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Ask HN: What do you think of my startup (gymcalls.com)
13 points by dkan 5688 days ago
Personalized reminders to go to the gym
3 comments

Nice idea; how will it make money?
Well, it's a subscription service. Ideally, there will be a lot of people that lack the motivation, yet want to achieve the results. That's where we come in. In exchange for us calling them and providing motivation (whatever kind they want), they pay about 67 cents a day.
discount code for HN readers?
Go to http://www.gymcalls.com/discount-sign-up.html for discounted subscription, password: 'gymcallsnow'
Too much text, and the font is too small. The pictures are clearly used without permission (big no-no!) and don't match in style, so it just looks like a bunch of stuff thrown together. Get rid of the video. It's unprofessional. I almost hit the back button when I saw it.

The prose is too colloquial and informal. It doesn't identify what your customer would want, it identifies what you want. You also make it sound like you're doing people a favor ("That's why we're willing...") but then you also tell them you're charging them for it.

On the Service page, you have too many slash marks, so what you do becomes confusing. Get rid of the slash marks and everything after the slash mark. (Why would you call someone after their workout to tell them they should have worked out?)

Also, $20/month is too much. I pay less than that for Netflix. Voip, Xbox Live... You need to justify the expense. Which brings us to...the samples. Based on the samples provided, I would not sign up. It's that simple. You/your guys need to be more assertive. Style should refer to the script, but not to the substantive content. Too many (well, all) of the samples just sounded like nagging, and I can get that from my girlfriend for free. It goes along with the relative lack of professionalism in the site. It also makes it hard to discern what value the service provides over an automated call.

Basically: (1) fix up the look and content of the site, (2) figure out what value it is that you provide over an automated message service, and (3) figure out why someone would pay $X/month for a person to call them rather use a cheaper automated message service or SMS service.