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3 Comments

Would you use this free community as an IH?

Thinking about making a free tool called FounderFeedback, which would be a simple forum where IHers and others like us help each other out, with a twist.

Imagine you wanted to get some alpha testers to play around your website and find any issues with it. You post to FounderFeedback, and within a few hours you have multiple in-depth responses.

The reason the feedback would be high-value is due to the fact that you need to either "approve" or "reject" the feedback. If you approve it, the person who commented gets a point, which they can then 'spend' to submit their own post. This way, the website ensures that everyone gives as much value as they take.

The website is focused on "feedback", which can be anything in this general vicinity:

  • Feedback on your landing page
  • Asking for people to sign up for your alpha/beta and offer their thoughts
  • Listen to your podcast and let you know if they like it, or what needs improvement
  • Answer questions you have regarding an aspect of business

Things that we would moderate (not allowed):

  • "Upvote this post for me on Reddit/Product Hunt/ etc"
  • Buy my x and I'll buy yours
  • Basically anything sleazy

The reason I like this idea as a free tool is that, while IH is super great and I don't want to take away from the community here, I feel like at times I see people's posts getting ignored while the top 20% of posts get all the attention. I'd like to see a forum similar to this one that enforces high-quality responses, while giving everyone a chance to receive feedback.

"Kevin, why would you make this?"
First and foremost, it's something I'd like to see in the world. But as you may know, I'm currently focused on codernotes.io, and I am looking at this as a marketing opportunity. I'd love to have a free tool like this that's getting some use, and to be able to advertise CoderNotes for free. Finally, I think it would be valuable to CoderNotes for this site to exist in the world, as I would love to be able to get valuable feedback on my Alpha/Beta.

I'd hope that I can crank it out in roughly a couple weeks, as I can't have it take too long and distract from my main goal.

So, would you use this? Does the idea make sense?

on February 24, 2020
  1. 1

    I love the idea! I think retention would be a big problem. When I want something out of the platform, I might be motivated to feed the system. Otherwise I might very well just ignore it. So you might end up with a lot of one-and-done sort of interactions. Which might be fine.

    1. 2

      Thanks, I can see that retention may be a problem, hopefully at least the one-and-done people need to have a high-quality comment before they disappear, keeping the value going.

  2. 2

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago

    1. 1

      Thanks! I actually do imagine that things such as, "Hey please fill out my survey!" would be totally encouraged on the platform. I just want to draw the line at gaming any other websites/systems ("Upvote my IH post and I'll give you a point!")

      It totally depends on how this product is positioned and what persona types are targeted.

      Could you elaborate on this? What personas are you imagining when you think of this community?