I think it looks great, just a few thoughts (mostly on UX/UI):
1. You probably can do without the <hr> tag separating the head and the rest of the body on the landing page
2. I see a signup button, but not a login/signin for existing user
3. I find the font a bit quirky, but that's just my preference. I try to do non-cursive font for easier reading
4. The about page: a) url is sprint.im/user/about--that's a bit weird as I'd assume it's just sprint.im/about b) shorter paragraphs and make the long paragraphs about "why Sprint.im different" into a list
5. Quick tour page: the bounding box of each step needs some top/bottom padding/margin. They're connected to each other right now.
6. Register page: a) help text for password is "secret salt" I get it, but I think the word salt would be confusing b) I don't like the arrow icon to the left--it's too big and too gaudy as a list icon
7. Just another thought/question for discussion as I am also wondering about this myself. It's a B2B/Saas, I wonder if the fact that it was made by one person should be pin-pointed (on the about page). Most people would prefer that their software is made by a team/group/company. Having a single name as designer/developer takes away that illusion of "faith" and can turn a lot of people away.
I think it's a great project. Congratulations on launching your beta. It's a great step and you should be happy and proud of it. Now just iterate like a machine and I'm sure you'll definitely see some interesting movement. Your space is interesting in that: there's a lot of players, but there isn't a king or someone who basically rule the rest (well, basecamp/jira maybe?), but that means if you focus (which I see that you are) you'll capture some market share that other guys haven't or can't seem to do. Good luck and as always, please update us on each iteration.
1. I'll see what I can do for the <hr> tag
2. Once you're registered, you get a companyname.sprint.im - That is where you're expected to login.
3.ok
4. Ok will plan on changing about and a few other pages.
5. ok
6. yeah its a little confusing.
yeah I've been pondering over if its the right call to showcase that it was built by a single person. Will have to do some testing to see what works. But I was hoping that it would me a more personal touch with customers.
Thank you for all the feedback and suggestions :) yes. Basecamp and Jira are huge so is project bubble. Hoping to get a good slice of the market share soon :)
Are you saving the "registered" cookie? If a user is registered, but accessing the site on another browser, there would be no cookie and he/she wouldn't know how to login. What language/framework are you using?
Yes and No. Rememberme cookie autologs in when you goto company.sprint.im (if you have logged in before). It however does not log you in directly if you try to goto sprint.im. This is something I probably should work on. A simple login link would solve all the problems.
Yes, you definitely need to create a login/signup links. Just ask yourself this question: "what do I gain and loose by not having a login link?" Not all people read and not all people look at icons, so you usually have to have both icon and text to get all your users to take actions. If you make it less of a guess work for your users, they will appreciate you for it.
The hacker ethos is also classically male. "Being concerned with appearance, shopping for clothes and decorating your house are feminine values. Tech millionaires see that type of spending as silly and frivolous," Marwick said.
"It's more important to have the freedom and the independence to build something for a huge audience."
True story that happened to me: while trying to look up information for a restaurant reservation, I found some security issue that would redirect user to an obscure host name. I think it was an issue of bad DNS setup with their web hosting provider. In any case, being the helpful and detail-oriented web guy, I sent their head quarter's team an email with the detail of what's wrong and a solution that should fix it. I got an email from them the next morning, and since I started my email with "While I was looking up information for a reservation..." the person arranged the reservation for me. So I thought that was that. But after the meal was done, the owner came out and thanked me personally and took care of all our drinks. And since it was a Brewery/restaurant, the beer tasted a bit sweeter :)
I've also sent another email to a small online belt buckle shop to notify them of the insecure way they were setting up Paypal on their site (again, the steps to reproduce the problem and steps to fix it). The owner emailed me back to thanked me as well as taking care of the order personally. You know, most people are just happy that you are giving them some help. Being in the hacking community, I would imagine that everyone is the same here--most of us are (overly) helpful individuals. It's in our genes. So don't fight it and do the nice thing of sending them the steps to reproduce the problem and ways you can fix it. If you feel that you should protect your anonymity, do it. But do notify them :)
If one of these days, when I make an obvious security problem, I would hope, that one of us here would shoot me an email so I can fix it immediately. And I will promise to do the same.
I recently (3 weeks ago) quit my day job to pursue my own startup product full time. Believe me, 3 weeks with a full-time focus was about 3 to 6 months part time with a day job. It's definitely worth it! But of course, only do it if you could afford it.
I completely agree with @auganov. If OP hasn't looked at the map for a while, Asia definitely is HUGE :) Perhaps start with 1 country--the question would then become "How do you reach Vietnam?" or "How do you reach Japan?" Which is much more answerable (even if the answer would be pretty long).
As a Vietnamese American, I've always been interested in the Vietnam market since the number of internet user's growth is astounding! The country's literacy level is very high and majority of people are either online or trying to be online daily. But this is more of a developing country and the majority of regular Asian population.
The biggest problems I have with Vietnam and Asian developing countries right now, and this isn't unique to just Vietnam as far as I can tell:
1. The postal system isn't uniform/consistent throughout the country, so there's a real problem in mapping people with a clear home address.
2. Not having a clear home address combined with a lackadaisical sense of infrastructure planning, it's making things like loans and credits and ultimately credit card ownership is very difficult. So online transaction can be difficult. There is a population of Vietnamese population with ATM debit cards, but the commitment and buy-ins with online transactions are still at an early stage. As far as I can tell, most transactions to push money to an online vendor still go through a brick & mortar proxy (go to shop, load up on digital points --> pay with points like old school phone cards)
3. Speed/ownership of private internet connections is also an issue. A lot of the general population are still using the internet from internet cafe. As more and more people are getting personal internet connections at home, this is getting better; but it's a long way from where we are in the US. Imagine the early AOL modem era.
I don't disagree that the market is huge and there are countries and locations that are ready: South Korea, Hong Kong, Philippines and Malaysia etc. But the big market you're looking at are still made up of low to middle Asian population, which is getting ready but not there yet in term of online-marketing ready. FYI, a lot of successful services for Vietnam right now are mostly free or supported by ad revenue.
These are just a few of my personal thoughts though. Perhaps someone else with more solid data on Asia would really be insightful for everyone.
And what about japan? china?
This question came to my mind after i developed a small mmorpg for android and published it asking for beta testers, one of the people who contacted me was a chinese guy who explained me something i didn't know. They have many mmorpgs already published in the android market, and i never seen or heard of them. So i stared thinking of how many things we are doing parallel to them but without(except some occasion) touching.
I gained a lot from this experience and i think that opening to each other would be good for everyone but there are many obstacles, like language, different minds etc...
I think Japan is definitely ready. Big cities in China is ready. But since the social classes gap is very wide between the rich and the poor and it may come as a surprise to a lot of people, but majority of the population in countries like China and Vietnam is poor.
Btw, I hear South Korea's internet is much better than what we have here in the US.
If I understand your question correctly, it's "How would one go about implementing their own analytic engine?" I have looked into this question recently and here's what I know so far (not 100% sure of course as I'm still looking into it)
Getting Basic Info:
1) 1x1 pixel method which request a 1 pixel image from your server which will pass the requesting client's info. A lot of people use this method because it's fairly simple and cross browser.
2) (I assume) guys like sharethis/addthis etc, request a javascript on your server which would pass all the client's information to the server per that request
Tracking things like mouse movement, page area etc would most likely require a more customize javascript that will send data to server via ajax/page unload etc.
Storing Data:
Because the data you will be collecting for analytic is HUGE. Think much bigger than HUGE. You'll need a real big-boy set up like a Distributed Storage/Database system. Most of the big guys use their own. Here is where you will need to read up on key/value databases like Cassandra or Hadoop etc.
Anyone with much more experiences and wiser thoughts, please do share and correct me as I am still learning about this. Good luck and thank you.
Ditto on the design and the mismatching of icons and messages. Those slides don't really seem to help your case here. But I'm also concerned with the language usages ("Stop hiring like an amateur!") can be a bit too forward, assuming and jarring. Maybe that's the "slick" way of talking that I am not used to.
I think it's a great project. Congratulations on launching your beta. It's a great step and you should be happy and proud of it. Now just iterate like a machine and I'm sure you'll definitely see some interesting movement. Your space is interesting in that: there's a lot of players, but there isn't a king or someone who basically rule the rest (well, basecamp/jira maybe?), but that means if you focus (which I see that you are) you'll capture some market share that other guys haven't or can't seem to do. Good luck and as always, please update us on each iteration.
-V.