from Hacker News

Show HN: NationBuilder, my startup just launched

by jgilliam on 4/6/11, 10:04 PM with 93 comments

• by spking on 4/6/11, 10:34 PM

  Feedback: It wasn't immediately clear to me who this is for. A big headline telling me "Online Campaign Management for Civic Leaders and Candidates" would be helpful.

• by gokhan on 4/6/11, 11:34 PM

  My feedback:

  - Landing page does not tell me what the site is about. Who is it for? Something like the one suggested by @spking needed.

  - Carousel is too fast for me. It should also pause on hover to let me check.

  - Heroku and AWS is most probably unknown to your target userbase. You should drop it from the carousel, IMO.

  - Not urgent, but you should work on the YSlow score. Lots of the scripts are unnecessary for the landing page.

  - Make the hover animations on the "features" pages discoverable. No one will notice them.

  - Can't you make a shorter version of the screencast and put it on the landing page?

  Overall, there are lots of features inside, but screenshots are too crowded and copy is not helping much in the landing page.

  For example, there's a lot going on in this screenshot and there are many screenshots like this one in the landing page carousel (http://nationbuilder.s3.amazonaws.com/3dna/pages/36/features...). You have many features, but select something simple and stick to it for the landing page.

• by neilk on 4/6/11, 11:22 PM

  Wow. Compared to what a lot of people are calling startups these days, this is practically General Electric.

  Looks great to me, although I have not tried it (since it's 100% integration work, devil is in the details). Seems that you've done this before and built the app you would have wanted.

• by asnyder on 4/6/11, 10:26 PM

  A potential client came to us several years ago with a similar idea, apparently there's lots of money to made since every local election needs a site + social media. Thus white-labeling the process, as NationBuilder is doing allows for your local sheriff or judge to harness the necessary tools they need to get their campaign going without a cost prohibitive price tag.

  I thought it was a good idea then, and an even better idea now. I think NationBuilder did a great job. Needless to say the potential client got cold feet, and never executed their idea.

• by specialist on 4/7/11, 12:20 AM

  You asked for feedback, so here it is.

  Have you worked on any political campaigns? Candidates, issues, activism, anything? I have. Your NationBuilder is not yet a full product.

  Pitch your product to local campaign managers. That's the fastest way for you to get your course correction.

  Campaigns do need better tools. So I encourage you to keep at it.

  (If you're wondering why I just don't tell you what you need, I'm working on a business plan for something very similar. Also, I'd rather you earned the domain knowledge firsthand.)

• by mahmud on 4/6/11, 11:10 PM

  This has a lot of potential.

  Only problem I see is the pricing. You should be doing 4x what you currently have.

• by Nate75Sanders on 4/6/11, 10:38 PM

  Hopefully General Zod will use this for 2012. I might have voted for him, but his page in the last election, http://www.zod2008.com/ , didn't have enough social network engagement and I thought he was a bit behind the times.

• by emiranda on 4/6/11, 11:11 PM

  Does anyone else think people would be more likely to sign up and try it if a credit card wasn't required for the 14 day trial? I was going to sign up to to see what it was like, but then decided not to when I found out that a credit card is required.

• by Tiktaalik on 4/6/11, 11:34 PM

  I think this would really help political candidates in countries such as Canada without fixed election dates, where elections can begin with little notice. Our election just started a week or so ago and parties were nominating new candidates for some ridings at the last minute. My riding still doesn't have a candidate for the Liberal party.

  Certainly these new candidates are starting the campaign flat footed with regards to their web presence and social media strategy and this favours the long established incumbents. This service could fix that and get new candidates that haven't had time to prepare up and running as soon as possible.

• by fourspace on 4/6/11, 11:13 PM

  Nice work!

  Looks like there's an errant "Edit this page" link under the sidebar here: http://nationbuilder.com/features

• by epnk on 4/6/11, 11:36 PM

  As far as the idea goes, I think it's great, and very polished. Nice work!

  I had a bit of a bad initial reaction when I heard the name, however, as it feels very imperialist and negative to me. Might just be me though, so just take it as a single datapoint. But my suggestion would be to look into names that are a little more positive.

• by dangravell on 4/7/11, 8:46 AM

  Really interesting.

  When I arrived at the site I had no idea what it was for. After reading the first and second pages I _still_ had no idea what it was for... but for some reason I didn't care. I began to form this idea in my head that 'nations' referred to 'eco systems' and that this site was a fully integrated Internet presence for a startup. E.g. an easy way to have a Web site, forums, integrate social networking into everything and have it all beautiful at the same time.

  It was only once I read the HN comments that I realised it was for a more political market. It just amused me that looking down that sidebar I made pretty much everything in my head apply to startups... "co-ordinate volunteers? are they talking about open source projects?" ;-)

  Anyway, those are just my initial thoughts. A very interesting vertical you've _actually_ aimed for.

• by bdclimber14 on 4/6/11, 11:29 PM

  I think you'll find the size of the market, measured by number of customers, to be much smaller than you think. I say this because your pricing seems very low. This is obviously a very comprehensive solution and complex software. The individual components from 3rd parties would be much more expensive if they were used separately, (e.g. MailChimp, CRM, etc.) so I think you should price based on what the cost of all the items would be.

  Another commenter said 4x, I'd say 10x plus an upfront fee.

  However, I could be wrong, please correct me if you've done trials and found this to be the best price :)

• by PStamatiou on 4/6/11, 11:56 PM

  It sounds a bit like what Flowtown is doing with their new product: http://v3.flowtown.com/#/flowtown

    Connect your Facebook account to become an official Ambassador for Flowtown.
    Be the first to know, connect with other Ambassadors, and participate in
    exclusives opportunities.

• by lordlarm on 4/7/11, 9:56 AM

  When I'm using Flashblock the flash at the bottom of your site is huge: http://nationbuilder.com/start

  When I accept the flashanimation it works, but you may want to look into it sometime.

  And btw: the "start your trial button" looks (in my opinion) more like web 1.0 than 2.0, with all those gradients and strong colors.

  Keep it up, looks good!

• by Maciek416 on 4/6/11, 11:04 PM

  Wow, this is an interesting spin on a lot of previously-disconnected ideas. I really like the branding and name. The intro screencast was well done.

  I'm looking forward to hearing how well this takes off, especially with the pricing plans currently in place. I have an idea for a political action campaign, but I'm kinda on the fence with your lowest tier price.

• by mryall on 4/6/11, 10:50 PM

  Interesting idea. How much manual legwork do you have to do when a new customer registers? Is there manual effort involved in setting up Twitter and Facebook accounts, mailing lists, etc.? I imagine many of the online services you use would prevent automatic creation of accounts somehow, like with a CAPTCHA or something.

• by nethsix on 4/7/11, 12:19 AM

  My first impression was, this was a useful convenient internet mass-media platform, not only targeted at political people, but anybody who wanted to appeal to a group of people. It had a twist of painting the user as a leader/creator with 'nation'. I guess you're on the right track if every one read it like I did =).

• by m0dE on 4/7/11, 3:43 AM

  Is Corporate Pricing suppose to be all 499/mo regardless of # of people? Why?

• by impendia on 4/7/11, 12:02 AM

  "ammount of people", down low in the FAQ (check the spelling)

• by jacques_chester on 4/6/11, 10:44 PM

  Is this built on CiviCRM or is a custom platform?

• by Tycho on 4/7/11, 10:53 AM

  So it's basically a dashboard for social media PR campaigns?

  (if so then I can't believe nobody's used the word 'dashboard' yet)

• by petervandijck on 4/6/11, 10:58 PM

  I think this is awesome and have been trying to convince a political party to use something like this.

• by ssebro on 4/6/11, 11:34 PM

  BTW, I'm working on a webapp that needs subscription billing. Who'd you go with, and why?

• by ssebro on 4/6/11, 11:37 PM

  This is amazing. How long did it take to spec + build? What's the background story?

• by epaulson on 4/7/11, 12:55 AM

  Can you talk more about your VAN integration?

• by jdp23 on 4/7/11, 1:13 AM

  Nice work, Jim!

• by pitdesi on 4/6/11, 11:36 PM

  My initial feedback is that there are too many pricing layers and that is confusing. Maybe have a few and then do some sort of step function.

  I like the idea, I think it makes a lot of sense and this market probably really needs this sort of thing... that being said, I don't know the market AT ALL.

  Give me a shout if you want to talk payments, we can probably help you figure out the best way to manage that.

• by ddkrone on 4/6/11, 10:48 PM

  This looks like a joke. Is this real?