Ask HN: Review my startup, http://UpOut.com

[martinshen]

My room mate and I started on this website in mid February whenever we weren’t working on client stuff and/or school. For the past two weeks, we’ve really put our best effort to release a second/better version. It’s called UpOut and it’s a city guide built by users. We make it super easy to post awesome stuff pulling maps and pictures for you.

As an avid HN reader, I’d love to get some feedback! Please take a look at http://www.UpOut.com or to learn more http://www.UpOut.com/about

I’ll also be on Convore for as long as I can.

EDIT: Please try out the logged in portion. Either create your own acct (super easy) or use username:teststeve pass:testing999 We specifically want to see if the form is easy enough to use and that the profile editor is also easy.

[paraschopra]

Great work! Though I have couple of suggestions from SEO perspective.

* Please, please, please change your URL from http://upout.com/a/YRlIYk to http://upout.com/new-york/candle-vegan-food (you can't imagine how important URLs are)

* Please include the city name in page title. So, your title "Candle Vegan Food | UpOut" becomes "Candle Vegan Food in New York"

* Add related activities tab and list activities there to build strong interlinking between various pages

* Give a small widget on the page so people can embed these activities on their blogs/websites so you get backlinks from there

Rest looks awesome! Good luck.

[martinshen]

Thanks so much for the advice, this is really helpful. We are planning on SEOing our website sometime soon. We originally did the random short YR1YK for short URLs but we're realizing now how useless that is. Users can currently change the URLs too themselves!

[bemmu]

http://UpOut.com

[zyfo]

Downvoted by mistake. Sorry.

[sage]

On the signup screen, I typed in my email address, then reflexively hit 'tab' before looking at the next field. That cleared the field and I didn't know what field I was in. I had to tab out and back in to figure out it was the password field.

Otherwise, it looks pretty cool, and I'm looking forward to having a Chicago version.

[martinshen]

Thanks. We'll be doing more cities as soon as NYC is done right.

[mtw]

I love this!

How do you get the listed places? had a similar idea once (for a different market though) but we couldn't find a way to get them. Or you've got a person phoning all local businesses?

As for feedback:

* your urls are not SEO friendly

* so when I find an experience, where do I go from there? I think you should have a hard look at monetization. One easy way is to just let people click a big orange button "I am interested!" and then you can sell that qualified lead to the business. Lots of $$$ to be made there and you also get satisfied users.

[martinshen]

That's funny because it's kind of the purpose of the orange like button below. We played around with a lot of different words for that... would "I'm interested" be a lot better.

As far as turning that into a qualified lead... we plan to do this soon especially when we enable sponsored listings.

[mindotus]

Definitely agree on the SEO friendly URLs, but I'm sure they'll implement that soon! :)

[imechura]

This is probably not what you are going after but consider solving the problem of... What can me, my wife and young kids do for fun this weekend.

That is something I would pay money for.

[martinshen]

Everything on this site is user generated and tagged. Users can create their own tags like we have one called #family. You can consequently follow those tags to get a custom list of things to do for families. Alternatively, click #family then filter to this weekend (not many items yet but send me an email at martin at up out.com and ill send you stuff to myself)

[djb_hackernews]

I've been building something to scratch that itch for bit. http://impromptudo.com. It's still an early project and not very polished, but I use it probably every weekend to find something to do. I plan on adding filters for family friendly, etc stuff, but nothing like that for now. I'd love some feedback.

I hope this wasn't poor taste, I feel like my project and OPs project are aiming to solve different needs.

[kongqiu]

My site isn't nearly as slick as UpOut, but we do offer curated family-friendly events as our second area of focus:

http://www.parkgrades.com/blog/fun-things-do-dfw-weekend

http://www.parkgrades.com/events/dallas-fort-worth

[volandovengo]

Great idea + execution. I'm always looking for a simple answer for what there is to do. I have been surprised that the net really hasn't answered the question in a simple manner :)>

[volandovengo]

Small nits: - clicking on nyc pops up a pop up that it isn't easy to get rid of - I would suggest defaulting all views to today, rather than forcing a person to based upon date on the left hand side

Large nit: I see in your about page: "Deal/coupon aggregation and maps. Integration with Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare and Gowalla.Local Questions/Answers. Mobile application." - I would suggest to do one thing and do it well. I think just answering the question what is going on in town is a tough one to answer but answering it will make you a useful service. Trying to do everything at this stage will probably mean you don't do any of them that well...

[MatthewB]

Speaking about the UI/UX only...great job. The site is very slick and easy enough to use. There's some cleaning up you have to do but mostly it works very well.

[martinshen]

Thanks. Any specifics as far as clean up?

[sawyer]

Lovely site, the UI is very easy on the eyes and I love the filter style.

My only complaint is with content really; it seems like a large percentage of the activities are already just business listings (mostly restaurants). How do you intend to weed out the hundreds of simple business listings that will crop up and make the site look like the Yellow Pages?

[martinshen]

The main idea is that things should get sorted by tags. So for example #random http://upout.com/at?v=g&st=t&s=Random has more things to do rather than just restaurants. You can consequently follow #random or users who post your type of events and you'll get a stream of those related ones.

[bdclimber14]

I tried to submit my city, but it didn't do anything. I checked for JS errors, but surprisingly there were none.

[autalpha]

@martinshen Great job on the site. Congrats. It looks very slick. Here's a few things that could probably help make it even more awesome:

1. Rich text editing capability for description--at least with <p> tag so it can be more readable than just a big block of text. 2. http://upout.com/auth/s_profile and http://upout.com/auth/s_customize don't seem to add the "active" class correctly 3. http://blog.upout.com/ make the logo go back to upout.com rather than the blog root

What are the technologies behind this? Again, good luck!

[guynamedloren]

Wow, this looks great! I love the concept, as well as the design/UI/layout. I didn't login, but I can tell that you put lots of thought into every inch of the user interface. The entire site is pleasant to use and easy to navigate. Best of luck with this!

[martinshen]

Thanks! If you logged in, you'd see our killer form that doesn't even make you upload an image (we pull them from Flickr)

[zackola]

Hey looks very nice! Do you have/will you provide RSS or an API to get at this data? I would love to include it in a small side project (mobile app for kid-friendly activities and restaurants in NYC), of course with proper crediting/linking, etc.

[bdclimber14]

This is more of a question, but how do you know which state a city that a user submits is for? I guess you don't really care about the limited city submissions for small cities as much as the metro areas, e.g. Phoenix vs. Tempe.

[martinshen]

We just added the city picker last night and honestly could have put more effort into it (like making it work). We're fixing it now and will probably make it more functional.

[ianl]

Interesting idea, do you have a mobile application? This seems perfect for the mobile market.

I can imagine sitting in a pub after a meal with friends wondering whats next and perhaps using an application similar to this one.

[martinshen]

A mobile application is under development (aka starting tomorrow). The best we have right now is a map view.

[dmelville1]

Ditto. A simple mobile interface (ala Groupon's mobile app) would make this very useful.

[wcchandler]

I've been working on a similar project in my spare time. I have a different mentality to it, but similar concept. I wish you the best of luck, while secretly hoping for your demise. Muahahaha! But seriously, good job!

[martinshen]

Thanks! There are a lot (like a lot) of people in this space.. It still hasn't been conquered yet!

[layzphil]

Nice domain.

I don't instantly get that it is user-powered, although that is clear on the /about page.

Perhaps consider using social sign-in rather than standard account creation.

[martinshen]

That's exactly what's next. We figured that most users would just want to browse than post but we provide a small call to action for every user at the bottom of the page to sign up (or learn more). Please try posting something... we tried to make it easy to post incorporating the Flickr and Gmaps APIs

[JonLim]

Cool! You guys don't have Toronto yet, but your signup form for other cities doesn't seem to be working.

Let me know when it works, or when you have Toronto! :)

[martinshen]

Thanks. As a Toronto born kid.. it was my #1 choice but we settled on NYC

[playhard]

This is awesome!! Killer idea!! Going to be big! concentrate on what you good at! Enabling people to discover (things to do). Less on social aspects!..

[martinshen]

We want to be more city guide than ANOTHER FACEBOOK. That being said.. I want people to be able to send each other their top things to do in a city. As in if you were coming to NYC, go to UpOut.com/ini (ini is my username) to get my stuff to do.

[cabalamat]

As well as listing events, I suggest you allow people to collaboratively write articles about things to do with the city in question, Wikipedia-style.

[martinshen]

This is a good idea but has issues as people have huge variance in opinions about different places.. We're trying to find an elegant solution to duplicates.

[plainspace]

Awesome. Love the name/domain. Beautiful UI that will clearly keep getting more so. Couple of thoughts re design: 'Love sharing great things to do?' box should line up on the right side with the right side of the boxes above (using Safari.) I'd also try making the width of the sign up bar at the bottom the same as the footer bar (Home | What is This?, etc.) Keep up the sharp work.