HN Office Hours with Jared Friedman and Trevor Blackwell

http://nestify.io founder here. We're improving PHP CMS hosting (WordPress, Drupal) with better scaling, on-page optimizations, better security. We have paying customers and ~100 die-hard users that will be really sad / lose revenues if we shut down.

Should we focus on building our brand while scaling or switch to whitelabel and API services and partner with hosting providers?

We think potential users can be broken down into different groups. The first group would be people within the same organization (testers, design, other devs, marketing, support, etc). In that scenario, the company would subscribe to our service and everyone would use it internally, especially once they see how much easier it is.

The second group would be people who have a vested interest in a website working properly. For example, my friend has a clothing company and they sell online through Shopify. If she encountered a bug on Shopify and they told her this is the tool she should use, she would do that. I do agree however that for a casual user on a website, it would take a lot to get them to use our service. That’s why we are not focusing on that.

Thanks for pointing out that formatting problem. We use Instapage to make the marketing site (we’re bootstrapping) and it seems fine when I logged in- I’ll forward the screenshot to them to take a look.

As for the small user base, even if they’re really into it, it’s the kind of tool that someone uses only when they need it. So even if we have a committed user base, unless they have tons of buggy sites, we can’t expect to see tons of activity. That’s why we aren’t sure how to handle it.

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to clarify and for the feedback! It’s really appreciated.

"why rely on obscure text reports when bugreply can show you the problem: live!"

"bug reports for the youtube generation"

"take the pain out of bug reports - bugreply lets your QA|consultants|users record the steps leading up to their problems"

You really need to brainstorm this; first get the value prop clear for various target demographics, then iterate iterate iterate until you can get a few nice one-liners.

Then test them on someone who is clean (a potential customer).

Btw if you want any further feedback feel free to ping me on twitter; username is the same as my hn username. I'll DM you my gmail/hangouts address/linkedin.

All the options you mention would be technically impressive (so good for recruiting hackers), but none of them are obviously on the path to building a huge business. You should lean towards the option where you can imagine having a near-monopoly in a huge market.

There's a big danger of getting sucked into some application where better NLP isn't the differentiator. Most interactive agents have small enough domains (getting cable TV installed, parsing S-10s, triaging support emails, ...) that general reasoning isn't critical, and the companies that succeed in this space will be defined by other factors like sales and integration with the customer's IT stack.

I wouldn't worry about IP leakage. I've seen a lot of companies, but none that failed because of IP leakage. They fail for a long list of other reasons: slow execution, bad product-market fit, founder breakups, etc.

Even though you are your own target user, it's dangerous to build a full prototype without talking to actual users. It's likely that you will find that what you thought people wanted does not match 100% with what they actually want.

Do you have mockups or screenshots of the tool? I would recommend lining up some research scientists who can serve as product advisors. Tell them about your idea and ask them what they would want in this kind of tool. Try to get a commitment from them to use it after you build it - that will force clarity on their side.

Not only will that prevent you from potentially throwing away code, it will get you started building the kind of deep advocates in the science community that you will need to get a movement like this started.