Notifo (YC W10) Is A Simple Mobile Notifications Platform For Anything | Hacker News Reader

Notifo (YC W10) Is A Simple Mobile Notifications Platform For Anything

techcrunch.com

93 pointsjazzychad66 comments

This looks really awesome. I like push notifications as an idea, but I'm not wild about Apple's implementation, especially since there's nowhere you can go to get a list of notifications you've gotten, so if you get one, then you get another before seeing the first one, it's just gone. (A few of Apple's decisions, like not putting a simple "Notifications" listing app, baffle me.)

One thing about the app/site: the workflow for getting started sucks. I have to go to your website, make an account, and then go to the app to put that info in. To add to the effect, the only signup link on the homepage is all the way at the bottom, and creating my account doesn't automatically log me in.

Plenty of apps give you the option to register an account right in the app, and yours should be one of them. Make the start as frictionless as possible.

Yes, agreed. The next version of the app will have registration possible in the app. Having the unpredictability of the app approval process meant I had to basically submit a minimum viable client as soon as I could to make sure it was in the app store at launch. This is super high priority.

Alright, that's reasonable. Yet another reason I might get a Nexus One soon (especially if I no longer have to worry about being push-less!).

How will the other mobile apps work? Will they just always be running and frequently checking for notifications? Can you do some sort of long-polling over cell networks that sometimes lose service? How will you make sure you don't kill people's battery life?

Are you a mobile app company or an internet messaging company?

Great strategy to submit a minimal app first.

How long did it take you to get the app approved for the AppStore listing? Just curious what the length of an average release cycle is like.

I am curious about the answer to Jeff Lindsay's comment. Why do we need another app in this space when there is a powerful free open-source framework for doing this (http://notify.io)?

Jeff contacted me after I launched. We are in the middle of a conversation about this, but we both had to go to dinner (he with a group, and I hadn't eaten all day).

His concerns are valid, but we are both wanting to finish our discussion (it is/was quite open).

However, the canonical answer to "why do we need another X in this space" is "why did google need to be another search engine?" It may be that we are fulfilling different demands, and we both agree that competition is better for everyone involved.

Notifo has a shipping product which does notifications on a phone. notify.io has describes telephone clients as something which may possible be available eventually.

Existing is a fairly useful feature.

in addition, notify.io has iphone support through Prowl (a non-free app, which I have used for a long time), but notifo has a native iphone client with tight integration for notifo's own infrastructure.

I started notify.io with Jeff and you're misunderstanding what notify.io is. We have clients not just for the iPhone, but also for the Mac, Windows, Ubuntu and Android. You should check it out before describing it as "telephone clients".

Really? When I click on get started it only offers to download a mac client.

Here's how I came to my apparently mistaken impression that you do not have shipping clients for phones and thus bear no resemblance to this product:

1) I went to notify.io and looked for a list of supported platforms, and saw prominent notices that your problem is described as "Get desktop notifications from web applications" and that the quickstart suggestions presume use of a Mac client.

2) I looked at every top-level navigation element for a list of supported platforms, and failed to find it.

3) I dug around a bit for the development blog via Google, and found a roadmap post from January, which included: "Outlets repesent the other major feature of Notify.io. They’re ways you can get a notification. ... Currently supported Outlets besides Desktop Notifier are Email, Jabber IM, and Webhooks. Outlets to look forward to are SMS, Twitter, IRC, and perhaps telephone."

Now, as one OSS developer to another, let me say this as gently as I possibly can: if you want people to think of you when someone says "mobile notifications", you should probably note somewhere fairly conspicuous that you actually support mobile notifications.

Exactly. I've searched and searched again, and can't find any information about where to find the ubuntu-client. Nor could I find anything about how to get notifications through XMPP/jabber.

It's such a promising concept, but this way I don't think a lot of users will catch up on it.

I agree with all these points. Some of them are out of practicality since it's not fulltime.

Btw, telephone means actually calling you via telephony, not mobile. However, an iPhone client is planned.

Obviously marketing something like this is hard. Notifo starts with a niche so it's easy. We did too: desktop notifications. But hey hey, we also do a lot more.

Anyway, we are a lot more badass, address some problems Notifo doesn't, but we just don't have a mobile client yet. Womp womp. We'll see who can be the better platform though...

You're exactly right: marketing something like this is hard. But writing the code is harder. Making it open source was risky, but brave. Oh, the perpetual downfall of open platforms.

You're handling this extremely well, btw. I've had my work ripped off before, and it is beyond upsetting.

Yeah uh, I should finish up the android notify.io app and put it up in the app store. There's a semi-functional android alpha at http://github.com/newhouseb/Noid for anyone interested in getting involved.

When I was integrating this into HN last night I was thinking: practically every web app is going to want this.

A permission marketing channel in the pocket of your users? Yes, please. It is like lifecycle emails on steroids without the spammed-to-death problem. (Well, not yet anyhow.)

This solves a real, pressing need for many sites: maintaining user engagement after they're off your website. The number of people who register and never come back is depressing -- many of them might be enticed to come back, if you only had a way of getting in touch. That is pure profit for the company, since you've already spent whatever form of resources it took to acquire them as a signup in the first place.

> The number of people who register and never come back is depressing

I think that says something about the content as well as about the user.

> many of them might be enticed to come back, if you only had a way of getting in touch.

Or you might push them away even further.

I try to keep notifications down to an absolute minimum on my sites, and to give people genuine reasons to come back in the future.

My feeling is that you need to get a user to invest a bit of time in to your site on the first visit, that's the best predictor they'll be back, especially if you leave them 'wanting more'.

you might push them away -> This is a testable claim about empirical reality.

My feeling is that you need to get a user to invest a bit of time -> This is also a testable claim about empirical reality. I actually come down totally differently on this one: I think getting a user to "success" quickly trumps all other considerations for retention, even if getting them to "success" quickly causes their first use of your service to be much shorter on average than it would otherwise have been.

But, hey, what is the point about making testable claims about empirical reality if you don't actually test the suckers. So I'm going to dig into my data this weekend and figure out which one of us is right, at least for my app/users, and blog about it. Please mock me mercilessly if I don't have this done by Sunday.

> Please mock me mercilessly if I don't have this done by Sunday.

It might not be so quick a thing to test, so no mockery from me.

It took me years to figure out how to increase retention on my sites, little by little tuning it so that the 'pipeline' from users just visiting to users signing up did not get disturbed.

So, yes, they're all testable claims. For me tuning this worked well, it was - at some point - the difference between $5,000 / month and $ 50,000 / month so the pay-off of the time invested can be immense.

I'm conservative by nature though, and it took me a long time to clue in to a/b testing (this was back in 2000 or so), which didn't help at all.

Best of luck with that, I'm curious about the results.

Btw, I agree that getting your users to go from 0 to the breaking point quickly can make you some money, but on the other hand there is no such thing as a 'bad' user, and if you can somehow engage them to generate some buzz for you that's a pay-off as well.

It may not be such a simple relationship between the two, the sales curve might lag quite a bit behind the 'buzz' curve. It's about 'mind share', and that's one of the hardest to quantify variables.

Just about every site I've ever been involved with that's at a large scale has learned that more notifications means more user engagement.

It's silly to think that more notifications is a replacement for a good experience... But it just about always augments it and serves to "pull back" those users who were kinda interested but maybe aren't quite addicted or in the habit of visiting yet.

"This solves a real, pressing need for many sites: maintaining user engagement after they're off your website. The number of people who register and never come back is depressing -- many of them might be enticed to come back, if you only had a way of getting in touch. "

Ok I am probably missing something here, but if people won't give you their email (which is what I assume you meant by "if you only had a way of getting in touch.") why would they give you their notifio id (or whatever it takes to push notifications to their cell phone)? How is email not a "permission marketing channel" but notifo is? (genuine questions, not snark)

I'm thinking of it more as a supplement for email, not a replacement. It has advantages for the business -- the immediacy of a phone notification as compared to email (which is becoming less and less immediate, particularly as it moves from desktops to web clients), the fact it is not yet done to death, and the fact that it is structurally guaranteed to be opt-in only means deliverability should rock as compared to email.

Surely with the rise of the iPhone and push GMail, email is becoming more immediate rather than less.

Where I will agree with you, though, is that I'm more and more happy to leave emails festering in my inbox waiting for actions whereas iPhone notifications get immediate attention. Why? Because I choose exactly what notifications I receive. As notifications become more spammy, we will need a new less-spammy system. Rinse, repeat.

we love it so far.. great job Chad

Yeah; first thing I did today was put together a class for this in PHP.

http://www.tokyomuslim.com/2010/03/notifo-kicks-ass/

Definitely going to find a way to integrate this into my love hotel site.

Alternatively, not quite the same thing at all, but a local startup here in Ottawa has a service and Restful API for Sending Push Notifications. Its called AppNotify ( http://appnotify.com/ ).

It's similar. And most have never heard of it. Perhaps some value of being YC vs. not-YC. TC coverage and all.

Not that similar, I think appnotify falls under the class of APSN infrastructure service provider which brings to mind, UrbanAirship - http://urbanairship.com/ iLime - https://www.ilime.com/

Yeah, I think thats fair to say. Also, being Canadian and not being in Toronto or Montreal, doesn't help much either, or it can seem that way sometimes(at least from experience with the startup I work for).

Why the hell does it keep loading one script a second from xxx.olark.com? And then subsequently crashes the browser.

It's Olark doing cross-domain polling via script tags.

Get a better browser.

> Get a better browser.

Yeah, it was very sneaky of Mozilla to force Firefox 3.6 on 3.0 users. It seems to be hanging and crashing left and right. Switching to something else though is not an option for a variety of reasons.

Guys, this is an awesome service. I can see a lot of other startups building on this platform.

Did you guys build push.ly yourselves? If so, the smart thing here is building and marketing a great free little demo app is a great way to get your platform out in front of potential platform customers. Also, it will provide access to some end users, so you can see for yourself what other capabilities the end users are craving. smart stuff.

yes, built push.ly myself and also the march madness alerts and stock alerts bulit into the notifo site. i was thinking it would be nice to have promotional services to get users straight out of the gate.

Count Gridspy in. Might be some time until we get around to it though :)

Check your HN account page, there's a new notifo field.

Explained here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203104

What's stopping someone malicious from entering my username in a random account on a random site? I see I can block it, but what if I actually want to use the site with my real account?

Seems like you should use a random token, or something slightly more secure.

Alternatively, make it even easier for users by using the email address they used to sign up for the service, like Gravatar for notifications. The user usually has to verify the email address anyway.

edit: ah, I see that it asks for confirmation

Very clever. I don't get text msgs and would love to use a web-monitoring service use this to notify me if a server goes down.

I would love for CloudKick to integrate with Notifo :)

+1 for new relic as well!

Is there already something for generalized push to regular computers as opposed to phones? Forgive my ignorance.

just set up an account on the website, then downloaded the iphone app. It doesn't seem to integrate too well with 1Password. I generated a password for the website, but the phone app wouldn't accept it until I made it simpler. The website and phone app should have the same password requirements.

So what does it actually do? The techcrunch article used the term "push" a half dozen times, but never defined it. The screenshots made it look like it's just a twitter client.

Anybody care to explain why I would want to use this?

If you use Boxcar ... that is an iPhone push notification app that when you receive an email or a comment left on your Facebook a pop up notification appears similar to what you see when you get a text message. This app allows for any 3rd party(publisher) to integrate this into their service so users can choose to get pop up notifications on their device from their favorite services(updates, news, discounts, etc).

Nice!!!

Aha, I tried to do this a couple years ago when I registered a domain name I liked (pipinghot.info) and the tried to come up with an app to go with it. :)

I tried to do too much of the scraping work myself which got me into a mess. If you can get people to offer data rather than try to pull it yourself you might have better luck.

RSS, Alerts, etc. stuff handles a lot in tech, do you expect to try to get more casual things like live sports data, current events, etc?

Nice. Just registered. Various glitches on the website where you fill out a form (received via https), hit submit, and get the API error page saying https required.

yes... fixing that now.

and a minor typo 'Notfio' on the FAQ page.

Hmm, anyone else actually installed this?

The concept is great but I am assuming the app is just "get it in the appstore quick". It's a little frustrating to use because:

a) it "loads" almost every screen (for a few seconds)

b) the push notifications dont go into the app automatically, they have to be loaded again when it opens. Which on 3G is a bit slow... :D

But cool concept anyway!

regarding b: this is how all push notification apps work currently. Notifications can't talk to the apps on the phone when they arrive, so they must be reloaded from the server when the app opens.

Maybe if there are background apps in the future this will be solved more cleanly.

bah, that's annoying then - I hope Apple "fixes" it at some point.

Im quite enjoying it as an app actually - I generally dont have many apps on my iPhone (because I never use them..) but this might be a keeper :D

Touching 'create account' doesn't do anything. bug?

I initially had notifications off and turned it on later. for whoever's info.

The idea is great, but the iPhone client is pretty poor, no offense intended. I had to restart it after every step, and when you initially install it, it's very use unfriendly. It says "create notifo account", but does not tell you how or where to create this account.

It's a great idea with a real need, but it's a bit poorly implemented.

I agree completely (I wrote the app). The next version will be much more user friendly in the install/signup stage. Timing the app approval/launch was the issue that prevented it at initial release.

There is like a big list of minor annoyances. For example I get multiple notifications, but when I start the app there is nothing shown in the notification center till you pull the top down and release it. That's a bit counter-intuitive. If I were you I'd get someone on odesk for $30 an hour to rework the client while you focus on marketing your business and developing the backend.

notifications are auto-fetched when you open the app, they just have to load from the server (all iphone apps must abide by this for now, until background apps are allowed). the "pull down to refresh" is there for obsessive people who feel like they must constantly refresh to get info.

I know there are a bunch of unpolished aspects, but that is part of the "release early" mentality. This app will get tons of iteration.

Is this free for publishers? How long will it be free?

Twilio has a super simple API to push SMSes out to users, but it costs money. No one seems to have mentioned them in this comment thread, but what are your thoughts on the competition? Do you see them as competition?

Was looking exactly for this for a web app that I'm working on. Going to give it a try and see how it goes :-)

Could you please give any details about how the iPhone app is actually receiving these notifications ?

It just uses push notifications. But each site you're getting notifications from doesn't have to make you install their app. You just have to have Notifo installed. You also can actually see a list of all of the notifications you've gotten.

It seems pretty similar to Howl (http://howlapp.com, mine) or Prowl (which also offers an API). What's new here?

It looks like notifo is trying to be a universal notification system. It's not going to be an easy way to do iPhone push notifications; it's going to be a single API to push to any smartphone.

They're starting just with iPhone because it's easier (since push is builtin) and widespread and they wanted to get something out there as fast as possible, but they say Android and Blackberry are coming soon, and I bet WebOS (and Windows?) won't be far behind.

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