Rule #1 of a release announcement: don't assume we already know what your product is. Every time you fail to give a 1-sentence elevator pitch in your blog post, hundreds of potential customers say "meh" and hit the back button, taking their thousands of friends, family and colleagues with them.

I was actually coming to HN to say the exact same thing. I assumed the link to "Cheddar" in the blog post would give me some information -- also assumed that the logo would take me a top page that would have information about the product.

What I have learned: * Cheddar is out for Mac * Cheddar is opensource for iOS * Sam is the creator of Cheddar * Archiving is not supported

What I have no learned: * What Cheddar is * Why I should care

>>What I have not learned: * What Cheddar is * Why I should care

Anyone want to summarize those two points?

Todo list app.

It's a little depressing how underwhelming that answer was.

What I learned: "Cheddar has shirts!"

I'll give it to them that, for the first 2 seconds, I was starting to get very curious. After 3 seconds, I was gone.

And also I think it would be a good idea to put an easy link to the main site at the top of your blog, and maybe that 1 sentence elevator pitch as the subtitle.

Your main site mentions nothing about pricing. I'm assuming it's all free at the moment, will it always be, are ads part of the plan or will premium features be turning up later?

[edited to be a little less abrupt]

If there hadn't have been some discussion here I'd probably have not dug deeper. Looking at the info page for the desktop app I saw a mention of Cheddar Plus, and not finding a mention anywhere I else I signed up to see if there was more info.

The free sign-up appears to let you have unlimited tasks but only organised into 2 lists, and for either $1.99/month or $19.99/year you can get Cheddar Plus for unlimited lists.

I'm not saying they're wrong in this approach, but my gut reaction was that it felt 'off'. Thanking on it a bit, if it was me, I'd probably have limited the total number of tasks in the free account, but left the number of lists unlimited.

I'd want people to be able to organise lists however they wanted, but find themselves running out of task items. If users have a limited number of lists before they decide to buy a Plus account they can only create muddy generalised lists, rather than specific well organised ones.

With users able to create better organised lists the app would hopefully seem much more useful and organised and leave a more positive experience.

I was very frustrated by this. The feeling was only compounded when I couldn't easily find an "about us" link. Eventually I did, but that only made some vague hand waving about organizing life and syncing between devices. I'm still not sure what this is all about.

This.

I had to click through the blog and try really hard to find out WTF the app is/was.

Also, screenshots.

Yup. It would be trivial to add an explanation right between the first two sentences.

"I’m super happy to announce Cheddar for Mac is now in public beta. [Explanation Here] You can download it here."

Another blog that talks about an ambiguously-named product and provides no links to or descriptions of said product. I had no idea what Cheddar was after a couple minutes of skimming the blog posts.

What's wrong with navigating to the product's homepage to learn more?

That's the problem: You have to go to the homepage of the app and there isn't a link on the official apps blog page.

Here's the process I went through:

* Click HN link

* Okay, so what does this do? Click on Cheddar for Mac

* Great, known issues and a download link, but _what_ am I downloading? click "our blog" to go to blog front page

* Scroll through the most of the front page. I see open sourcing news, shirts and other stuff, but not what it does.

* Okay, I see a GitHub link. Let's go there.

* Top of the GitHub page has "Cheddar for iOS — Read more" still not helpful enough. Fine, I'll read more.

* Finally at the end of the first line: "a simple & instant task manager."

I can see how that can be quite cumbersome. I guess we just navigate websites in a different manner. Navigating to the homepage via the URL field is always my first instinct.

Different strokes for different folks.

The whole point is that you shouldn't have to go looking.

If you want me to use your product, you damn well better tell me what it is first.

> What's wrong with navigating to the product's homepage to learn more?

If you're talking about the "Cheddar" homepage, there isn't actually any navigation linking to it. If you're talking about "Cheddar for Mac"'s homepage, thats equally as ambiguous.

Right, it makes it "simple to organize your life" or something. It still doesn't tell me what it does in a meaningful fashion.

There's a video on the homepage that shows it in use. Showing something actually being used will resonate much better than stating a feature list.

Personally I'll only ever allow flash to load and watch a video if a product page has sufficiently grabbed my attention first. Doubly so if I'm at work.

They should focus more on the real time nature of the updates and why I should care if my ipad gets a update in real time when I make an change on my iphone. I'm sure there's some scenarios where real time is useful and even more so once they start supporting more platforms but users are unlikely to try and come up with these scenarios for long before they move along to something else.

Video is great, but as an expansion on a brief introduction.

I for one would prefer to at least read a couple of sentences that tell me what an app/service does before I have to watch a video, especially if I'm mobile at the time and/or it's hosted on Vimeo (great quality but looooong unforgiving buffer times in the UK)

Assuming they are able and care to view that video. Why not both?

Clicking the logo just goes to the blog homepage.

For those wondering, and without comment, this is a release announcement for a orange to-do app with a unique font.

Does anyone know if the Mac app might be open-sourced in the same way the iOS app was open-sourced? I'm working on an OS X app that could benefit from both tight integration with their server-based service and I think I could learn a lot from their Mac app source code, as this will be my first Mac app.

Ok, I'll just put this out here.

https://mail.google.com/tasks/canvas

That's only available to Premium users, too bad. App is incomplete (no editing and archiving) and it wants me to be a premium user. Hah, not in this world.

@dcope - FYI, its really hard to figure out what you app is based on your blog. And there's no obvious link back to the site root to get more information.

It's not my product. I merely submitted the blog post here since I know there are people on HN that use this service.

Cheddar Mac; I wish I had a bowl right about now.

I'm not a Cheddar user, but one thing I love about Sam is that he ships like crazy.

Is it a public beta if you have to pay for access?

A better description of the app: https://cheddarapp.com/apps

I'm not entirely sure what this is, but from what I've seen so far it appears to be wunderlist in orange.

You can click on dock icon to bring up Cheddar window before logging in ;)

What is Cheddar? Todo list app that syncs across iOS, web and Mac app.

Just listened to your podcast on Founders Talk. Great podcast!

Where is that talk?

Here you go: http://5by5.tv/founderstalk/38

Thanks man.