Agreed. It would be nice to see Toronto build more of it's identity around this inclusiveness and openness. Surely the fact that Toronto is now the most diverse city in the world is worth trumpeting a little bit.
Nice to see BB here! We used BB to build our iOS app; over 3 months, it made the process of iterating, deploying and collecting feedback on our prototypes incredibly easy. Great product and a very proactive team. One feature that BB has that is particularly useful is the ability to deploy test builds to various groups. We deploy a build internally to our team group at least once daily, and then another more polished version to our most avid beta-testers at least once a week.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. And happy to hear that you liked our welcome Godzilla -- definite shout-out to Wufoo's dinosaur there :)
I totally agree that our sign-up flow has far too much friction, and you're spot on that all we need from new users is their full name.
While I like your suggestion of prompting for the user's name after they submit their reply, since Volley is a place to get help from real people, we believe it's super important to avoid all anonymous content, as well as all feelings of creating content anonymously. People just behave differently if they don't know that they have to "Own Their Own Words" (https://github.com/VolleyIndustries/readme/blob/master/etiqu...).
Here's our proposed improvement: upon signing up to Volley with your email, we'll also prompt that you enter your full name, but instead of bringing you out of Volley to your email, we'll automatically create an unverified account for you so you can reply right away. I think this gives us the best of both worlds: the benefits of our passwordless sign-up process without the friction of having to bring you to your profile before creating content.
Would love your thoughts on the improvement; we'll be shipping it this week!
Regarding your point that native mobile software is easy to install: this seems true in the absolute sense, but is it true in the relative sense? There is arguably less friction in running a web app on your phone then there is going to the appstore, inputting your apple id yet another time, and waiting for yet another app to take up valuable screen real estate.
In my opinion, the limiting reagent preventing the mobile web from overtaking native app development is clearly not ease of installation - it's performance, which davidhariri argues is changing rapidly.
+ sign is to choose a profile picture, which also changes the background of the landing page. The circles within the text fields are color confirmation states, turning green when the string you've entered is a complete name, email, etc.
Thanks for bringing to light the shortcomings of color confirmation; we should have text confirmation states instead.
Sorry about the confusion! I'd love to walk you through things if you're up for it. Just shoot me an email at mike [at] volleyit.co
Your comment really underscores the need for us to be far more descriptive in our landing page about what Volley does. Our assumption that our limited copy is alluring has been clearly invalidated.
Volley gets you introductions to people you’re looking for. We do this by making it easy for you to send a request out to your network and for this request to propagate across your network’s network.
Currently this network is made up of your gmail contacts, but we'll be enabling you to add contacts from other networks in the future. Volley is a desktop web platform currently. After over 700 successful introductions facilitated in just over 3 weeks, we're shifting our focus to build Volley on mobile.
Thanks for the feedback. It's clear that we need to communicate more about what Volley does prior to asking you to sign-up. To date, this hasn't been an issue and our thinking was that people were intrigued by the limited copy on the landing page, signing up to learn more. In retrospect, it's likely that those who have signed up to date have had a little more context about what Volley is since many signups are coming through referrals.
Volley gets you introductions to people you're looking for. We do this by helping you connect with people over actionable requests (Eg. “Looking to grab coffee with a developer for advice around building a NodeJS API”). These requests are sent to and acted on by a community built of your existing contacts and their contacts. By completing requests, the user gains karma (similar model to stack overflow) that could be spent on things like featured requests (think: featured listing on ebay) or held for community status.
Thanks - our major priority is to build Volley for mobile. We designed the experience with mobile in mind from the beginning but sought to validate on the web. I'd welcome your suggestions for improvements
Looking for an entrepreneurial hustler to help with customer success and sales. Small team, early days, newly funded. Email [email protected].