tastefulwords

Thank you for thinking about this and trying to help.

I wholeheartedly agree with you in spirit. If I could launch today, I would. If I could build a launch-able version of this, by myself, in a month, I would. Sadly, though, neither of those situations are the situation I'm actually in.

Thank you very much for taking the time to think about this -- and even more for taking the time to also write.

I agree with your feedback. On the one hand, the deck is meant to be short and to invite conversation -- which it has done. On the other, it is hard to come up with stuff like "customer validation" and "monetary size of opportunity" in this particular case.

What I want to tackle is contracts in general, not any one particular type of contract. I know that this goes slightly against the general product mindset of focusing on a niche. But, to me, in this case, the niche is contracts -- agreements made formal. And, in my mind, the solution is fundamentally the same across the board, and should be approached as such.

There are many products trying to make contracts "easier". Large B2B contract management players like Ironclad; small Freelance-dashboards like HelloBonsai. All of them are using templates, basically, that you edit through some sort of classic WYSIWYG editor -- which is very far away from what I'm trying to do.

With regards to customer validation in particular: I have put this in front of people and asked if it makes sense; and I've gotten very positive responses. I have not, however, done any formal user interviews: to me, the problem seems clear; and whether or not this is truly a solution isn't something that you can find out from just a few interviews -- especially not when what you can show is far from the finished/polished experience.

In conclusion: yes, this is still a tech oriented idea; turning into a usable product is why I'm trying to do -- but, to do it well, I need to raise money.

I should've been more explicit.

My post was on the Ask HN page, near the top; then it suddenly disappeared, from one moment to the next. My guess is that would only happen if either too many people clicked "hide", or because of some other moderation-type decision.

Thank you, though, for taking the time to try and help. If I may ask, how did you find my previous post?

If, looking at the demo, what you saw was "a simple form" then our perspectives are far enough apart that I don't see how they could ever meet.

Nonetheless, I thank you for taking the time to write.

P.S. I submitted this yesterday too. My post got hidden/shadow-banned, and I don't know why. Trying again, as this is my very last hail-Mary, before I burn down nearly a year of full-time work on (what I think is) a great idea.

I think you're probably right.

But, sadly, I have neither the energy nor the financial liberty to do so, after the nearly one year of full-time work that it took to get here. (The demo isn't just a mockup; the tech that powers it is production-ready, which is why it took so long; which might've been a mistake, but that's another story.)

Breakdown of the first year, which is what 500k will get me (barely):

  - Month 1-to-4: Design/Build.
  - Month 5: Private beta with 10/20 freelancers.
  - Month 6: Start enterprise case-study.
  - Month 7: Soft launch for Freelancing.
  - MOnth 8-12: Raise next round.

I don't have a detailed breakdown for the Design/Build pahse.

You can't use it yet because what I deem an MVP for this is far-away from what I have right now. At the moment, the tech is probably 80% of the way to what would be in a v1, but the design/experience is maybe 20% of the way there.

Getting this to a proper v1 requires a design exercise that's at least 2/3 months long, during which time I need a full-time designer and a full-time lawyer.

I don't think that I absolutely need a lawyer as a co-founder, but I do think that having one would definitely be great. (Which is why I tried that.)

Some great books in arkitaip's comment.

But start with this one: "The Non-Designer's Design Book" -- it'll teach you how much of "great design" is "great typography".

Actually, it would still be possible to do that, if we instituted some sort of a HN-wide policy that the person who wants to gauge interest should make that to-be-upvoted comment -- that's because comment authors do see the pints of their own comments.

Glad you asked this -- as many people think my opinion on this subject is something other than what it actually is.

I don't hate advertising. Good advertising I actually love. Unfortunately, there's lots and lots of the horrible variety and way too little of the good variety -- but I see signs of this (slowly) reversing.

That's beside the point, though. The point being that Readable doesn't circumvent advertising -- it only loads on request, in response to a physical user action (clicking), by definition after the original page has loaded, and it also makes it very easy to get back to the original page. I honestly don't see how I could be more accommodating, towards ads :)

P.S. Also, Readable wasn't originally created because I was annoyed by advertising -- as I have a tendency to read only those sites with good advertising. It was made for the sole purpose of allowing people with particular (and maybe even peculiar) tastes about how text should look to read comfortably.

Not really. But I want(ed) to see if there is genuine interest in something like that.

I'd hate to write/post uninteresting stuff.

Oh and one more thing: I'm honestly not trying to draw even more traffic this way. I really really wanted to thank the community -- a lot.

The clickable link is here just because some of you think it's bad form to post about an app, without a clickable link.