Hey Paul, I already shared some feedback with you before so I won't repeat that here.

The two main "issues" I see with the website are 1) that the interface is still quite complex, and 2) the map feels a bit rigid.

Right now you've got a form on the left to represent adding a new forest, a list on the right to highlight the biggest forests, and then a map in the middle to show all the forests. Ideally this would all be part of one virtual environment. Almost like a Zelda game.

For example instead of showing a separate leaderboard you could show gold, silver, and bronze trophies in the 3 largest forests. Or maybe there's a celebration happening there with some animals. Something visually appealing.

For adding a new forest it would be nice if I could pick my own spot on the map directly. So I could collaborate with friends to build our forests together. Even better if I can pick my own tree types and the exact spot to place them. So I can get creative and spell out my name, etc.

I know some of those ideas are out there, but I guess my overall suggestion is to make it more of one virtual environment rather than a regular web app with a map in it.

I also realize that's A LOT of work, so for now I'd just go with what you already have. It's already quite interesting. So the above is perhaps something you could try for a future version.

Some more actionable feedback/typos/etc:

• Top of the page should probably be "it will be planted in real life."
• "Name or Company Name", I would just say "Name" people are smart enough to figure it out
• "Congratulation!" --> "Congratulations!"
• "Share your forest with the world"

Context: Yesterday I manually added an OG image to my blog post. I designed it in Photoshop and uploaded the file as one of the website's assets.

Looking at Mugshot I can see how this would save me a lot of time if I were to publish more blog posts.

Personally I'd want at least the following features to start using it:

• Remove Mugshot branding
• Custom design, or at least a simpler template ( I prefer big bold text )
• Ability to add a supporting background image (example)

In terms of pricing I don't think I'd pay more than perhaps $29/year and I'd need some trust in that the service will be around for a while. The reason I'm willing to pay so little is because manually creating these images is pretty trivial + it wouldn't be too hard to automate it myself as I already do this for my other sites.

Just my $0.02. I'm probably not your typical user as I publish maybe one post a year haha. I bet you can find more qualified customers that are willing to pay a significantly higher fee and are content with the current feature set. So I'd focus on finding those. (versus falling into the trap of adding more features).

I was expecting it to work like Trello where I can drag and organize the cards across different columns. So an RSS feed becomes an automated way of adding cards, but then I can manage them in a way that makes sense for me.

I still think that's an interesting idea. Not so much for consuming news, etc, but almost like a Trello-with-automated-imports-of-various-types-of-data.

Imagine automatically importing sales leads, pending GitHub PRs, etc.

If the news reader approach doesn't work out, perhaps the above is worth experimenting with.

Yes, working in public does increase the chance someone will take your idea or get inspired by it. But generally I'd say that the originality of your idea is, or at least, should not be what makes or breaks your product.

I don't share everything I do publicly, but I do share a lot. I find that there's a lot of benefits (getting product feedback early on, expanding by network amongst makers, getting more useful advice, etc) outweigh potential disadvantages.

👍 Sounds like you're on the right track. Digging through customer feedback about SendGrid, etc might reveal an unserved niche.

Personally I'm not a fan of people sharing Bitly links, etc rather than just link to the end result directly. I don't like the idea of being tracked, cookied, etc. Regular links do the job just fine.

Makes me wonder whether there's a market for a privacy-friendly link shortener. That intentionally does not track people, set cookies, etc. I know that would limit the functionality, but the signal "I respect your privacy" might make up for it. You could even add privacy-specific functionality such as hiding the referrer, etc.

I know @jelmerdeboer recently(?) set up his own instance of the open-source YOURLS. I'd be curious to hear what he thinks of BTFY and whether the convenience of it being hosted (and perhaps extra features?) outweigh the price tag.

I think it's a laudable goal, but to be honest it would be hard to convince me to switch to a new service.

I think most established services are already quite developer-friendly with a lot of available plugins and different ways to integrate their service. For example, I use SendGrid's SMTP because it's easy to configure Ruby on Rails that way. There's also built-in support for ActionMailbox which lets me process incoming email.

For me an HTTP API would actually make things more difficult as I'd need to somehow configure Rails to use that instead. It would also make it harder for me to switch from or to another service.

SendGrid also has a great deal for startups ( wip.chat/deals ) where you basically get 12 months premium for free.

I think you're getting into a very crowded and competitive market. I wonder if there's a specific niche that's currently underserved you target instead of developers as a whole.

My main piece of feedback is that it isn’t clear to me why I should use this over one of the many established services.

Especially considering it’s mission critical and privacy sensitive.

First impressions:

• There's a lot happening on the page. Not sure where to look. Might be okay once I become a returning visitor and get used to it, but initially it is a bit disorienting.
• The two visible "above-the-fold" topics are "Belarus Protests" and "TikTok", neither which I'm interested in. I'm not sure you need to fill the whole screen with news about just two topics. Perhaps it might be more useful to show a diversity of topics and let me dive deeper into the ones I like.
• The headlines are a bit hard to parse. I'm not sure why. Maybe because there's so much, there isn't a clear visual hierarchy (most font-sizes are the same for example), and there isn't anything yet that tells me what headlines are the most important. Once you've got some upvotes and can rank by that, that might help solve it. But you haven't gotten that yet, so you might need a temporary solution.

Overall impression:

I like the fact you're experimenting with a new approach here. And while I'm not in love with the layout yet, I do like that you're experimenting here as well. It's something new which is refreshing.

Personally though, I don't feel like I need another news source. Especially for news that';s covered everywhere else already. I don't find these topics very compelling.

I'd be more interested in a news site that is specifically about the things I care about, and aren't covered elsewhere. Random example, but I'd be curious to see Hacker News posts that aren't popular enough to get on the front page, but still curated by the community (e.g. more than 10 votes).