Really useful feedback, cheers. Yeah, "Mixed results" is kinda rubbish as you say. It should give you something concrete before asking for anything. I'll fix that today. Fair point on the £79 upsell at the end of a £19 report too. That's tone deaf and I'll move it. On the £19... I'll think about it, but you're right the site needs to do more to justify the spend before pulling out a card. Appreciate the honest take!

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CJefferson 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Just a quick follow up, if my reply seemed very harsh, view that as a sign of how enthusiastic I was to see the website at first. I understand wanting to make money, but I'd seriously consider giving a lot more away (maybe even the basic report stuff) away for free, I'd love to explore my local area, my parent's, be nosey what life is like in Oxford (a place I previously lived), but even if I was willing to pay (I'm not), having to stop, get PDF, download, really breaks the flow.

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mebkorea 8 hours ago | parent [-]

No, that's absolutely a fair follow-up and not harsh at all. It's very helpful. The "be nosey about places you used to live" use case is exactly what the postcode tool should serve (thinking about it), and right now it doesn't. You're right that PDF-downloads break flow badly. Tbh... that's a hangover from the "people want a thing they can save" assumption that I'm still stuck in, I guess. I'm still on the fence about giving the paid reports away wholesale, but the gap between "tells you nothing" and "£19 PDF" is way too big. I'm gonna need a middle layer of free but actually useful exploration on the site. Will have a solid think about this today. Appreciate the feedback!

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gnfargbl 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm also enthusiastic, it's not often you see people find a genuinely underserved niche and you have.

I don't know if I would pay £19 for a general state-of-the-area report. I would almost certainly have paid £100-300 for a service that took my planning application, critically reviewed it and told me which aspects were and were not likely to pass, with references to specific examples within my local area.

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mebkorea 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Thanks, honestly that means a lot! Yeah, the pre-submission review idea is interesting and I've thought about it. I have the data to surface "applications similar to yours in your ward, here's what got approved and what didn't" but I haven't built it as a workflow because it requires the user to upload their plans... and that's a different kind of trust ask, but yeah, it is definitely worth revisiting. £100-500 is also a much more honest price for something that genuinely changes a decision. £19 is in the awkward "too much for curiosity, too little for stakes" zone you and the other commenter are both pointing at.

	▲	ramon156 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Just checking, are you using an LLM to reply? Your replies are riddled with things LLMs are good at, like making quoted analogies that make no sense. They're not even analogies

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pjc50 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What benefit would people gain from the reports? Average rate of success/time is interesting, but I'm not sure what you'd do with this information other than a bit of local press discourse. I suppose it's nicely timed for the council elections?

	▲	mebkorea 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Honest answer... I don't fully know, zero paying customers so it's still very much a hypothesis. The two use cases I think hold up: (1) people pre-buying a house with extension potential, who otherwise guess or pay £500+ for a planning consultant; (2) homeowners about to commission £2-5k of architect drawings who want a sanity check before proceeding. Someone else suggested £100-500 for a proper pre-submission review which is probably better for that second case than my £19 report. The "general state-of-area" framing is the weakest one and you're right it's mostly local press discourse — that's marketing not revenue.