Do you have any ballpark numbers for wordpress hits day -> expected revenue from appifier?
I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
91–100 of 204 posts
Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#92The word "native" jumped out at me. I wonder, for the target users you are aiming, if it's enough to say "...an iPhone app...". To me, it's the same feeling as "to kill a running app". It's common for tech people to say but doesn't have personal touch.
Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#93Interesting idea, but can't get it to work. I created a test account and added 2 WordPress blogs to it: TechCrunch and the official Wordpress blog (http://wordpress.org/news/). Went through the steps, downloaded the sandbox app on my iPhone 4S and tried to preview them. App instantly crashes when loading both sites. Is it just that these blogs don't have the required JSON plugins (possible)? Or is it that they have too much content for Appifier to handle? Either way, an abrupt crash doesn't inspire confidence. Do you have any sample blogs we can try to test this with?
Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#94Have you run this past Apple with regards to their App Store approval policy? I'd be worried about clause 2.12:
"2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"
Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry guys! We weren't expecting this kind of load. I'm doing everything I can to redirect traffic to http://engine.theappifier.com
HN has grown a good deal in the past year or so. It has quite a big "slashdot effect" now :)
Has anyone who's been hackernews'd done an analysis on the load numbers?
Back in the day there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_refer...
Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good stuff, but I'm a bit confused by what SnapHop is. From the landing page it sounds like you are an agency, but you talk about a platform. What exactly (i.e. not marketing speak) does the platform let me do? Where can I see it in action?
Signup an see! I'll upgrade your account also for free and give you SMS if you blog about us. Yes we need a better video somewhere. We kind of went the enterprise route as our competitor did ( http://44doors.com ) where showing less unfortunately pays you more.
For what it's worth "sign-up and see" is an awful response to a potential user being confused about what your service does.
I think you should consider changing your landing page to make it explicit how you can help local businesses. That may mean removing some of the myriad of use cases you describe.
My $0.02, obviously feel free to ignore.
Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#97Interesting. This looks like a container similar to PhoneGap, but more specialised to some sort of feed from the WP website, perhaps RSS. Is there really that large a market for this sort of thing?
It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content. We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.
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Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#98Interesting. This looks like a container similar to PhoneGap, but more specialised to some sort of feed from the WP website, perhaps RSS. Is there really that large a market for this sort of thing?
It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content. We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.
As a mobile web developer, I feel compelled to mention that iPhones make it easy to bookmark a web page and put the page icon right on your home screen. Utilizing HTML5 manifests and local storage, you could also have offline access. Creating an interface as good looking and responsive as a native one is definitely doable as well.
You don't get an app in the appstore, so that's one advantage you have over an HTML5-based approach...but I would much prefer just getting an awesome mobile web app experience when I view a site in my browser, as opposed to being prompted to download the app.
When I'm browsing content, I like to stay in my web browser so I can browse other sites. Switching between a bunch of native apps just to get a decent ui is a poor user experience, IMO.
All in all, the product looks really well done though. I don't mean to be disparaging with this comment. I just wanted to point out that it's totally possible to do everything you mention using mobile web techniques.
What I've described here might be a direction you could take your product. You could offer both native and mobile web approaches, giving the choice to the Wordpress site owner.
If you do want to explore that idea, drop me a note (info in my HN profile). That's a project I'd love to work on.
Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#99Have you run this past Apple with regards to their App Store approval policy? I'd be worried about clause 2.12: "2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"
I think his business provides much more than just a url and a webview. The offline pages, organized layout and category browser is much more than what that clause is made to prevent.
The unfortunate thing about having a business that is at the mercy another business (such as iphone apps) is that apple can at any point block anything coming from OP's site. But thank god for competition.
Re: I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The site owner wouldn't have to charge for the app (unless I missed something). They just now have a native app for their website. Native app interaction speed and offline use are obvious advantages over using the blog in the mobile browser, so there's definitely value here. And the number of WordPress sites is so huge (over 70 million) that there's undoubtedly a market for this.
Unless the app auto-updates its content to be sure it is always in sync with the website, having native app speed and offline use grows increasingly less desirable the farther out you get from the date the app was created. For Wordpress sites one would expect new content daily. If Appifier pulls content and makes it all available offline that's great, until/unless the site being "appified" has new content. Will the a…
You should check out the site when its back up, obviously the app auto updates when new content is published.
It works because you have to install a plugin in your WP blog, which presumably has WP publish/edit hooks etc which notifies an Appifier service, which then pushes to the apps, making sure all content is up to date and available offline. It's a pretty popular, if not the only, design for content surfacing apps.