourself (which will be freakin hard unless you are an expert in that field and have a huge team) you should let the transcirpition run through spelling programs. It can be as simple as using MS Word. Most of these softwares are already able to improve way more than just spelling which could make your MVP more efficient and valuable for not much additional effort that has to be put in. :-)

          1. 2

            I had a similar thought. I was wondering if Grammarly (which is present on the MVP text box for the blog post), could be automated and check through every spelling and correction as soon as it is created.

            Thank you so much again, I love small yet innovative ideas like that!

  9. 2

    I've seen a few tools offering an approximation of this functionality, however they have all been focussed towards tech products, taking support requests, allowing them to be voted up and potentially lead into a sort of public roadmap.

    I couldn't remember any names off the top of my head, but a quick Google turned up https://canny.io/ which shows the type of thing I'm thinking of, and I'm sure there are more.

    As I say, these seem very tech-oriented, so it doesn't mean to say the idea is 'taken' already. A product targeting retail shops would likely be designed differently, use different terminology etc. And these existing apps provide you with some good research material.

    Are you thinking of that type of SaaS product? Or bringing your client's feedback under one brand that you own (like a Trustpilot or TripAdvisor)? I think that's a clear distinction to make before proceeding - two very different offerings.

    The idea to link participation with rewards is a good one.

    I'd say bootstrapping an initial MVP would be relatively painless, since the bulk of the pages/features are that of a forum. You might be able to get something off the shelf and customise it to validate your idea.

    1. 1

      Hey @joejoejoe, these are awesome thoughts! Thank you so much.

      Yes I know from my research that there are plenty of community-feedback softwares for digital products. What has stunned me is that almost none of the physically existing businesses are actually using those to improve their customer's experiences. Therefore I might have found a niche in the retail sector.

      Businesses can create their business account on the platform that will be accessible for everyone interested in sending feedback. It should be like a huge community where you can send feedback to whatever business you want. I want to distance myself from these individual type of SaaS products.

      I have already created an app-prototype for my idea that could help you understanding it even better. If you are interested in checking it out just let me know. I appreciate valuable feedback like yours tremendously and think that your thoughts on the prototype might honestly be very helpful.

      Btw: if you have an idea that you want me to disrupt/ to think about please let me know as well! :)

  10. 2

    Hi! You want to replace an old style approach or add extra responsibility to the shops?) there is not just one way to collect a feedback, even google does this, other platforms also exist. So you have to think about them also as your competitors) but one think is really good - the market is huge so maybe worth trying) but...be sceptical and start with customer development)

    1. 1

      what a great reply! Thanks so much @Tiltforindie :-)
      I think that it's more aiming to replace an old style approach. Indeed, there are many competitors focusing especially on the review-segment.

      1. 2

        Welcome! Be skeptical about mine feedBack also. Only customers can prove If your idea is good by paying or at least by intention to date with you))

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