This "business model" is getting old, make a social network, make it super popular, then do data mining, profit!
I understand this is the first iteration and they'll likely change the product, but, it almost looks like a scam to get people data and predict stuff like stock market; A lot of people are doing it on Twitter already, if the founders didn't think about that they're hugely innocent.
joshua, the product gives a presentation of a listing category like craiglist + job listing. A good business model and viable but not scalable towards, anything you are trying to detail.
I think you meant "registered" instead of "registering". I clicked it after I already had registered, and it showed me notification about being part of hacker news group.
> You are now a member of Hacker News Reader. Other Hacker News Reader members will see a special badge near your profile picture so they'll know that you're as special as they are.
Yep. I am special and unique, just like everyone else:)
> Embedding an iframe with the url in a html page will cause all visitors to the page to get the affiliation.
Won't a simple <img src=...> work? Why go the iframe route?
I don't think this is going to be the final affiliation implementation they are going to use. It's more like adding special touches for a community where he is showcasing, and they will turn it off in a day or two.
Looks fun. A simple tweet or Share on facebook button would be nice to say to all your friends or someone specific "Hey, Joshua needs X, can someone help him please?". You don't even need to get people to give you their Twitter or FB auth for this.
Let people participate without signing up. At least for myself I've noticed, once I have even a little bit of time invested in a new app, I'm more likely to sign up. Codecademy did that really well.
Minor UI things: there's no edit button for the main post itself, but it's there for the comments. I see I can edit the post if I click on the title and then click Edit Details. I'd make this much simpler and faster - just let me edit in place.
Make the search box bigger.
Let users help you with cleaning spam. A spam/rude/unhelpful button?
I'm working on a shopping search app and have been wondering how to use social. It's interesting to see a social-first approach.
I got to see the actual page once and now it's forcing me to the sign-up splash screen, is that supposed to happen? From what I saw though it's a cool idea but the posts on the front page seemed confusingly arbitrary, are they just the most recent ones?
Another user compared the site to Stackexchange, maybe you could categorize requests in the same way that they categorize questions for the sake of uniformity and ease on the people actually willing to to through and answer these.
Looks like Quora on the surface, but much more capable of supporting targeted advertising than StackOverflow.
Less meatspace and craigslist-y than Zaarly.
Retains that same narrow utility focus that inspired Delicious.
Agree with the sentiment that it could be a place to go if Google searching lets you down, but suffers from that same social scalability problem of Quora (the relatively narrow field of expertise of the quality user base limits broad appeal; but to go broad you have to water down the content and answers with micropayment-financed content farmers a la eHow.com which could reduce the quality.)
I suspect that the exit will be fast like Delicious (which was two years from start to Yahoo acquisition), so the speculative question is whose deep pockets (or deeply-funded pockets) will this fit into? I don't view serial entrepreneurship as a negative thing; repeating a $15-$30 million exit twice would be an impressive accomplishment. I also wonder if history repeats itself and whether joshu would take the same route if an embattled-but-on-the-precipice-of-decline company (like Yahoo! was in 2005) offered that kind of exit in 2013-14. (And all the better if Tasty Labs is simply an incubator for multiples of these $20 million spinoff exits.)
It's great to see Jig finally launching to the public. I had a first look in June, when I used it together with 200 others foo campers to coordinate the trip to Sebastopol. Then I used it again when I moved from Chicago to San Fran to find a new accommodation.
I don't see Jig as a Q&A site because needs, unlike questions, tend to be personal in nature and change (or even die out) over time. The same need could be posted by multiple people in different locations, or by the same person over time, and all could get different answers.
With that said, Jig will have to fight the only known certainty of any online community: as your user base grows, your quality declines. I can already notice the difference in both the needs and the answers posted now from those of just few weeks ago. Let's hope the Jig team has a strategy in mind to keep the trolls at the gates.
Yep! We have a lot of ideas, and a bunch of them came from reacting to the traffic.
It looks a lot higher quality if you load your personal networks from twitter/facebook/etc but the traffic goes by much slower, so we need to work that.
Interesting. I'd rather not be required to log in though. I went to suggest some a bed-ridden software engineer learn Clojure and gave up upon account creation. The account creation was fine, I just don't need yet another account. Perhaps you're not after the casual commenter though...
I need a notification option where I can opt out for receiving mails for needs I raised, and not for needs I responded to.
Since it's a package deal, I turned it off completely. Had there been an option not to receive mail for needs I answered to, but only for needs I raised, I would have kept it.
Reloaded a dozen times, tried changing the https to http, followed your "hn" link above, cleared cookies, everything I could think of. (including just typing jig.com into a browser window).
Create new ideas (be a pioneer, and get arrows on your back as a result).
Or
Improve on existing ideas that already have a defined market.
Just like pinboard improved on delicious, this could end up improving on the Q&A formula.
Their current approach is innovative in terms of presentation. It looks clean, simple, maybe even Apple-like in terms of grid-like alignment.
They need to differentiate the comment/solution issue. It is a good feature. The question allows for more data to be provided by the OP, but it is rather bland looking and gets lost in the gray background. Make the question textbox a light yellow to better contrast it.
I see this growing as a mix of different Q&A models. Time will tell.
I want to get away from Q&A. It's not just arbitrary questions, it's your friends with real needs, and your neighbors with real knowledge, or whatever.
But: think of this as "create new ideas" but clothed in current UX. There's a lot more to this idea, but we needed to ship something so that we could start iterating with interaction from the public.
You weren't kidding (lots of snark on display). I've always thought that establishing a tone for discourse was one of the tougher things a new service had to pull off.
On a different front: I've no clue what this even is. I see fake posts from Mark Zuckerberg and weird Youtube quality comments. Is 'jig' a word that should ring a bell here (and doesn't)? What's the purpose?
How do i describe this to my friends on Facebook? I couldnt think of an apt description, "A combination of StackOverflow, Craigslist, Quora", will that be apt? Couldnt see an about page either
joshu...congrats on finally launching! Seems like forever since I saw the first Tasty Labs teaser page.
A few thoughts, can you guys make it a bit MORE clear exactly what jig is on first-load. I know the pop-up is there that asks for my zip-code and briefly tells me what the site does, but it doesn't articulate clearly which problem is being solved here.
Especially since the front-page looks like a 'typical' Q&A site (a la Stack Overflow & Quora). I think you might be on to something really powerful here...but it isn't articulated properly in the top 400px.
Maybe one suggestion might be, pushing the section that starts off with 'Recent Needs' and 'Unmet Needs' down and having a section right above it with 'Met Needs' - so it shows the solutions that have been provided to people's needs.
I think your approach to 'intent harvesting' is brilliant....and could be VERY lucrative. Google makes a bajillion dollars monetizing activity around figuring out people's intent when they are searching.
But you guys are cutting through all that clutter and getting straight to the point. From there, you can then make recommendations based on either recent activity/suggestions from friends or products that work.
What I am seeing here is, a solution to the 'product search' problem. Where, no longer do I have to figure out the 'right search term' to use to get the product I am looking for.
If that's kinda the direction you guys are going, well...it sounds VERY exciting.
If not, I am sure you have some brilliant plan working towards and look forward to seeing how this evolves.
Long story. Basically I wrote code to generate plausibly euphonic words and check to see if they are registered.
One particular high scorer was already registered but unused so I tried to buy it. The domain owner had others, offered jig, which was WAY better than what I was trying to buy. So I did it.
If you're at all optimizing based on what will be valuable when you sell your company for scrap, you've already lost.
(Talent acquisitions may defy this to an extent, but that just goes to show how valuable great people are, and in particular the value of many great people who work well together)
> If you're at all optimizing based on what will be
> valuable when you sell your company for scrap
1. The name has tangible benefit to the company prior 'selling it for scrap.'
2. It's still a cost/benefit analysis, but the fact that you may be able to recoup the costs factors in to mitigate some of the risk of sinking too much money into the name.
3. Who says that you can't resell the name, and rebrand if it's a failure?
4. The name has resell value for a reason.
5. If I buy a car based on resell value, have I also 'already lost?'
It seems really unlikely that they'd sell it while they still were doing well, even after a major pivot. It's part of the company's identity, they'd want any users of the old site to be funneled to new ones, investors may think they're desperate, etc
As for 5, this is different than the normal car buying case. You're driving a treacherous trip to buried treasure with limited resources. If you make it, you won't care what the resale value of the car is, and if you optimize for anything other than making it, you won't.
I don't necessarily object to buying a good name. Depends how good for how much. But if you think about it in terms of what you can sell it for, you're heaping value onto the name that you're never going to realize to justify spending it on something easy like a short, shiny name instead of something hard like hiring
Minimizing risk is always valuable. People's initial reactions when they hear that that you want to spend $30,000 on a domain name are generally surprise and horror, but that's not the whole story.
A good name is always helpful, and unless you are having cash-flow problems, sinking money into the name is a perfectly decent investment that is unlikely to lose a lot of value.
As you say, if you have funding and make a large pivot, keeping the old name isn't a bad idea. It's a win-win, and because of that it's not as risky as people's gut reactions tell them.
Your email preferences seem to be broken. I opted out of all emails, and yet I got an email when someone commented on a need I posted.
Please, please don't do this. I really hate it when apps do this. I want to like you, so I didn't nuke my account this time. Have a rule in your system which just never sends email to people who don't want to hear from you. </minirant>
An "I need this too" button. I saw the "a belt with no metal" post and thought yes, I need it too! But, the only way to express it was to leave a comment. So I didn't do it. Brevity through simple voting mechanisms on social sites is really powerful.
The search box needs a clickable button to submit the search.
Nice product. Kinds of needs that I think could be filled meaningfully:
Users who could not find something on google.
Users who are learning something - they are new to a domain and don't know how to construct a query due to lack of vocabulary in the domain that they are searching.
Users who are looking for other users - likealittle for users who want to collaborate online.
Right now, the posts are all over the place. I'd love to see it more focused on a specific topic.
Props to the incremental on-boarding process for new users. I see the notifications at the top of my stream on what I need to do to complete my profile.
You can get similar results using other services (twitter & facebook for answers/recommendations from friends, and quora, etc for answers/recommendations from strangers)
You can clearly see the Hacker News influence in the orange background color of various elements. The jig logo itself is basically identical in style to the HN logo :-)
So, sort of like Stack Exchange, except without differentiating between subdomains and there's no requirement for an active professional community around each topic.
Will it survive first contact with enemy? Right now jig is very much like Quora. But yeah, every successful product is a mass creating gravitation in the product design space.
It is inaccurate and only shows the tip of the iceberg. I have the Chromium extension FWIW, but I don't trust it at all. It shows me one of my GAE site as a ASP.net site.
I think I can see where this could go. Right now people think 'any info I need, I can type it into the Google box'. Sometimes that info is about completing tasks (such as purchases or hobbies), but not always, and the most salient pointers about tasks often have to be read and synthesized from many different destination pages. So, Google may not own the idea (in the public's mind) of 'type to get help completing anything you need' as much as they Google owns 'search'.
Jig is more focused; the smallest bits of advice, pointers, or even inline task-completion steps that are responsive to a 'need' (rather than a 'query'). "I want…" is also more primal than "I'm looking for…"
If people have a good experience typing their needs into "the Jig box", it might become their go-to site for a certain kind of task-query. Good algorithms for matching 'needs' to the best-available (or just-in-time next-created) need-meeters could give people a good habit-forming experience.
People prefer their needs be met by friends, familiar providers, and nearby resources... but are happy to expand their consideration radius if need be. Jig's algorithms can do the same.
And there's lots of room in that matching model for paid-placements – where something that would otherwise be just on the periphery of someone's normal consideration-radius gets nudged in (with fair disclosure) by promotional payments. AdWords makes Google results better, because willingness-to-pay is a useful metric, valued by searchers, on many kinds of queries. Paid Jig-responses (jiggles? jigjags?) could similarly build out the value for users while also sending revenue to Jig.
(All that said, two quibbles: 'Jig' may create difficulties when people try to demonym-ize it, to describe users or employees. May want to be clear about your preferred demonym beforehand. And, that highly saturated orange is OK for the logo but kinda eye-poking when used for buttons and labels.)
I understand this is the first iteration and they'll likely change the product, but, it almost looks like a scam to get people data and predict stuff like stock market; A lot of people are doing it on Twitter already, if the founders didn't think about that they're hugely innocent.