Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#121

Post by najamkhn » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 7:11 AM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #62

Oh, I can outdo you! Many years ago I did an upstart that was a combination of delicious and facebook, using bayesian filtering to locate links and people you might be interested in from what you posted yourself. Incredibly clever product. Before Google had even thought of pagerank. We got funding, we had great engineers, and I was the CEO. But you know what? We never launched. We ran out of money before we got that…

My wife made a baby too, but we never launched either.

Congrats bud! atleast you did.

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#122

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 7:11 AM UTC

mixmax wrote: post #62

Oh, I can outdo you! Many years ago I did an upstart that was a combination of delicious and facebook, using bayesian filtering to locate links and people you might be interested in from what you posted yourself. Incredibly clever product. Before Google had even thought of pagerank. We got funding, we had great engineers, and I was the CEO. But you know what? We never launched. We ran out of money before we got that…

[deleted]

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#123

Post by aaronblohowiak » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 7:53 AM UTC

lubos wrote: post #87

nanch wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be an interesting third party tool. Does anyone do this already? Something as simple as receiving a list of usernames over time.

MixPanel can do this and they have a free plan. I custom-built my own cohort reports but as number of users grow in my own app, I'm planning to replace it with MixPanel. You don't really want to put stress on your own database servers which are meant for production, not for analysis.

You should not be doing analysis (OLAP) on your main transactional database (OLTP). Moving from transaction-processing system (TPS) to analysis is done through a process call ETL (Extract, Transform, Load.) You will want to transform your data into facts and dimensions -- this is going from a relational model to a multidemensional model (using a star schema.)

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#124

Post by readme » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 7:59 AM UTC

As a practicing software developer who works on web applications daily, I did not get hooked after reading your site.

If you want to acquire me as a user you should post some instructional tutorials and videos on how I can use your service and why I would benefit from it.

New relic is doing a great job of marketing this way, with their IRC channel, reps contacting you to ask how things are going in a non-pushy way, and they're also giving out cool t-shirts (obviously an expense, but I think you could do it for someone who buys a $99 account?)

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#125

Post by L0j1k » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 8:56 AM UTC

ryanio wrote: post #18

I find it odd that the hacker community likes to completely disregard non-technical people[1]. It's situations exactly like this where it would bring a huge amount of value to have someone dedicated to marketing/community outreach and evangelism for the product. Even though it's a technical project, explained well and with patience even the most non-technical person could wrap their head around it and develop a plan…

Yeah... You couldn't pay me the 1700/month to live in that house. Sounds like a bunch of poseurs and wannabes that need help paying the rent so they can play WoW all day. "No work from home" ... ? That's like, half the hackers out there. Whatever it is, that place is sketch city (capital of the united states of douche).

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#126

Post by gingerlime » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 9:02 AM UTC

tg3 wrote: post #85

My advice: stop advertising PhantomJS and let me sign up for your service. Why did I have to scroll down 80% of the page to get to a sign up button? And nothing on your page convinced me that I should. I am in your target market - I build websites for a living, and I hate testing in multiple browsers. Convince me, in one sentence, why this is a good idea, and give me the option of doing something about it. Good luck.

The thing I missed the most is knowing which browsers / OS combinations are supported.

Can you specify using the API that you want a screenshot in IE9 or evaluate javascript with Firefox version 18 on Mac?

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#127

Post by jnardiello » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 10:08 AM UTC

I don't mean to sound like a scrooge but... it's really expensive! I'm super interested in this service, but before paying 29/month (that's more than what i pay for a VOS server) i want to be sure that the service 1) Is working properly according to my needs 2) It's efficient 3) will be helpful. A.K.A. Add a free plan to try it!

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#128

Post by pawelkomarnicki » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 10:12 AM UTC

My first impression when I opened your site was "Oh, another open source project!" — I think this was not the impression you wanted me to have :) Apart from that, very interesting service, well done :)

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#129

Post by charliepark » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 10:44 AM UTC

joelg87 wrote: post #61

charliepark wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel, what are you using for your cohort analysis? An internally-built tool? A third-party service?

Hey Charlie! We've been back and forth on this in the lifetime of the startup, but we're now doing all metrics ourselves, so it is internally built. I built an early version of the cohort analysis (which didn't scale, but that didn't matter) just a few months in and it was massively valuable. It's not too hard to knock something together.

Solid. Thanks!

Re: Tell HN: My Web App has 13 Users

#130

Post by mbesto » Sun, Mar 17, 2013, 11:15 AM UTC

Exciting dude! I'm in the same position. I've got 57 subscribers (probably 7 from friends, ha!) already on my web app, and it hasn't even launched[1] (psst - we're launching tomorrow). I was excited to learn that the latter part of sign-ups included people I had never heard of. One of them being a former Olympic silver medalist diver who does triathlons that signed up! That's a pretty cool feeling.

[1] - http://www.competehub.com