[s1mon]

Even in beta, how you present your work is as important or possibly more important than the "work" itself. (It's actually a significant part of the work.)

I've been involved with beta programs for other CAD tools and constantly give feedback to the Onshape team for their design and development of their app. I've worked at major design firms (IDEO, Pentagram, Lunar, etc) and have an ID background. I'm very enthusiastic about CAD and its creative uses. I'm part of what I understand your core audience to be.

I'm trying to give you constructive feedback that a GitHub link which dumps me into a directory is a huge turn off.

Go look at Shapr3D [1], Gravity Sketch [2], or even FreeCAD [3]. Look at how they have calls to action, download links and key benefits shown visually in 2 seconds.

[1] https://www.shapr3d.com

[2] https://www.gravitysketch.com

[3] https://www.freecadweb.org

[s1mon]

Watching some of the videos on your YouTube page [0] gives a much better impression and clarity of what you're trying to do. Particularly this one [1].

The workflow and ease of creating so many features with so few keyboard/mouse commands is intriguing. I understand that you're trying to focus on game asset creation, but since it does do STEP import/export, there's really no reason this can't be used for ID or engineering work, at least at the initial concept level. Don't ignore those markets.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/nickkallen1/videos

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC2MBvb1_Fk

[nkallen]

I appreciate your feedback and I totally want to market it in the way you propose. But let me be real: I am one person doing everything. I expect to have all that stuff by September when I plan to launch 1.0. If I were "in control" of this situation, I'd prefer the app get more buzz closer to launch rather than 6 months away. But I can't really control when people post to hacker news... And in any case I think all publicity is good. Dying in obscurity is the biggest risk.

[fknorangesite]

Yeah, this makes sense. Don't let the HN commenters grind you down.

[toss1]

THIS!!

I've also been using CAD professionally for nearly two decades (RhinoCAD), and was intrigued by the title. When I saw it was just a GitHub code page, without even much for documentation, etc. My response was basically "nevermind", although I did come to check the comments - the video definitely highlights capabilities in a way I would never have guessed form the GH link.

In short, some basics that I learned while building software companies (before doing materials & CAD):

1) Most users have very little imagination - we MUST really spell everything out and draw the connections for them, at least until they get to the "AHA" moment.

2) Most potential customers have no interest or knowledge of software and how it works (software for artists this goes double++). They want to know what it can do FOR THEM, not how cool it is for us

3) A decent approximation for how well users will understand something is what we as software experts would understand with a new application or feature set when we are very tired and in a huge rush - think what you can figure out in less than a minute at 3AM when you've been crunching for days under a deadline, and someone brings in a new thing - it isn't much; you don't really GAF about the new thing, if it isn't really obvious, you'll skip it for now. That level of insight is what is available for a non-expert after a half hour of presentation. So, whatever it is, you need to design it and the presentation of it so that it meets that criteria - you could present it to your peer at 3AM in crunch time and they'd be able to pick it up and use it (or at least get the "AHA" moment and see the utility).

[fknorangesite]

It hasn't even launched. It just got submitted to HN by some rando, not the dev.

[toss1]

I knew it hadn't yet launched. thx for the update on the poster.

Still, the knowledge was hard-won, and I hope it helps someone else on the forum. I've had people randomly provide me with a few of their hard-won gems over the years, which when I applied it made substantial positive differences in my career.

It seemed relevant to the topic, even if not in the strict sense of advising directly the developer in this specific conversation. (Also, it'd not unlikely that the Dev would have the convo brought to his/her attention, so it may end up there anyway).

[fknorangesite]

> so it may end up there anyway

Yeah, like this, the GP if your very own comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30698861