agreed, though its a great way to get the word out. Posted it in an IRC channel and got 22 people to sign up in about 10 mins hehe, thought i did get a few people feeling like they got scamed aswell
This is a legit product, and it's not a scam. The reason we want people to sign up is to show that the idea has demand. This is important for us to validate our own efforts as well as to show our stakeholders that people are interested in the idea.
I think the point people here are trying to drive home to you is that if you want people to risk their reputation by recommending your product to their friends then you need to let them use it first.
it's like a chef saying, "sure i'll cook at your private event. But first you have to recommend me to all of your friends."
What if the product is awful, why risk your reputation? Atleast give us something to try out first:)
That's a good point... we are using Launchrock's default settings to figure out how to send out invites. I've also been asking people who don't want to share to DM or tweet us at @vizualizeme if they want super early access. Everyone will get a beta invite eventually, though
I hate the way sites are using this kind of way to sign up. It feels so scammy and turns me right off what ever their "product" is, now I just want my email address back and couldn't care less about them.
Next time I see the LaunchRock format I'm just gonna close the window
I think it's scammy too - just flag the article. They'll learn soon enough that they need to tell customers there's an additional requirement before getting their email address.
This idea makes a lot of sense, without seeing much of the actual product, this is actually something that I had thought of doing some time ago - inspired by a few posts on HN about visualizations of other resumes.
So, given that I probably won't do it, here are a few suggestions.
I think there is some useful data about people already in various 'social sites' that you can use to generate some interesting visualizations.
For instance, Stack Overflow and github for developers.
For Stack Overflow, you can develop some sort of quotient that is easily identifiable. Don't just use SO points, but use that as part of the quotient. Where a quotient is either a combination of their overall SO points and the quality of feedback given or gotten.
I would also graph/visualize various elements of Stack Overflow, example if they have really popular answers you can highlight it - i.e. get that code snippet/answer from SO and display a summary or the actual answer to the question on their 'resume'.
The idea is as their SO profile grows and more people find their stuff useful, your service is improving their resume. So the job recruiter can look at their resume at a glance and get a summary of their activity on SO, or they can drill down and see if the person asks a lot of questions or if they answer questions or if they do neither, do the questions they answer get lots of activity/votes or does the same apply to the questions they ask. There can be awesome developers that don't answer questions, but the questions they ask are really top-notch, cutting-edge stuff that many people are struggling with - so by weighting the activity around both the quality of the question & the answer, you use the activity (i.e. the community) as a proxy for the quality of the question or answer. I hope that makes sense and wasn't too rambling, but I didn't intend to give this stuff away until I saw this.
Github, you can also do some cool visualizations there - e.g. you can have a quick summary of repos forked, or new repos created. You can look at the activity on their original repos (i.e. you are trying to find the quality of their original work, not say a fork of a Rails repo). If they are the creator of Merb or jQuery for instance, you should be able to visualize how popular/how much activity is surrounding those repos, so the appropriate creators & collaborators/contributors get the credit and not people that fork.
Although, if there is a fork and there is a lot of activity there, that should definitely count for something.
So, all in all, imagine there is a resume generated by your service that quickly gives an accurate snapshot of the quality of the developer by either the quantity of projects they are affiliated with/contribute to/collaborate on, or by the quality of their feedback to the community.
I know it sounds a bit immense and there could be all sorts of directions to go in, but I think this gives you a good start.
Once you conquer those, you can also move to images - you can do the same for designers with communities like Forrst & Dribbble. Then you can also do the same for social media 'experts', although this one is a bit more tricky. There are other things you would have to look at and measure here.
Hope this makes sense, and if you are able to execute on it like I would want, then I won't need to compete with you.
But, if you don't....beware and forewarned....I think a product like this could be extremely useful :)
2) They tell you, "Want an invite? Invite more friends!"
Even for a legitimate product, this approach makes it feel like a scam.