Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog.

Re:Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog. by sabalaba on Thursday April 07, 2011 @02:07AM (#2418408)

This semester I've been working on this with my co-founder (mekarpeles) and we were adding features and just having fun with it. I think we went way past the bare minimum in terms of features. I was really afraid to launch during the semester, I didn't want it to interfere with school etc, but it was just one of those things where my co-founder and I just started working on it whenever we had time and it sort of took over from there.

Anyways, I actually saw Steve Blank give a talk at University of Michigan and I went up to him afterwards and showed him a demo of this, he said, "Just launch, what are you afraid of? The worst thing that can happen is that your successful." So we decided, lets just launch it.

What do you guys think about it? Harsh criticism is expected and appreciated :).

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Re:Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog. by SupremumLimit on Thursday April 07, 2011 @07:44PM (#2421722)

I sell digital goods so I'm in your target market. There's very little information about the features on your web site. What payment gateways do you support? How does the affiliate scheme work? Do you support discount coupons? There's lots of other questions.

I tried the demo but didn't get far because I had to upload a file. I jumped around the video but that seemed to dwell on very basic stuff.

To summarise, you may have a good product but there should be a lot more information on your site because at the moment I just don't know if it's good or bad.

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Re:Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog. by mekarpeles on Wednesday April 20, 2011 @02:38AM (#2465534)

Thanks so much for your feedback SupremumLimit! We're honoured you took the time to test out our platform. Currently, the system supports payment through Paypal (including credit card payments). We're working to expand this to offer more payment options.

Our main feature is being an all inclusive, free, one stop solution for selling and buying digital goods. We have several features in development which target several of your criticisms.

1. Our affiliate system enables our registered users to generate unique affiliate links for any product in our marketplace. If someone makes a purchase through this link, they will receive a fraction of the purchase price. Stephen and I have some elegant solutions in progress to make our affiliate system easier and more powerful to use.

2. I am glad that you shared your experience with our demo. Currently, the file upload for our demo is intentionally fake and does not perform an actual upload (to protect the privacy of our demo-ers). We'll change this immediately to make it more apparent to the user.

3. In the past few days we've done a lot to make Babolog more usable. We have a 'help page' which addresses frequently asked questions, an updates page, and we're redesigning our user interface.

I don't want to spoil our features-in progress but I will say we anticipate releasing version 2.0 of our beta system in the next week. This release will include a revamp of the marketplace and address much of the feedback we've received in past 13 days since we launched into beta.

Thank you again for your wonderful criticisms. We can't wait to show you our improvements!

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Re:Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog. by Huppie on Thursday April 07, 2011 @02:34AM (#2418470)

I think it's a good idea to add a 'payments provided by PayPal' link or something. I had to find out what I could use to pay by just ordering something.

And what's with the 'profit-to-date' field? Can anybody see that?

Edit: Oh, and before I forget, there's no FAQ link on the front page, only on the stores.

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Re:Show HN: I was afraid to launch, so I did. Babolog. by mekarpeles on Thursday April 07, 2011 @03:37AM (#2418593)

Thanks for the excellent feedback Huppie!

We're sorry for the inconvenience! We'll work right away on getting a list of frequently asked questions compiled together. If there are any other questions which you think deserve special attention, please let me know at [email protected].

In the -near- future, you will be able to plug in merchant accounts and use credit card. Our goal is to accept as many forms of payment as possible. Our next step is to enable you to purchase babolog products and receive payments from your and others' internal system balances.

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