Ask HN: Review my startup - Boorgle

7 pointsby burgalonvor 15 Jahren1 comments

Hi Everyone, For the past few months I've been working on my spare time on this little service, and although there are really lots of things I would like to do better, change, and polish, I feel that this MVP is ready for some feedback and see if there's any interest in such a service.

http://www.boorgle.com is a service which will push your friends contact details to your phone (currently via GMail) so you can always stay updated. The video on the homepage is probably the best way to understand it.

Few points that I would appreciate feedback:

* I realized that the marketing message of this service is not clear to people, however I seem to have failed to get it right. The only way I can get people to react to this service is by showing the video of a phone actually being updated in realtime.

* Design/UI/Focus - It seems to me that this product has few user-stories/scenarios (e.g: discovering new people to communicate in real-life), however until now the only positive feedback I was able to get from my friends and family was the syncing of the contact details. Should I drop/hide the groups + messaging part of this service? (I also realize that the groups + message purpose and behavior is not clear to the most user, but am still trying to find out what design/flow could make it more clear)

* Technically: the service is running on Django-nonrel + AppEgnine, however recently I've had a feeling that it would be easier and maybe cheaper to use EC2+Mongo backend instead. Anybody had experience migrating Django-nonrel appengine app into mongo backend? * Monetization - I feel that getting companies to pay for their presence in their clients phonebook could work, but am not sure that this is the best path for monetization.

* I realize that there are other companies doing similar things, however I feel that the way it's currently designed is different. Also this service is very easy to replicate, and still again I feel I have a clear way of how I would like to make progress and differentiate from other products. Any suggestions on the matter?

Thanks, Alon Burg

1 comments

liorsionvor 15 Jahren

Setting up takes some time but the end result is really awesome. I've been looking for something to keep me sync up automatically with contacts new phone numbers (well, especially my changing numbers..) for some time now.. nice work!