Ask HN: Review my startup: Storage Room - A CMS for Mobile Apps

I am an iPhone developer and frequently had to include some dynamically loaded content into different apps. Content like a tip of the day, store locations of a retail chain, cocktail recipes etc.

I think this always is way too much effort. I either have to create a small web application myself to manage and serve the content in JSON/XML or configure a large open source CMS to do this (which is a pain). And I have to host and maintain those systems, which costs time and money.

My hosted solution is cheaper, flexible and allows developers to configure many different data sets. Editors can manage the content for these data sets and you can then easily load that content into your mobile apps with JSON. You could also load the JSON into your website with JSONP or into a desktop app, but this is currently not the focus.

Basically a CMS for non-HTML applications. What do you think of this idea? Would you use it? Is there a market for this? Thanks so much for your feedback.

http://storageroomapp.com

Honestly, this looks a little bit like CouchDB + x to me

I'm a hypothetical iPhone App developer. Catch my attention and interest: You need something concrete to catch me and have me say "Yes! This solves a problem that is annoying me already." I don't think that is sufficiently communicated on your website.

Why should I trust you? You're just a tiny business, and will probably go bankrupt any minute. Can you calm me down? Or do you want to avoid waking sleeping dogs?

You say you offer a very nice data entry solution like a CMS, and a nice REST API. That sounds interesting, but if I haven't overcome my fears from above, can you maybe separate them and have them access a database that I let Amazon run for me?

(This is a summary of a discussion on the #startups IRC channel.)

Separating the application itself from the database is an interesting idea. But then you would still need to host a database yourself somewhere. If you don't trust me you must also be afraid of me messing up your own database with my solution (My solution would need write access).

A lot of mobile application developers are probably not experts in server management and backups. It is not their priority and core competence. They want to build great applications quickly.

My solution gives them an easy to use CMS with a REST API for a low monthly cost, and they don't have to care about backing up data themselves. If they don't fully trust me, they can export their data from the CMS regularly themselves, so in a worst case scenario they still have their content.

Thanks for the feedback.

I blurred the screenshots as they didn't look nice. I just have an ugly prototype so far. I wanted to ask for more feedback and validate the market more before spending more time on making the system nicer.

Currently you cannot sign up. You can only enter your email in a list and get notified when the product launches.