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sry4partying posted:Startup Get something in that <title> tag stat!
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Jul 3, 2012 15:27
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I just launched my first product - Accthub! Everyone is building mobile apps these days and most of them need some type of platform to power the backend of their app. Accthub provides a simple API for mobile developers to build their applications on top of. As users register for your app, you would create an account for them on Accthub. You then add data to their account as they use your app more and more. The major use case for this is developers who want to create an app and not have to worry about building, securing, and managing a backend platform at the same time. Accthub is priced on the number of accounts you have in the system, not on the number of API calls you make. Your first 100 accounts are free, and every account after that is 1 penny. If you're a developer or just have a moment to check it out, I'd love to get your feedback. Thank you!
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Jul 22, 2012 03:33
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unixbeard posted:That looks really cool, you should post it in the "Stuff you're working on" thread in CoC you might get additional feedback there. Thanks, I'll cross post it in there. I wanted to go with more of an Amazon AWS'ish pricing model where you only pay for the resources you use (though they do charge per API request, it's very cheap). Unfortunately, the thing we can beat our competitors (Parse and Stackmob) over is price. That's not to say I think we have a bad product or I'm going to jack the price up when our product matures, they just have millions in venture capital and have more mature products. That's a good point about a small registration fee. I also want to go after enterprise customers who may not feel comfortable letting us do all of the hosting and would like to purchase a license of the software to run on their own servers. Thanks for your feedback.
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Jul 22, 2012 11:14
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Malevolence Jones posted:Torn between responding here vs. CoC, but since I'm focusing more on the business than technical aspects, this thread seems more appropriate. Right now, the biggest reason for using Accthub over any of our competitors is because you'll get a lot of hand holding and focused attention. You may get that at the other guys, but we'll work with you to get up and going quickly. Although I was previously against it, maybe trying to get some venture capital to make us legitimate competitors isn't a bad idea (it seems like all of the companies in this space have raised around $7m). And you're right, I need to take off my developer cap and put on my marketing and salesman cap and get out there and sell Accthub. There's also the thought of going after the enterprise developers. Maybe they aren't comfortable using a hosted service, but would be interested in licensing a copy of the software to run on their own machines (Github Enterprise, for example). Thanks for asking the hard questions, I need to ask them more often myself.
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Jul 24, 2012 14:04
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Maluco Marinero posted:If anyone has some thoughts about what they see or think about what I'm doing go for it, working on your own tends to make it hard to be objective. Please be gentle. Actually, I dig the design of your site. It's a refreshing change from every single other SaaS site out there. I especially dig the pricing page, a nice change from the vertical tables seen everywhere else. Is there something stopping you from launching right this second? Right now it just looks like I can sign up to be notified when you launch. Are you charging any of the people registered so far?
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Aug 14, 2012 09:31
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So a little over a month ago my partner and I launched a product named Accthub. It's been doing just about nothing since it's not competitive to other mobile platforms and we have not spent enough time marketing it. That means, you know, time to pivot! Accthub didn't originally start off as a mobile platform as a service (PaaS). Originally, it started off as an account management and authentication system that you would install on your own machines and any piece of software you controlled that worked with accounts could centralize them in Accthub. How would this help me, you ask? Well, imagine you're at a software company that manages 10-20 ecommerce websites that are all on a similar platform (whether it be bespoke or an off the shelf solution, doesn't matter). Each of these ecommerce platforms have customers who create accounts and addresses and sign into the site. Now, when you've discovered a bug in the account management piece of your software, you have to go to each installation, fix it, and deploy it. It's time consuming and not fun. This exact scenario happened at the company I'm currently at which is what gave rise to Accthub. I wrote Accthub to fix that problem. You install it on a server and then all of your software speaks to it through a REST API (and a nice client library in your language of choice). I spent the last few weeks adding a nice admin panel to it so you can manage all of your sites account data. Here's a walkthrough of the admin panel on my blog - http://leftnode.com/entry/accthub-enterprise-walkthrough.html What are your thoughts? Is this something you would find useful? If so, would you be interested in a copy to play around with? Right now it does require some Linux admin chops to get it installed, but it is straightforward.
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Sep 5, 2012 15:38
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So I abandoned previous startup attempt in favor of something people actually want. In addition to my day job I do custom applications for small businesses. One of them was to build a basic ecommerce app that integrates with QuickBooks. Well, QuickBooks is a giant pain in the rear end to integrate with. Figuring other developers had this same issue, I set up a small landing page describing my solution and got some coverage on Hacker News and Programmable Web. My idea was to provide a very easy REST API on top of QuickBooks. A lot of people liked this idea, and signed up so we built it. It's called MajorApi and is officially launched. If you're a QuickBooks developer, I'd love your feedback.
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Jan 17, 2013 22:45
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DreadCthulhu posted:I'm trying to figure out how to make a nice, short and sweet front-page product video along the lines of what Dropbox used a few years ago. Their video was pretty DIY, but still good enough not to give off the ultra-amateur vibe. I have no experience in that area and would be ok with spending a little bit on contracting this out. You might want to check out http://fiverr.com/. My father has had great luck with people on there doing incredible videos and voice over work for a few bucks.
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Sep 25, 2013 03:26
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CraigMcDermott posted:Down to field any questions about what we've (or really, they've) done to get this far, and also solicit input about best practices for our marketing efforts going forward. As a programmer, I'm usually very wary of things like this. Perhaps it's only meant for sales people who's results can be evaluated more deterministically, but this just shouts to me as something some business guy can use to justify not giving someone a raise or firing someone. "Your Ambition score isn't high enough! Looks like you've been slacking on the job, Julie Programmer." Also the idea of pitting employees against each other seems a bit at odds with how employees should work. I don't think good teams should be constantly competing with one another - shouldn't they be working to boost everyone else up? quote:Now your X employees can compete against your Y employees and you see who the best overall performers are. And then what? The losers are fired? Made to feel like poo poo? Don't get bonuses or raises? Gamification is fine for games and silly apps to get people to use them more, I suppose, but when it can start to affect your actual livelihood I'm a lot more suspicious of it. Is abuse something the founders have addressed? Do you use Ambition within the company? How do you use it to measure much softer skills like programming, or project management? The more I read the landing page the more and more this absolutely rubs me the wrong way.
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Jun 16, 2014 18:34
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Comrade Flynn posted:I'm honestly not sure what we'd do with the capital right now. The only way we could scale would be to make investments in games which takes us down the path of being a more traditional game publisher. There's not anything wrong with that, but it muddles what we are doing a bit. That's awesome, congratulations. I own a similar company - two founders and one part timer. We're attempting to do what you do but with web apps. For the first 3 years we just did normal consulting: client wants application built, we build, deliver, and we're good. With one of our newer clients, we're doing a 25% rev share on gross revenue and it seems to be working out so far. Can you speak (anonymously) to the types of rev shares you have set up? Is it a flat percentage, or per unit, or something more complex? After the app is released, how do you handle making updates to it - as in, do you get paid some type of retainer, or do you just use the rev share money to pay for that? How do you go about selecting what apps you'll work on? Do they essentially have to pitch you like they would a VC? And yes, seeing how well the software you've built has helped your clients grow is a good feeling. Thanks for the insight!
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Feb 12, 2015 03:48
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Sparta posted:If I have 10k cash I want to riskily invest, can I invest in early round startups, or do those stupid rules still apply (about minimum net work/earning). I make a decent amount, and I have a fair bit of cash/assets, but they're under the minimum for those SEC rules (200k/yr/2 years or 1mil+ in non-residential assets). If you only have 10k to invest, do you have something less tangible to go along with it? Great contacts? A history of successful exits? Expertise building and growing great products? 10k is not a lot of money (maybe 1 or 2 months runway).
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Aug 24, 2015 06:21
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Have they attempted to sell or license this technology yet? Five years is a long time to work on something without a single customer (outside of academia). Generally any VC willing to invest in something like that is going to be a B or C series and not a seed or even A series. If nobody seemed interested why would a VC be? I would say hang it up and work on something else.
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Aug 27, 2015 17:04
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Pfox posted:I'm working on a SaaS business to "insource" rather than outsource collaboration. I'd lov it if you could spend a moment and answer a few questions for me. A. It seems like an in-house Stackoverflow, where you can build a knowledge base inside of your company. B. Sorry, we already have Confluence and Questions for Confluence set up which seems to do something similar. As for your copy, "enters the skills they need to complete the job" is a bit confusing, especially if they don't know the skills they need. quote:Worktopus monitors your organization's most in-demand skills, and compares that with what people are good at. It's simple to see if there's a mismatch, and that makes recruiting the people you actually need a lot easier. This is actually a really interesting value proposition. Hiring, especially for every hot tech company, is a HUGE issue. The wrong hire may take months to weed out and cost tens of thousands of dollars (even more so if found through a recruiter). If you're familiar with Patrick McKenzie (patio11 on Hacker News), he just released a new startup aimed to hire better (http://starfighters.io - though it's aimed at programmers). A general purpose tool that could help managers and HR departments highlight a shortage of skills and then go out and find that specific person would be very valuable. quote:Worktopus is private, locked behind your corporate email address, so you don't need to fear prying eyes. We use a document reference system that ensures your sensitive documents stay within the firewall, whether it's on your own servers or housed with a cloud storage provider you already trust. Hows that work? It can access files behind a firewall? One of the huge reasons the Atlassian suite of tools is so popular is because they can be hosted internally. C. I know MVP's generally don't need to look great, but the design is very off-putting to me. The half rounded half square everything is jarring, and stuff like the screenshot below with the weird line and almost no-contrast menu don't inspire a lot of confidence. I would definitely find another fresher template first (maybe one based off Bootstrap or Foundation).  Not crazy about the name, but there are a zillion oddly named successful enterprises (wtf is an Atlassian, btw?) The other posters have great suggestions on how to start selling. Definitely get this in front of actual decision makers (CIO's, HR people, middle managers) and see what their thoughts are.
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Feb 8, 2016 05:55
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Wow, that's really awesome guidoanselmi. What's the stack the server/software is built on? Where are you hosting it? (Site's down for me now, unfortunately).
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Feb 14, 2016 22:28
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Yeah I live in Dallas and have a box on Softlayer (we have our local meetups at their HQ), definitely the best for hardware.
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Feb 14, 2016 22:36
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Hyvok posted:Does anyone have any good tips or an article or something on what should an offer include? I'm talking about a document that specifies what service/product I am offering (to a company) and for what price. I'm not actually even sure is it called an offer, a quote, a bid (not technically bidding against anyone in this case) or something else. This is related to engineering design so I guess it would need to include price, schedule, services offered, tools used, IP rights... This is just a little project but I'd rather do it right the first time around. If you're the one selling your services (a vendor) to a company, you can usually start off with a Master Services Agreement (MSA) and a Statement of Work (SOW). I've used the documents from http://msabundle.com/ before with much success (the MSA, SOW, and Retained Services Agreement (RSA) as a consultant).
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May 15, 2016 14:49
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