Show HN: Launched my side project: DecideOnADate
http://decideonadate.com
I know the market is saturated with event planning applications but I was finally able to get one of my side projects launched to completion so I wanted to show it off.
The goal of DecideOnADate is to be a dead-simple way for a group of friends to decide on a date for any event.
Let me know what you think!
Published in 2011, this chronicle by @mdoerneman details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 9 comments
Hope this helps....
Overall interesting start, you did execute on an implementation which deserves kudos for that. I like the simplicity but the UI does leave much to be desired. Needs a little polish to take it away from the standard output from Rails (aka looks too Railsy, if such terminology usage exists). I'd try picking one market segment initially to design towards (one underserved by the current event app market) and go more in that direction to establish a beachhead.
Homepage, consider an easier to read font. The background color of the center content area doesn't match the white background. Make the facebook like way more prominent! Make the support/feedback also more prominent! Perhaps don't show the app quite yet, but illustrate the steps to convey the message more clearly than a block of text.
Consider teasing functionality and increasing investment of users time by creating the first panel of the event before getting hit with the reg page.
Consider making the reg a modal window.
At login/reg screens, until mass audience is registered, make it smaller component to the right.
The password match can be ajaxed without the page reload needing to take effect.
Consider date entry as a calendar control
Consider adding end date to the date options. Duration won't be needed if end date is there. I would actually use this tool for proposing dates for our annual weekend trips. But no end date makes that very difficult.
Invite entry screen is too cumbersome for the lazy (like me) to use. Consider integration with Gmail or Fb.
A word on the logo is to take it out of that box, leave it on the background and make the stroke around the words thicker and white. Try to soften the entire interface up so that less harsh box structures exist. There is great opportunities to do something fun and interesting with the center -- so try it out.
Looks pretty. Would you mind explaining how this is different from existing apps (e.g. doodle.com)? And I agree with frankdenbow on the email issue. Maybe a screencast or some more elaborating would help (by the way: doodle.com doesn't require an email address).
Might be better if you didn't force people to make accounts, like this:
http://whenshouldwe.com/
Looks good, although it would be helpful to know more about how this works before pushing us to create an account. Good luck!
Clickable: http://decideonadate.com