Ask HN: Feedback on my product's pre-launch page.

[jamesotron]

Hi all.

My expertise lies in networking and development and not in marketing and business development. I'm probably not best suited to the life of an entrepreneur, but with the help of friends like @peterc, and keeping HN in my feeds I have learned an awful lot over the last year or so.

I am launching http://splinch.it/ in July. Splinch provides automatic router and switch configuration file versioning and collaboration using git. It will also provide log file analysis for the very same allowing me to autodetect configuration changes and read in the new config.

I'd really love some feedback from people here about the landing page as it is now and suggestions on how to improve it. Also, any ideas on how I can reach my target audience would be great.

Thanks! @jamesotron.

[elbrodeur]

Hey James,

A few things:

- Heavy use of text shadow and box shadow makes my browser chug to a halt. Latest Chrome build on a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo with 8GB of RAM.

- Get rid of "What is splinch?" The paragraph there is enough, and there's no need to guide the user's eye to that.

- Header/logo are huge... I'd consider making that section 50% of it's current height.

- I'd get rid of social stuff for now: Your target audience is savvy enough to share in a smart way.

- I'd change the button text to [ Join our mailing list and get your first month free ] and make the color of the button distinct from your background color. Your button should be in the foreground, and using a similar palette as the background is visually confusing.

- The items at the bottom look more like a footer -- typically where you'd look for things like menu, about, etc.. -- and less like features/important information. I'd consider bringing them up into the lighter background so that they are visually grouped with the product

- I'd try a little bit of a different layout. Typically the top left of the screen is the most valuable real estate. I took a couple minutes and did this: http://cl.ly/3l0y1w2G2p2y1P2M1p3u

- The container is a bit weird.. Unfortunately chrome developer tools is super slow with all the text, so I'm not sure quite what's going on. What I would do is have a container with a fixed width (880px-960px) with a margin:0 auto; to center the entire page.

Great idea, and while I'm not your target audience, I think that a lot of people will get value out of what you're building.

[jamesotron]

Thanks! I've already made a few of your suggested changes to the site.

[pedalpete]

You've done a good job of outlining your product, what it does, why it's needed etc. But I'd recommend some design tweaks.

I think you should get rid of the shadows. They make it difficult to read, and it doesn't look very professional, crisp or clean.

The white on brown isn't super easy to read. Maybe go for more contrast in that section on the bottom.

Why is the socialize at the bottom so HUGE?? What is that? Why is it there? Why is it detracting from the opportunity to say more important stuff about splinch?

Your page content should have a set width. You're resizing your 'splinch provides' text which is making it too long to read.

Give yourself a limit of 980px or something like that, and squeeze all your content into that box. Take a look at the homepage for http://basecamp.hq - you can get some ideas for layout from sites like this.

Makes it very difficult to read.

[jamesotron]

Thanks.

All the text shadows or specific ones? I used it only in places where I thought that it made the text _easier_ to read because it helps increase contrast. I'm probably mistaken :)

I'm really surprised by people telling me to make the site fixed-width, all the work I have done with accessibility, etc has taught me to make it scale nicely and avoid using absolute units wherever possible. I'll modify it to include a fixed width on my dev environment and take a look.

Sociable is the name of my company, Splinch is the product. I note that basecamphq.com has a great big 37 signals at the bottom of the page too, but I take your point and will reduce the size and add text explaining what it is.

[sgentle]

I am confused about "Splinch Pro" - is there going to be a non-pro version? If not, perhaps it's worth removing that distinction.

As for your pricing, is it based on research? Corporate IT is one of those magical environments where sometimes more is more - ie, your service won't be taken seriously if it's priced too low.

I think it would be worth your time creating a second page with more details. I don't know what "collaborative maintenance" means, nor "community extendable", so having some more information would be helpful. Specifically, I would point out the advantages of your service over the existing approaches. Keep in mind this won't just be read by network admins, but by non-technical managers to whom the benefits may not be immediately obvious.

[jamesotron]

Hi.

Thanks for your feedback. I will be adding more details about the difference between free and pro over the next week or so. I am hoping that I can get engineers to use splinch for their configuration management for free and then find a reason why it is essential for them to upgrade to a Pro - ie more devices or multiple environments (production, DR, etc). You're right, the pricing is based entirely on my gut feel, and unfortunately my guts are wildly oscillating between "people pay hundreds of grand for one of the existing solutions" and "if I price it too high no one will buy it."

I was planning on waiting until I had some screenshots and maybe a screencast available before putting too much effort into the sales side of the site but I'm waiting for a few of the features to be a bit smoother around the edges before I do that.

Thanks for your feedback, I'll give a few network operations managers I know a call and see what the think about pricing.

[jeffepp]

Clickable: http://splinch.it

[rikramer]

Run spell-check. Your page has 'receive' spelled wrong (recieve). This will kill you credibility-wise.

[jamesotron]

doh! thanks for the catch.