Feedback Conversations

Not sure what Susan meant by that comment? Ask her right on your site by hitting the “reply” on any comment, design, or bug. Like normal feedback, you can pinpoint a part of a page to attach to your reply to give better context. This means everything relating to one idea, design, of bug can be encompassed in one manageable conversation instead of many disparate comments.

Delegate Feedback

Most comments, designs, and bugs are things that need to be acted on. Who’s going to do it? Now you can assign any of your invited collaborators to any individual piece of feedback and treat it like a task. Keep track of what you’re working on with the new “My Work” tab which lists the pages of the site where you’ve been assigned comments, designs, or bugs.

Archive Feedback

Finished with a design or a bug? Instead of cluttering up the list, just hit archive to hide it for later. Archived things are hidden by default but can always be seen again by ticking the “Show Archived” checkbox at the bottom of the widget or using “Outline All” mode to select an element that has comments (whether they’re archived or not).

Email Notifications

We know you log in often to see if your collaborators have added new feedback via Outspokes. With email notifications, we’ll bring the updates to your inbox! You can be notified of new feedback, new replies to feedback you created, or when something’s been assigned to you. When your team needs you, Outspokes reaches back out to you!

Thanks for all the feedback and we’d love to know what you think of this big new release!

The following points elaborate on the SitePoint post, so I’m reusing their headlines:

1. Go Above and Beyond…Every Time

How do you stand out after landing a contract building a big site for a great client? They probably expect lots of long emails, many screen shots, yet another Basecamp project, and months of back-and-forth communication. Why not surprise them with Outspokes? Introduce your clients to better feedback, faster prototyping, less screenshots, and a tidier inbox. It all starts with targeting: you can express yourself with more clarity and less words by pinpointing exactly what you’re talking about. Every time.

2. Get to Know Them Well

How can you “reach a point where you can anticipate [client] needs before they even have to say them out loud?” Listen and keep listening. Gathering requirements is a continuous process throughout a client project. People always change their minds and nothing ever ends up quite like it started. Instead of fighting it, be flexible and use a fluid & lightweight tool like Outspokes to adjust things as you go.

Our designs feature is an excellent example of this. When your client wants that font size “a little smaller” or that color “isn’t quite red enough”, you don’t have to fire up Photoshop, take a screenshot, or edit CSS. Just open up the designs tab of the Outspokes widget, make the change, and share it without leaving the browser. This kind of rapid responsiveness helps you learn what clients really want faster than ever before.

3. Keep the Lines of Communication Open

We know you’re busy getting great work done but does your client? In these days, with email, smartphones, social media and the like, clients expect you to be ultra responsive. But who has time for even more emails, phone calls, or meetings?

Inviting people to collaborate on a web site via the Outspokes widget is the best way to keep everyone in the loop. Your clients don’t have to ask for updates or wait for you to reach out to them. Clients just visit the site, see the widget on the bottom, and instantly know what’s going on! They can see a page-by-page or site-wide breakdown of ideas, problems, and design suggestions. And with new forthcoming features like the ability to treat feedback as tasks and assign it to people, indicate progress, and email notifications, you’ll seem even more responsive without having to do any extra work! Try that with phone or email.

Obviously using Outspokes won’t replace email, phone, or face-to-face time completely but it will help you move through your day-to-day work faster without making your client wonder what they’re paying you for.

4. Become a “Value-Added” Provider

You don’t have to spend a lot of time just to give your clients that extra bit of value that will make them appreciate and remember you. Start a real conversation with your client about their new site. They’re excited about building and evolving it, so make yourself an enthusiastic person to work with by engaging them! Brainstorm ideas, provide suggestions, and point out new directions based on your wealth of experience. Stay organized and share it all, directly on the client’s new site, via Outspokes.

5. Show How Much You Appreciate Them

This one’s all you. Treat your client like that professor you admired in college or like the family friend who’s helping you out. Approach them as a friend, not a contract. Simply having that mindset will make a difference that everyone will notice.

Arthur and I arrived in Mountain View bright and early to interview with Y Combinator.  We grabbed a filling American breakfast in a diner nearby and were pumped to interview at 10am.  Twelve hours later we would get an email from Paul Graham explaining that YC would not accept us for the Winter 2010 round.

We felt deflated to hear the news, but the feedback was helpful, and our inner optimists continue to drive us towards helping our fellow web consultants.  On top of the aggregated YC interview advice, here are a few pointers we picked up ourselves:

Prepare as many questions as you can think of

It’s unlikely that you’ll get an exact question that will be in your document, but the process of brainstorming questions and answering them will clarify your message. If anyone is interested in the questions we came up with, shoot us an email and we’ll send them to you.

Practice with friends and YC alumni

Even though you won’t get an exact phrasing of the list of questions you came up with, there’ll be a lot of overlap in the type of questions and you’ll learn to piece together your answers from your initial list of questions.

Thanks to Jude from Heyzap, Alex from Snipd, Mark from YumDots, and Tim & Suhail from Mixpanel for helping us prepare!

Ignore the timer

There’ll be a 10 minute timer when you walk into the interview.  It won’t help to pay attention to it, so you might as well forget it exists.  It’s good to practice with a timer so you get a feel for how incredibly short 10 minutes really is.

Don’t bother elaborating

We had short paragraph answers to our questions list.  When we practiced with people, they always let us finish our sentences.  This is not the case with the real interview.  PG will have a question ready before you can finish your current thought and sentence.  If you don’t answer the question, he’s already moved on to the next topic.  If your answer is interesting, he’ll drill deeper.  Don’t expect to drive the conversation in any other way.

Answer as many questions as possible

The questions will appear all at once from multiple people.  Queue them up and answer them clearly and quickly.

Assume nothing

Even if something about your product or plan is completely obvious to you and everyone you know, your interviewing audience won’t know about it.  If you want to convey it, say it.

Most importantly of all, go in with confidence and enthusiasm. It’s your ten minutes, and while you’re there, your startup is all that matters. Make sure you convince the four behind behind the table that you’re as amazing as you believe yourself to be.

Best of luck!

-Jerry

The East Bay Ruby Meetup Group

We’ll be doing the inaugural developer spotlight at the next East Bay Ruby Meetup.  Come hear us talk about what worked and what didn’t while we built the Rails backend and the Javascript frontend.  Learn from our suffering and share your experiences as well.

The EB Ruby Meetup is a really chill crowd and a great local resource for asking beginning and advanced Rails questions.  We’ve been going regularly since 2007.  Check it out here.

Outspokes is a great new collaboration tool for anyone involved in creating or managing a web site. Whether you’re a freelancer with an outspoken client, a consulting firm dealing with design by committee, or just a remote team all producing the next great web application, Outspokes can help you communicate faster and more clearly.

Just follow @Outspokes and tweet the following:

Then we’ll message you to confirm your account and get you on the premium plan!

What happens in January? If you love us, please stay on our paid premium plan. Otherwise, we’d be happy to provide you with our current free plan.

Check out del.ici.ous for my collection of relevant blog posts.

Below are my favorite bits…

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http://blog.directededge.com/2009/11/05/the-interview-with-y-combinator-thats-not/

Talk to as many people as possible about your startup and try to get them to ask as many questions as possible. Show them the demo and see what they think.

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http://myoung8.posterous.com/advice-for-your-yc-interview

The greatest risk you run when interviewing with YCombinator is having Paul, Jessica, Trevor, and Robert not understand the full extent of your opportunity.

The key is NOT trying to create an all-encompassing description of your company, rather, it is to embrace constraints, to be as concise and precise as possible. … Try to condense your description into something less than 10 words. Coming up with a good tagline isn’t really all that important per se–it’s the exercise of trying to explain what you do in a clear and concise way that is. Once you’ve done it for your tagline, try to do it for everything else you might say.

Convince them the opportunity is viable … the market is big enough … the market is capable of supporting a new entrant (i.e. that there is enough money to go around if you enter the market and that barriers to entry are low enough to permit you to attack the market).

…the surest way to increase your chances of being accepted is to not need YC.

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http://railspikes.com/2009/11/9/y-combinator-interview-advice

Paul thinks big, so if he likes your idea, be prepared for him to rattle off about 2 years worth of work for you to do – new features, new markets, a different direction, etc.

However, it’s not all about the idea. Some teams get roughed up in the interview and are surprised to be accepted. The Y Combinator partners are looking for teams to fund. Lots of YC startups end up doing a totally different thing before Demo Day.

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http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2008/11/y-combinator-interview-advice.html

Having said that, be sure you know your market in and out. You better know who your competitors are (”We don’t have any” is not an acceptable answer), the history of the market (What previous companies were similar? Were they successful? If so, how did the exit? If not, how are you going to do better?), how you are realistically going to make money (for a 3 person company, at least $30,000/month), and a very good technical understanding of how you are going to get all this done.

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http://sam.bluwiki.com/blog/2009/04/advice-for-yc-interviewees_12.php

The last thing you want to do is argue with the partners. Accept criticism and show that you’ve thought about the objections they raise. If you don’t have an answer, be honest. Offer to do the research and follow up later in the day.

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http://blog.listia.com/my-yc-interview-experience-s09-by-james

- Research previous YC companies.  Take a look at the types of companies YC has funded and see where you could fit in.
- Be open to make changes to your idea.  This says a lot more than one may think.
- Reread your application.  The same questions may come up.
- Know the answers to the easy questions.  “Would you be fully committed?”, “How many founders do you have?”, “What problems/hurdles are you anticipating?”, “Who would use your product?”, “Are you open to changing your idea?”
- Most importantly, be genuine.

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http://drraw.blogspot.com/2007/04/ycombinator-advice-interview-tips.html

…don’t mistake passion for stubbornness. You should be as excited about your idea as possible without being violently attached to it. Whenever somebody says your idea has something wrong with it, they are giving you a chance to learn something. The right answer is always “why do you think that?” instead of “we’ll prove you wrong”.

(Re-)Re-Read the application … Expand on your answers and re-think them.

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http://mattmaroon.com/2007/10/19/advice-for-y-combinator-interviewees/

Relax. You’ll get a lot of points if you aren’t nervous. … You’re basically in unless you mess it up, so just look at it as an enjoyable afternoon hanging out with Paul and Jessica.

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http://vagabondhacker.com/2009/04/16/our-y-combinator-interview-experience.html

I’d advise candidates that more than anything else, you must (a) intimately know your market and competitors and (b) convey your determination.

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http://blog.pretheory.com/arch/2007/11/yc_interview_tips_1.php

If you have demo, walk in with it loaded and your laptop open.

Show them the coolest thing right off the bat.

…some content is just plain better for your app than other content. Think about it - if you were pitching YouTube, you wouldn’t your investors to come to the front page and just see music videos. This will give them the impression that you’re trying to compete with MTV (plus it raises questions about copyright infringement). You’d be better off showing off the highest-quality user created videos you can find. Always show the data that best fits with your app first.

Watch the clock and deliver your vision.

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Can’t wait see all the other interviewees in Mountain View next weekend! Best of luck!

Brainstorming sessions happen often. Designs come forth, get tossed out, adapt, evolve, and get incorporated. Code gets written and rewritten. Many photos are taken of busy whiteboards. Rubies & gems are coveted. They drown in JavaScript.

Less than 4 months later, they have it: Outspokes. It’s a widget that lives at the bottom of every page of a web site and facilitates collaboration for anyone involved in building that site.

Hi, I’m Arthur, one of those 7 folks and now the Chief Executive Outspokesman.

Why did we build Outspokes? A lot of us have designed and built web sites for others so we know how hard it is to communicate throughout the process of creating a new site. Whether you’re a lone freelancer or a firm with a team to manage, the time you spend communicating with the client and others involved is one of the hardest things to estimate and get right. There are endless emails, links, screen shots, phone calls, clarifications: a whole sea of feedback to drown in. How in the world are you supposed to take it all into account in your hourly estimate?

Our widget will replace all that. Right now, it’s just starting to help with that really heavy feedback process. Instead of writing a long, detailed email describing what’s broken on some page, just go to that page, click on the broken part, and make a comment through our widget. Whenever someone reads your comment, the broken part of the page can be highlighted. This is ridiculously easier and faster than taking a screenshot and wrestling with Photoshop just to get your point across. Just ask one of our customers, who at one point received hand-written notes of printed out screenshots… via fax.

Back to the story. So it’s the dawn of the summer, I have my Berkeley degree, and no clue what to do next. I can find a job, but who wants to go do a boring thing like that? I’m in love with Outspokes but how can I possibly start and run a company on my own?

That’s exactly what I asked my friend Jerry Cheung. His reply?

Try it for a week. See how far you get.

I did. That week never ended.

Fast forward to now. In the last 5 months, we’ve gone through customer development, talks at meetups, getting advisors, doing venture competitions, pitching to VCs, dealing with lawyers, incorporating, intellectual property issues, the TechCrunch50 DemoPit, SF New Tech, our first paid customer, and saying goodbye to a person instrumental in getting us to where we are now. We’d love to tell you all about that in the lifetime of this blog.

We are currently 3 Berkeley folks building our first company: Arthur Klepchukov, Jerry Cheung, and Nikki DePaola. Arthur and Jerry are the founders & engineers and Nikki’s our brand new marketing intern.

And how this story ends is up to you.