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Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

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Re: Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

#91

Post by tixocloud »

mbrundle wrote: post #40
tixocloud wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you be interested in connecting? I'm looking to connect with entrepreneurs with families who are still trying to make it all happen.

Likewise. I'm also mid-30s with 2 kids, and I'm currently pivoting from a science career to a software developer one. I'm currently deciding whether to go down the self-started startup route or get a normal job, and I'm blogging about my experiences at http://www.hacker-dad.com . Combining parenting and startups presents a set of pretty unique challenges, and I'd love to find other parents who are grappling with them…

Thanks for the link. I will check it out. If it's fine with you, I'll drop you an email tonight and we can connect?

Re: Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

#92

Post by tschellenbach »

leftnode wrote: post #28

I'll come out with a contrarian point of view: I think you're wasting your time and certainly your money. To have invested your life savings into this app which, uh, is really hard to determine what it does seems silly to me - especially since you have a family to care for. Slack Meets GitHub Issues? Doesn't Slack already meet GitHub issues in that it integrates with GitHub fine? The fact that you need a very long bl…

Don't let people tell you your ideas won't work!

Re: Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

#93

Post by hewoco »

Side-point, but hopefully relevant. I helped out at the Techstars London demo day and after bugging the managing team on one of the prep days, we were able to find out what they saw as some issues unique to the UK and the one they always saw was "too much code, not enough talking to customers" - they've had start-ups apply with over £2 million spent, and a stunning product, but with no real customer input thus far or dveloped target market after.

My fear, though I hope I'm wrong, is that openloopz will be another one of those failures created by our apparent 'Original Sin' as a tech community.

Re: Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

#96

Post by GarethX »

rmc wrote: post #82
onion2k wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're Joel Spolsky you can release a piece of software with any name you care to choose and people will still take it seriously because you have earned the respect of your peers. Other people who don't have decades of experience producing exceptional software don't have the same luxury. Fogbugz is a terrible name and if an unknown developer had released it there's a good chance too few people would have looked at…

FogBugz was released in Nov 2000. How big was Joel Spolsky then? (It's before my time.) It looks like Joel was hardly blogging when FogBugz was released ( http://joelonsoftware.com/backIssues.html )

To be fair, as early as 2004 he had this to say on the name:

"Yeah, it's not an ideal name... But the brand equity is already worth significantly more than the cost of having a yucky name... (There was a period for about 6 months when "Z" was all the rage. Antz, Dogz, and Atomz come to mind)."

Re: Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

#97

Post by jakejake »

pdrummond wrote: post #35

Holy crap! I wasn't going to come back here until tomorrow at the earliest, then my own post popped up in my Feedly! Surreal. Thanks for all the feedback!!! I'm still reading, but here are some quick responses from what I have seen so far. 1. I will update the openloopz.com asap - oversight on my part. Not sure how I missed that tbh. 2. The word "openloopz" was coined about 7 years ago when I first started working on…

Congrats on finishing and launching your product! Not to rehash everything that has been said already but, you can tell this was designed by a programmer because we love abstracting things. It's not a bad thing, but it's impossible to market something that is everything to everybody.

My suggestion would be to think of all the customers that you are marketing to that will never give you $5/month. For example, high-school kids looking to chat and have fun will never bother learning your concept and pay you $5 for the privilege. Get rid of all marketing messages aimed at that use case. Will college students pay you $5 to collaborate on a school project? Stop marketing to them. Will a family use this to plan their vacation? (etc)

If you do that you should be left with a smaller group and that will allow you to make a definitive one-liner that describes your product, for example "OpenLoopz is a collaboration tool for event planners." Or something to that effect.

Even though your service can manage any type of content, you will do better if you just select a few use cases and then customize your marketing to fit them.

Re: Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

#98

Post by dbg31415 »

leftnode wrote: post #28

I'll come out with a contrarian point of view: I think you're wasting your time and certainly your money. To have invested your life savings into this app which, uh, is really hard to determine what it does seems silly to me - especially since you have a family to care for. Slack Meets GitHub Issues? Doesn't Slack already meet GitHub issues in that it integrates with GitHub fine? The fact that you need a very long bl…

"Did he say he wasn't in SF? Let's all yell at him and tell him that he sucks and his idea sucks. SF is the only place anyone who knows how to code / market / launch products lives and everyone else everywhere is dumb."

- Paraphrased 95% of the users on this site lately

Re: Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

#99

Post by nilkn »

S4M wrote: post #76
gadders wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

#middlebrow_dismissal

Please don't mistake harsh but constructive criticism for middlebrow dismissal.

I don't think the top-level comment even criticized the app, though. The impression I have is that he has not tried it and doesn't even know what it is. If anything, the only thing he criticized is the landing page.

(And that's certainly valid criticism, but it's not a strong basis for telling someone they just wasted their time and money. A marketing problem can be fixed.)

Re: Show HN: Slack Meets GitHub Issues

#100

Post by jasonm23 »

nkohari wrote: post #89
leftnode wrote: post #28

I'll come out with a contrarian point of view: I think you're wasting your time and certainly your money. To have invested your life savings into this app which, uh, is really hard to determine what it does seems silly to me - especially since you have a family to care for. Slack Meets GitHub Issues? Doesn't Slack already meet GitHub issues in that it integrates with GitHub fine? The fact that you need a very long bl…

You spent 15 minutes looking at the beta version of a product, and you've made the decision that the creator is wasting their time? Have you considered that, having thought about it for months, they might understand the problem domain significantly better than you? What if the product actually has tremendous value, but suffers from a marketing problem? That's a pretty easy problem to fix. Rather than using your sever…

Wow, great advice there "just keep your mouth shut".

For anyone who has actually invested a large amount of time in a dead idea, the above poster is right on the money.

I think you should take you own advice and talk only about things you know intimately. Lest your sentimentality gets the better of you, when actually trying to address a problem that could suck OP's life down the proverbial toilet.

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