Sérgio Santos

Founder and developer at Bloco.
Technician at Rádio Baixa. Host of Posto.
Member of Coimbr'a Pedal.

Using PickFu to get feedback for your startup

After reading this article on Hacker News I got curious about PickFu. It’s a service that allows you to ask a single A/B question to hundreds of persons, through Amazon Mechanical Turk.

It has several shortcomings though:

  • The sample is skewed both geographically (USA/India) and in genre (more females)
  • The sample is probably not related to your desired audience
  • Your paying them, so expect more sympathetic answers
  • Many answer as quickly as they can, without valuable feedback

Having that in mind, we decided to try it anyway. Since we launched an introduction page for Bundlr recently, we asked 50 persons whether they understood the information on the home page.

Overall, the results were 76% positive (sympathetic as I said :P). But the comments were the valuable result. Some examples of negative comments mentioning specific aspects we have to improve:

  • Don’t know what a bundle is or where I would share a bundle.
  • I have no idea what content curation is. Sounds like you are bundling something together.
  • This is some complex stuff. I better description with illustrations is required for me.

And even the positive comments were insightful:

  • It was very clear, I just question how it’s different from Stumble Upon etc
  • I understood the concept and it was fine for “coming soon,” but some ideas on what the bundles could be used for or why the service exists would be nice.
  • Sounds nice to have it all saved in one bundle instead of continuously doing one at a time.
  • At least, I think I understand it. But what does a bundle look like? How is it ordered?

I won’t recommende acting soleny upon this kind of feedback, but it’s certainly interesting and gaves us a few toughts on how to better present our concept in the future. For only $5. We’ll probably use it again in following iterations.

Tags: startups, bundlr

Future of Web Apps 2010, London

Excited about going to FOWA London. New business cards ready, some great early contacts made and awesome talks to attend to.

If you’re also going, let’s meet up!

Tags: events

Great cover from Wired October, 2010. This is a magazine I can buy both for industry news and customer research, besides entertainment of course. Looking forward to this issue.

Tags: magazines

Bundlr: introduction

The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators from Robert Scoble was the trigger. I started researching on content curation, specially aggregation. Then I felt curious about the lack of tools available. Nothing I would use at least. After some brainstorm with my colleague Filipe Batista, we came up with a concept: Bundlr.

  • Never wished, at the end of an event, someone could compile easily the best videos, photos, reviews and presentations in one place? 
  • When a plane crashes, or other big news, all the important content was in a single page you could share with everyone? 
  • You could publish a post curating some subject, and update it instantly every time you find interesting content?

We want to make those wishes come true. We believe content curation will become commonplace, and we want Bundlr to be the best tool.

We’re still working on the concept, mocking up things. We plan on launching a MVP by early 2011, maybe sooner. You can follow updates here or @bundlr. If you want to be the first to try it, drop your email at gobundlr.com.

Tags: bundlr, curation

The solution is synthesis: to never compromise two essential principles. One, that we always have a vision that is clearly articulated, big enough to matter, and shared by the whole team. Second, that our goal is always to discover which aspects of this vision are grounded in reality, and to adapt those aspects that are not.

The visionary’s lament in Lessons Learned

Tags: biz dev, startups