[ph0rque]

I did a Show HN on my side project, AutoMicroFarm, two years ago (although I have been working on it and posting to HN about it much longer than that).

Thanks to HN, I was able to get into the YC fellowship program. After launching and not getting any traction, I almost quit. However, I realized I did not know how to do marketing, sales, or customer dev (the "people want" part of "Make something people want"). It wouldn't be fair to the idea of AutoMicroFarm, or to myself, to quit without trying to learn marketing/sales/customer dev and applying it to AutoMicroFarm.

So this year, I hired a business coach (https://solacelessons.com/) and continued working on AutoMicroFarm. I can't claim it's successful in any meaning of the word yet, but I have a solid framework in place for my social media/email/blog outreach, I am talking to people to figure out what they want, and starting to make revenue--all while having a day job, a side gig (both related to web dev), and a family. I've been really happy to make this progress while keeping the hours spent on AutoMicroFarm to 5-10 hours per week.

[eganist]

The fact that solacelessons created an account and replied less than a half hour after this comment plus the fact that the business coach's site was directly linked makes this seem to me like a less-than-genuine endorsement.

I'm not going to specifically make that assertion (because, well, I could easily be wrong); I'm just saying how it comes across to me-the-reader. :/

[solacelessons]

It’s an interesting point. I thought it was nice that my client let me know he shared about me on HN and I inturn am supporting him. When comments popped up about my site, I felt the need to acknowledge what people were saying. How is this “less than genuine”?

[ph0rque]

Yes, after I made the comment, I let me coach know, who registered on HN and answered some questions.

How is this less than genuine? Would a disclaimer help? Perhaps something like, "This post may contain a direct link to providers of products and services that I personally have found helpful. I was not prompted to add the link, and receive no financial renumeration for adding the link. However, I may do so in the future."

[swaggyBoatswain]

[flagged]

[ph0rque]

Thanks for the feedback. I am starting to redo the website, I haven't updated the design for a while.

However, your comment comes across as really mean and unnecessary. I really doubt someone would come across it and think, "I really like the concept and would even be willing to pay for the products and/or services, but the logo font is Federant serif, and the FAQ spacing and kerning literally made my eyes bleed, so I can't see anything now."

Your reply to my coach is much more constructive and actionable. Please refrain from making comments like the one I am replying to, and strive to keep your comments constructive and actionable.

Have a great day.

[swaggyBoatswain]

Fair enough, I am sorry I offended you. You are right that comment was unnecessary and uncalled for. Design is a very particularly touchy subject to me. Sometimes I get in the heat of the moment and write down all my thoughts down unfiltered. I feel very strongly about every piece of information presented to me, and I feel even more strongly about lost potential

If you want constructive critcism, I suggest adjusting your line-height properties and font-family to something like Arial or roboto. If you want a quickfix, just add these 3 lines in your `body` tag https://i.imgur.com/33lI25Z.png

Without changes https://i.imgur.com/91Pv9Sh.png, with changes https://i.imgur.com/nA7JYub.png

For your font-logo I suggest simplifying it and removing some of the finer details. This is a quickdraft I made following the same guidelines that your logo emphasizes. Remove 2 fish, and just focus on one fish with bubbles to emphasize a complete cycle. https://i.imgur.com/fSWf2fJ.png

[ph0rque]

Thank you so much for your apology, change of tone, and helpful hints! <3

Do you have any suggestions about which font to pick? I like Federant because it seems rustic/"farmy" yet modern at the same time.

As far as the logo itself, I meant to play around with making it a responsive SVG (https://tympanus.net/codrops/2014/08/19/making-svgs-responsi...), but it would take me quite some time to climb the learning curve to do so. Unfortunately, the designer who made it for me did not provide an SVG file.

Again, thanks for your help!

[swaggyBoatswain]

I wouldn't worry about SVGs. The vast majority of logos are usually made in adobe illustrator / affinitydesigner/similar in vector .eps/.ai format.

When it gets exported its almost always a .png file. The logo you have doesn't benefit from SVG. The only ones that really benefit from it are things like gitlab's animated logo https://i.imgur.com/FuxVepX.gif. SVG tends to overcomplex things, sometimes designers circumvent it using embedded font-families instead. https://fontawesome.com/icons?d=gallery

Serif definitely is in the right ballpark for font families you are looking for. I really like the artofmanliness when it comes to older styles. https://www.artofmanliness.com/. They use "BLACK" found here I believe. http://www.fontspace.com/category/rustic. Other farmy rustic styles http://www.fontspace.com/category/rustic?p=3 → Altantida

I tend to think of "barber shop fonts" when I think of old rustic "farmy" feel, because farmers would cut their own hair. And barbershops are still one of the few places that still use old traditions of knife shaving. Other good examples would be "speakeasy" bars, cowboy style.

The font you have is more castle/medieval/serfdom font instead of old farmy rustic. Technically, its not actually a bad font though for what you are going for, actually I looked through it is one of the better options. The logos font height needs to be the same size as the logos height though. Example https://i.imgur.com/NEMKnhT.png . Change the size font-size here to 2.5rem. https://i.imgur.com/KJGAlxe.png

I wouldn't suggest using federant for your actual paragraph text tags though. Keep that part simple and use Arial or Google Roboto

Hope this helps out

[solacelessons]

Thanks for the feedback. I agree that if a site doesn’t resonate with me, I don’t generally use their services.

[swaggyBoatswain]

If you want to do a quickfix on your site, just change these things:

"You’ve been told to TALK to your audience, but it’s NOT WORKING" → change it as a background color div

"Hell YES I Want It!!!" → remove the pink shadow as well

I get that pink and blue are your colors, but those colors don't pair well together used that way. Either that just reduce the pink shadows by a large margin.

These are the changes it should look like

https://i.imgur.com/G0ekTgX.png

This is all the code I modified

https://i.imgur.com/sIMnapZ.png

and here

https://i.imgur.com/LY6Jci8.png

It still has the correct callout to action but doesn't induce any nausea to your users. I made the fix very quickly, but you should get the general idea. There might be minor tweaks you can make from the suggestions I indicated

If you want to implement these changes on your wordpress site, you can simply just copy paste everything I've written and paste it in your css file, or forward this whole message to your developer.

These are just my personal opinions though, your free to do whatever you want

[solacelessons]

I really appreciate this. Thank you. A developer friend made similar suggestions. I just haven’t had the time to implement. You’ve made it extremely easy for me, however. Thank you.

[gbersac]

The website of your coach is ugly !!!

But your project seems interesting.

[maceurt]

Idk, I think people seem to care about having a good looking website more than having a website that is practical. It conveys all the information you need on it right on the home page which imo is more important than being pretty. Though, the person who made the website forgot to make a landing page for the redirect on the "I want it!!!" button lol.

[solacelessons]

Thanks for the heads up on the button. I’m not having any issues with it though.

[solacelessons]

Thanks for checking out my site. I’m excited for AutoMicroFarm’s project to take off! It’s much needed in this world.

[ph0rque]

One of the most valuable lessons my coach taught me is, "get better at being good enough". She practices what she preaches ;)

[blensor]

As I am getting older that's exactly my take on how to achieve something useful. As software devs we sometimes try to outhink the problem by solving every non existent problem that might occur down the road and also doing it in an as elegant way as possible. But the fact is that "down the road" will never come if you never leave the garage.

One example is a little fun halloween project I did last year. It's nothing more than a simple servo that opens a box after a voice command through amazon Alexa. I a don't do much in the way of motors and electronics. So I tried to find a way to elegantly mount the servo in the box and build something that pushes the lid upwards.

In the end I thought what the heck I'll just glue it down with endless amounts of hot glue hoping that it will stick.

A year later when I wanted to retire my box to save some space it turns out that the glue stuck so well that I had to cut it out. So even if it is not elegant and could gave been done in a much more elegant way it worked and nobody cared how it was done.

No matter how elegant your solution, most of the time you are judged by the result not the how.

Here is the link to the box I was talking about https://youtu.be/BdbjoniAP0s