willcheung

Amazing! Having been a data practitioner, business and data have always been a big disconnect. Can’t wait to try it out.

Hey guys,

I used to work in Sales, and my company usually paid for Email Tracking (like Yesware) and Contact Profile (LinkedIn) tools. These email features are now an indispensable part of my daily workflow. Now that I started my own company, I wanted my whole team to have this superpower - not just sales, but all customer-facing teams. However, paying for everyone starts getting expensive. So we built one for ourselves instead and decided to let the world have it as well, for free.

We'd love your thoughts and feedback!

We do have parts of the functionality you're talking about. You can copy someone's individual ideas and add them to you own duffel. But you have to sign up first, of course. :)

We thought that the the first homepage looked too much like "travel inspiration" site. But yeah, we're trying to encourage users to try the site before signing up.

We do have one...actually I forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder!

http://duffelup.com/site/tutorial_overview

Got it. We did many things to remedy the issues you're talking about, but hid some of them so we can focus on getting users to actually try our tool first.

Point taken. We're too poor for professional copywriter, but def will change our wording.

My wife also said "corky" is corny. But she also suggested I put an image of a duffel bag with smiley faces on it, so I can't tell whether she was serious.

Anyway, I agree we should show and not tell, hence the ability to create a trip without signing up. I guess that wasn't clear enough.

Appreciate you spending time to write a detailed, honest feedback! Although our site is most useful for travelers who plan trips (a lot of people travel but do not actually "plan" trips), what we were trying to convey was that "even if you don't plan trips or travel, you can still use it to collect favorite restaurants or staycations." I think we have some homework to do to convey that message better.

Also, qood question: "why is it called duffel". We thought that a duffel bag is a place where you throw random stuff in when you travel or going places, and our "duffel" is place for you to collect your ideas of where to go, what to do while you're traveling. (I think I should just explain it like that in our About page :))

Large organization can provide you with resource (developers, capital, etc.), so if you can still do what you like to do, I'd take it. On the other hand, if it's just a "job", no amount of money could justify giving up the little idea that will take over the world one day. That's my personal take. Good luck!

For our launch, we also tried reaching out to tech / travel blogs to write about us. I found the time spent following-up and convincing them that your product is awesome wasn't worth it when you can be coding or improving the product (it was probably 10% conversion rate for us). A month later, I found a lady with good PR network to help us draft a press release and reach out to her network. Within weeks, we were on Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb, and other tech blogs. If you don't mind spending some money, I'd suggest you save time & frustration and hire a contractor to help with the news splash.