In the wee hours a few nights ago I wrote out a long-ish reply to someone on a listhost who asked for feedback about an early version of his webapp, on which he’d spent 9 months working with freelance developers.

I come off as a bit of an asshole, but a bunch of people replied with comments like “kickass response!”, so I thought I’d post it here.

RE: XXX

Thanks for sharing!

A few notes from a technical perspective:

—why open-id? What % of your customers will have openid and want to use it?

—why an about page? why is that necessary / worth money pre-beta?

—why have a blog?

—why have a help page?

—the link targets for the tabs when logged in don’t take up the entire tab, which makes it hard to click.

—why have messages?

—why have time and date settings?

—why have privacy settings?

—the language isn’t consistent. when I go to the “runs” tab, why does it say “add a workout” rather than “add a run”?

—why are there lightboxes? lightboxes tend to add/hamper development time without adding much value early on.

—why do lots of the buttons have images? why is that necessary?

—why are there rounded corners?

—why are there tweets?

—it seems like rather than “leveraging” online social apps, a lot of the features replicate other social sites. e.g. using fb connect and linking to send messages via facebook or e-mail and pulling in tweets via twitter’s api vs building all those features yourself.

As you can see, my general feeling is the app appears a bit feature-laden even in pre-beta. From a tech perspective, there are a lot of things like rounded corners, lightboxes, ajax, etc that are costing you tons of freelancer time / money but can’t really be justified in terms of any value add before you have a chance to see if customers will pay for the core product.

In terms of the biz model,

[cutting this out, since it's not that general]

My advice would be to cut out all but 2 or 3 features and then launch as is and try to get clubs to pay outright rather than just signup for a free beta.

My points might sound harsh, but I learned a lot of these things the hard way myself!

Best,