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Roast
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Let’s roast #WIP. Tell me everything that’s wrong with it and why it will fail.

I think it could be useful for us to roast each others product. Provide critical feedback. Then as a maker you can go through each point and figure out a fix or how to prevent those possible problems.

I’ll start with WIP.


It's annoying you can't add todos on /pending - as much as I love the telegram integration, that is kind of where I want to add them.

Also, it doesn't have a Favicon - it sometimes gets lost in my other tabs.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll add a way to add todos from pending.

As for the favicon, which browser are you using? There should be a favicon present.

I'll add a way to add todos from pending
Cool!

which browser are you using

Chrome, it disappears as I navigate between pages. I've seen this issue before and Turbolinks was the cause, you need to add data-turbolinks-track="reload" to the favicon meta link.

Thanks. Should be fixed now.

What I love most about WIP is the awesome community, the genuine feedback and the best advice I could ever get but I feel like as WIP will become more successful it will become ever harder to stay on top of everything WIP and to have the same connection and level of interactiveness with all those amazing makers.

I've become less active because a lot of times the discussion moves from actually making stuff to how bad zuck & Facebook is ( which most of the time is useless and doesn't help anyone)

^ What I was about to type. It's really hard to follow the discussion sometime.

I would love to add a point on this. Make another group to promote products, another group for all this talk. It would diverge the topics & it would create the main group WIP with the best content.

Yeah, I usually stay out of the chat... and wish the site had more stuff in it...

The ability to collect emails on product pages. Without it no point in promoting product page, as it doesn't help in capturing leads.

That's Product Hunt Ship. ;)

But yes. In Ship, you can get emails even when you don't have a product. But here it can be something like if someone likes your product they submit their email.

Would you want to send the emails from within WIP as well?

I wouldn't. Can handle that myself. I think we're more of a tech savvy bunch in here.

Just collect and maybe export + webhook option

While I know many here think differently around this, I'm not a huge fan of streaks being able to include things that aren't to do with making (which ties in with this wip.chat/questions/368). Streaks gamify making and (certainly in my case) motivate you to keep shipping, so it kinda irks me when I see things like "Woke up at 6:30am" just so that maker can keep up the streak. Some rules around this will clean up the feed to more meaningful entries and make the streak system more competitive.

I agree 100%, the biggest value of wip is being part of community of makers that ship, which helps us through the dips and motivates us to push through. There are plenty of free todo apps for personal tasks, lets keep this place focused on work and avoid devaluing its core purpose.

I agree. Maybe we can have some sort of private non-maker todo feature that people can use to manage todo lists that are personal. I personally like using a single app for everything, and since I am using WIP for work-related task management, I would love to use it for personal life's task management too. That being said, a private to-do list which might not count in streaks would be a great feature to have.

totally agree with this. im still a big fan of wip and use it to ask / answer questions + enjoy reading that chat but the streak element I feel a bit lost on. i just log my todos myself now. reason being: When i spend 5 hours on solving one today to get my streak going it just a bit demoralising seeing someone "keep their streak up" with such a nothing todo.

(But for some people they love the streak. So I'm not saying we take that away. just saying it doesn't work for me )

I'm a newbie here, it's day 1 for me, but here are a few of my first thoughts:

I would love to add todos in the web interface.
I try to take at least one day off per week, so I'm assuming my longest streak will be 6 days.
I didn't know that wip has a product page and would love to see more features around this part.

But that's my first reaction. Obviously the feedback of long time users is more valuable.

Love the product, few suggestions:

  • open images in modal
  • search for questions
  • add todos on the site
  • renaming product(hashtag) causes any already tagged todos to be deattached from the product
  • improve docs, missing: commands like /launch, how to attach an image, channel on telegram

It's a great idea to roast. This will provide good feedback to makers.

Suggestions:
- Need to comment on user's to-do list from a web interface. this will help to increase discussion among makers.
- Show technology stacks in project details. This can help when maker has some roadblock and they can reach out to makers who are using same tech stack for help. This will also help people to see new tools used by different projects and they can also try them or ask for feedback before using them.

Everything is great, but censorship is stricter than in USSR!!!!! #plsdontbanme @marckohlbrugge

Really? Why do you feel that way Adil?

I've been too spicy lately 😂

Damn...seems I lost a few interesting conversations #spicyadil

Yeah! You should spend more time with us :D
Maybe log your vlog ships 😏

Indeed...great idea. Initially I felt like I was cheating logging only vlog ships...but you're right..I'll do it!

Don't wanna loose any other spicy Adil stuff!

Telegram is a horribly confusing communication medium. Fight me.
- Difficult to find when, where, why and how someone @'s you
- Difficult to track multiple conversations, or jump back to an earlier conversation
- No groups? I think? I'm not sure.
- Took me ages to find out there's a Telegram MacOS desktop client and I should use that to login. Yes I know, I'm a dummy.
- It just seems very opaque.

Another communication platform could work better. Certainly, as WIP grows the problems above will only get bigger.

Totally with you on this one... Not a fan.

i hate telegram and the conversational UI, def not necessary

If you create todos from the website, would that solve it for you? I'm planning on adding this soon.

For many members the value of WIP is the chat, but if you prefer to use the website I can see how being forced to use Telegram just to create todo's is a bit annoying.

The telegram bot for WIP lacks a lot of obvious features like listing down tasks, deleting (and maybe editing) tasks, filtering tasks by #product etc. I use the telegram android app a lot for managing my tasks when on the go and the limited options in the bot pains me. I often have to use a mental reminder to make that todo change when I get back to my computer.

Product Hunt has a huge community of makers already in place, while WIP is building it from the ground up. This is a huge competitive advantage for them. WIP can innovate, PH could simply copy everything wip did well and most people wouldn't even know.

Yeah good point. They are working on something very similar.

I think one thing that would hold them back on just cloning WIP straight out is that it would reflect very poorly on them in the maker community to clone an independent, bootstrapped product.

I'll guess we'll see what happens :)

i think its all about "people giving more than they are taking" .

For example: Someone who only posts once every 3 months to promote their new product. Clearly that person is taking and not giving. Compared to someone who always helps people / provides feedback & keeps moral up. Clearly they are giving more than their taking. If everyone takes more than they give the community shrivels and slowly dies. If its the other way around the community grows and is a happy place!

Someone you have to incentivise people to give more than they take.

BTW (thanks for all the amazing help from the givers. Sometimes I take too much. I'm working on it. OK!)

That's a great point. Do you see this happening already?

I think 'curating' the community will become more important over time. Right now anyone can sign up if they are willing to pay. If this becomes a problem we can move towards an invite-only model.

Another approach would be to decrease the ability for people to just 'take'. For example by ranking questions, product launches, etc by how active the person is in the community. People who answer a lot of questions would have their own questions show higher up on the page, etc. Or maybe you cannot even ask a question until you've meaningfully answered a couple.

Interesting. Part of me thinks wip manages itself really well.
There's a line somewhere: "give and you shall receive tenfold"

And I think this applies. The community is pretty good at applauding the givers and sometimes even reprimands people if they are clearly using wip for excessive self promotion.

But. Yes I would like some sort of reward given to the most helpful people.

My idea is: "Community member of the week / month"

Just a little badge given each month to the person who helps the most which shows up alongside patron / fire streak on the homepage. It could be a vote from all the wip members. Only the winner is announced. No other places are announced (so it doesn't turn into a big competition) And yes people could win more than once.

As well as rewarding people for being good members of the community. It also reminds people of the importance to help others out!

That's a great idea!

Should members be able to vote for each other, or should we just calculate based on number of applauds?

Not every helpful act might get an applause, but voting on members might suffer from recency/availability bias. (i.e. you give more weight to the people that are familiar and/or who helped you the last 2 days or so, rather than the full month).

glad you like it — yeah, i think applause makes more sense for the reasons you've stated!

At some point there will be too many users (and thus too much noise) to follow conversations in just one group. Something link a Slack group with different channels would help.

Thanks, yes some people already quote this as a problem. We do have a few separate topic-specific groups, but people tend to stick around in the main one. Perhaps it would help if I make @wipbot available in other groups too + be more strict in the main chat? Direct people to the other groups when relevant.

No ability to search? I've just signed up, so it's possible I simply haven't found it yet (in which case, my feedback is that its location is not intuitive). I'm bummed as I saw an interesting comment somewhere as I was exploring. Now I can't go back to find it.

That's a good idea, we should definitely add it.

Do you remember the context of the comment? I might be able to find it

Thanks Marc! I ended up finding it.