Show HN: Backyard.io - We applied to YC (W12) and need some beta users

look intresting, but seconding the "why" posts...

what advantage am i getting for having these all under one roof? how are the integrations going to help me?

thanks for the feedback. you're not alone with that concern and it's something we thought a lot about in designing our infrastructure. we approached the problem in a few ways. 1) building as much of our technology on top of existing open source software. that way if you choose to move to a new product, your data is compatible and the transition will be much simpler. 2) making much of the infrastructure component based, so that you don't need to use everything all at one. you'll be able to slowly migrate data from existing services into our infrastructure. 3) your data will always be your own and exportable for you if you so choose. Backyard came out of our own experience at different startups. we spent valuable early engineering cycles setting up infrastructure, much of the time just recreating something that many other people had already built. so we understand the concerns about entrusting core pieces of a technology stack to a thrid-party. we plan on working closely with our users to help adress those concerns.

Agreed. Why not post invite codes to responders here on HN?

To be honest, I hate everything in one solutions for a couple reasons:

  1. It never works. There's always some problems and since it's all in one package, it's really difficult to remove an item and switch it from something else. (For instance, I know it's far from being the same, but think django and mysql. You can use something else, but anyone who did it will agree with me that it's a lot of problem.)

  2. There are *so many* already existing solutions out there that it's hard to believe that you can make *all of them* better. For instance, Dropbox is pretty awesome, Github is awesome, IRC is awesome, Gmail is awesome. Especially for startups, these are all free or *almost* free solutions.

  3. It's simply impossible to fit everyone's need with a one big solution for everything. I've been in *big company* where you'd have a microsoft based solution with everything, or others thousand of dollars apps to manage authentification and email and everything, and they all truly sucked. And they sucked not because they were wrongly build, but they couldn't be the *best* for everyone. If you want to make it newbie friendly enough, power user will hate it. If you make it complex enough for power user, newbie will be lost and hate it. I know I'm making it sound trivial, but I hope you guess the point. 

  4. Finally, from my experience, it's extremely hard to change the way people already work. Just try to move someone out of gmail for instance. Now, try to move him/her away from *all* software he already use and appreciate. 

You say you want to make it easy for startups to be like the big guys. That's one of the things I love about startup.. to NOT be like the big guys with all their politic craps.

Sorry to be harsh, I just wanted to give my personal opinion as a software developer. I'm curious to know what others hackers think about it?