1) Our vision currently is to help any product at any stage succeed pre and post launch. We want our platform to be an incredible and on-demand resource for companies to gain insights that they only could have dreamed of.
2) Superusers are your product evangelists. They're the people that want to deep dive into your product and want to have domain knowledge over it. Big companies such as Apple or Google specifically look out for these users and reward them handsomely, as they are incredibly rare.
To put it simply, superuser-level reviews are the highest quality of reviews, where you get the most feedback because the user cares that much about the success of your product and is willing to go that extra-mile for your company.
At Polymyr, we hope to cultivate and attract a community of superusers that simply live and breathe your product.
By testing/launch platform, we mean that we're making a place where new startups can launch their products. Our vision is that makers will launch first on our platform, and this will help them gain initial traction and consumer feedback to help them further improve their products.
By superuser-level reviews, we just mean really detailed and aesthetically pleasing (for both the consumer and the maker) reviews that we hope will help makers take their products to the next level!
I agree; 1. a "new stuff section" is super important, 2. measure popularity via engagement (although I'd use upvotes for that), 3. allow users to share via fb/tw/... .
As for the chicken egg problem; I guess focusing on a small industry first would help.
Actually, why not make Nyolk focus on sneakers first? There is a community of people that are obsessed with sneakers and they would love such platform. The word would spread quickly in that community. They eventually would become the first core community to contribute to Nuyolk.
I'm excited to see what Nuyolk becomes! We can keep in touch:)
1. I'd rather go democratic than "elitist": e.g. it would be nice if a post gets deleted because a majority wants it deleted and not because of moderators. That said, "even more exclusive community that can pin things" is actually nice because it increases the motivation of this "more exclusive community" to contribute.
2. I often ask myself that. Some thoughts;
- Not only can users see the popular stuff of the last few days but also of the last month, 6 months, 3 years, etc... Effectively "smoothing" this "slipping" you describe.
- With tagging, slipping is less a problem; even though a product has slipped in the general ranking it can still be on top in certain tags.
Thanks for the comment, what do you think of the overall idea?
I would use your website but I'm missing a more precise search.
Why not a tagging system?
Would be nice to be able to look for a "black" "shirt" with "stripes".
Do you guys want to only do this for fashion? This seems applicable to other industries, doesn't it?
I'm doing something similar, see "Apply HN: Alternative to Advertisement" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11441537). I'm excited to see that other people seem to care about that as well.
It would be so cool if things get popular based on their quality and design.
"we're starting with the more design-centric industries since they tend to be the ones with weird value/pricing parities." -> do you mean that there are small merchants offering products that are both cheaper and higher quality than big well known merchants? And it therefore makes sense for Nuyolk to bring these better products to consumers?
Yes. There are quite a lot of independent labels -- especially as the current barriers to entry allow almost anyone with reasonable design skills to start one. Also, the design-to-delivery/store costs are way cheaper in emerging economies like the Philippines (where we're based), allowing local designers to produce quality at a minimum. There is also a growing trend towards proudly-locally-made (in the US) and socially/environmentally sustainable products. Those who chose to fulfill their own deliveries also have better contribution margins as they avoid a huge portion of the ~40% of sales that retailers charge. The major problem for these kinds of labels is distribution. It's tough to get the word out when you don't have the economies of scale -- hiring a content and marketing squad does not make sense early on.
With the tagging system: they would look for the "sport" tag.
(Actually it wouldn't be a tag because sport is a "top-level-tag". Instead it would be a category with a dedicated website. So the users would go on sports.listing-platform.com and then be able to select tags like "football", "soccer", etc.)
and if a user is looking for fantasy sport websites, then they would lookup the tag "fantasy-sport". The fantasy sport website would publish itself on listing-platform.com under the tag "fantasy-sport".
I'm curious about the "launch platform" part. (I did a "Apply HN" on that). What is your vision on that?
What do you mean with "superuser-level reviews"?
This is exciting:)