Genotrope Journey

A new release caused an unexpected problem. New users were unable to register. Needless to say, this was a major issue, especially after our first press coverage and the new users taking a look.

The problem has been corrected and we have sent messages to those that contacted us regarding the issue. We hope that those of you that tried unsuccessfully to register will give it another try.

Genotrope was fortunate to have our first press coverage in Mass High Tech. MHT does a great job of covering our local market and pointing the spotlight on early stage companies. Thanks to Efrain Viscarolasaga for the article. 

We would also like to thank David Chang co-founder of Mobicious for his positive comments.

We hope this is the first in a long line of press coverage. We have a lot of plans for future releases and events coming in the near future.

So we are back up now. It was a pain in the backside to be down for so long. Sorry for the inconvenience. We actually didn’t accomplish what we set out to do yet, but now that the site is back up, we will figure out the port forwarding and be able to serve up the app without site re-direction.

thanks,  ts

We scheduled some maintenance for late last nite. New firewall, but the provider did not get around to do it when we requested 2-3 am, so now we are out of commission for a few hours.

Sorry for the down time. We ask for your patience with us, but we will be back ASAP.

thanks, Tom Summit

Yesterday we decided to get some much needed feedback by putting Genotrope (web app) or Genotrope (landing page) in front of the toughest audience we could think of, the Y Combinator News community.

Within ten minutes we were receiving comments from all over the world. First of all, I highly recommend giving this a try. You won’t like everything you hear but that is the whole idea. If you can make it on YC News, you can make it anywhere. What happens when some reformed enterprise server developers build a web app and let the YC News community pick it apart? They can’t sit down the next day due to missing buttocks parts.

So the end result is that we had about 350 visits from YCN. 75% bounces, only about ten users spent much time looking into the actual application. Thanks to those users who spent from two up to 40+ minutes on the site. They came from all over the US as well as Peru, Australia, India and Eastern Europe.

What type of feedback did we receive? A few people thought Genotrope was a strange name, even by web standards. A few said they liked the site. A couple didn’t like the color scheme. A lot thought the landing page graphic was distracting or just plain bad. For the most part it was about the UI, usability and graphics. The best inputs were to improve our landing page by focusing our value proposition and clearly stating what benefits we provide to users.

Another take away was that this group does not casually register for every site they come across. Out of 350 or so visitors, we got 4 sign ups. The feedback here was, show me what you can do for me and then we will register if we like it. Some of our functionality requires registration (just an email), so that limited what the new visitors could experience.

We really needed the input regarding the site design, however, the feedback was somewhat disappointing in that it was all web designer input and there was none regarding the actual concept, business model or use of the application. Granted, the blame is mostly ours, due to a less than attractive design and muddy benefit message, maybe most could not see past that to get to the business proposition. We will make the improvements suggested by the YC visitors and then come back to get more feedback on the use of the web app.

Cant wait to do it again.