Roast our community platform for learning 🔥

Hey 👋 returning the favour (thanks again!)

Before I start, I want to caveat my feedback by saying I don't know if I'm necessarily the target audience for this site. Nevertheless, I'm happy to share some initial thoughts:

1. I don't come away totally convinced I know what HeyOctopus is, if I'm being honest. "Relevant learning content" doesn't resonate with me. What exactly is it? And why, as a site visitor, should this excite me? The sub copy then mentions what you're doing (building a community-driven recommendation system) and why (to map knowledge) - but again, why should I care about this? Why should this excite me? What's in it for me? How does it help or benefit me? I can't see that anywhere.

Also, "get started" as a CTA is vague. Get started by doing what? Sign up to the platform? Say that instead then. If I don't know what's going to happen when clicking the button, I'm not clicking it.

2. As I scroll through the page, I think I'm starting to get the idea of the platform. It's essentially like an aggregation platform for content that helps you learn about certain subjects, with guides on where to start and where to go next, rather than being lost and clueless about where to even begin. Is that it? I see the subjects you're focused on and UX, as well as Machine Learning, would be two of interest to me. Interestingly, I did click UX Design and went through the 'Learning Paths', and when clicking on Career Foundry, I go to a page onsite about them - but it's a bit of a dead end. Do I go to their YouTube and consume their content? Or is there meant to be content pulled through to your site from their YouTube content like an RSS feed? Do I, as a user, add content from Career Foundry by clicking the plus button on their page? I feel this needs more usage guidance.

3. The structure of the site is nice and simple. I'd watch the minimum font size on the cards/tiles from an accessibility POV, and the button contrast on the primary CTAs (2.58/1 is an a11y fail) but the layout is easy to digest. I'd have liked to see the topics higher up the page, as that's what helped me figure out that this site MIGHT be interesting to me. The copy isn't explaining it simply enough.

4. Possible obstacle is just not really understanding why the platform helps or benefits me, and what I have to do to engage with it? How much input is required from me? Why is this better than doing a search on Google or YouTube? I'm sure it is much better, but the copy isn't conveying that or screaming that message to me simply enough, quickly enough or convincingly enough.

As you know from my own feedback thread, brutal honesty is my thing - it's the best recipe for growth and improvement. The site does look clean and professional, and I trust it for that fact. It doesn't look amateurish. It just needs some fine-tuning of the copy to offer way more clarity on what problem this solves or benefit it brings. Make it about your user, not HeyOctopus.

Hey. Congrats on taking the step towards building something.

Initial braindump: I value finding learning resources from that sources I already trust. I don't see this platform adding any value to the problem you're trying to solve (what is it exactly by the way?). Are people really having a hard time finding learning resources? How are you going to compete with Google/youtube/Udemy etc? What is your business model? What incentive do users have to add content or learning paths?

If you're going to actively pursue building this platform into a business I would really, really, really niche down. But even then, again, what problem are you trying to solve that isn't already being solved well? What's your biz model?

1. I got the general idea right away when I first saw the landing page, maybe because I was playing around with a similar idea before. If I get it right, this is like a Reddit community where people share relevant stuff about specific topics they're into, but more focused on learning. So, it's pretty much a community-driven info curation platform.

2. I see potential, but I'd like it to be more social. I don't have time to go through 10 articles, so I need to know which ones are worth reading and get a summary of each.

3. The call-to-action (CTA) was a bit confusing, mainly because there were so many choices. I also checked the site on my phone, which made it harder to get the CTAs. I clicked on one post, and it took a while to load; I wasn't sure if it was broken or not. You might wanna optimize performance at some point, but I don't think it's a big deal right now.

4. Having a high-quality community seems super important. The platform needs a good amount of activity without too much noise.

Good luck 💪

Hi there!

Thank you for providing me with feedback on my post and providing the link to this! :) I looked through the website and to answer your questions:

1. Nope, I did not really understand what HeyOctopus is from the website directly. It seems the information is too less for it to be clear on what it is and how it can benefit the end user from the information available. In short, as a user/learner, I did not feel the need to sign up. Maybe more information regarding how HeyOctopus is exactly different and what value it provides would be good to add. For example, if I wanted to know more about a certain content that I saw on the landing page, I could directly look it up on YouTube.

2. Not entirely sure what does the platform do to be honest. I feel like if you pitch it as a platform that provides a clear learning pathway, it could be interesting. For example, I want to learn how to build web applications, then a clear pathway to do so, with all the learning resources to do so would be cool.

3. Don't really love the dashboard styled design if I'm being honest. I think it can be improved to have a proper landing page, which has a call to action for people to try it out and look at your dashboard. That may just work better in my opinion.

4. I think the most important point here is lack of information on the homepage regarding how it adds value to my learning experience. If that could be made more clear, it would be great to incentivize me to sign up!

I couldnt tell what you do wen landing on the page

Hey @PhylomatX , here are my thoughts:

1. I understand that HeyOctopus is a directory/database of knowledge from various fields. I can browse articles on topics which I could find interesting
2. and 3) I had a good feeling, it's simple and intuitive. I didn't find it confusing.
   but
3. Here are my concerns for which I wouldn't sign up:

• You specialize on 6 topics but only 1 topic is relevant to me.
• And when I browse the topic I'm interested (entrepreneurship), I found only few articles that I am not even able to filter (random topics)
• I would narrow down, focusing on 1 topic and serve this topic as good as possible (then you can add more topics in the future)

Hope it helps.

P.S. If you would need more feedback, I'm building Userdome - a platform for acquiring feedback on your products. Currently, I'm going to do cross-feedback with 10 products (and their founders), so you can join us if you want. Let me know and good luck with your product.