Show HN: Turn a markdown document into an interactive tutorial
stacktile.io
stacktile.io
Honestly, users shouldn't even be able to ruin your sales pipeline by interrupting your pitch. Why let us enter any markdown? It's an example, you have a few representative samples, just take their output and hard code it and move on. As it stands now, I probably won't remember to come back so see what this is all about, and waiting for an email isn't really going to increase the odds that I come back.
Just some honest feedback for you. TL:DR: I was intrigued by the first page, put off by the unnecessary wait when you could've hard coded the response when a user chooses an existing sample.
This looks promising. Nice work Dan and Stacktile team. Looking forward to seeing what the community does with it.
I might be misunderstanding your feedback, but I think you're asking why we enable the user to edit markdown in our "try it now" demo -- and thus "interrupt the pitch".
Our rationale with our live demo is to show what the content creation process looks like for our prospective customer. The visitors to a completed workflow won't have the ability to edit the markdown.
again -- I'm sorry about the limited number of users we can support at the moment (and thus the redirect to our signup page).
The process of provisioning a new container (especially under high load that we're seeing today) is what takes a few moments. We however do a fair amount of pre-allocation and other tricks to speed this process up.
Perhaps the confusion is coming from the fact that a stacktile workflow is more than "pre-known" static content -- it is markdown coupled to a an interactive, running shell process in which code can be executed.
I hope that helps clarify
Thanks for the feedback.
If they want to try out their own markdown, then worry about spinning up a container.
We know this. People are saying that you need to have some sort of "pitch" that can't be overloaded by too-many users.
So, either you provision a lot more containers to handle spikes like the ones HN gives.
Or, you scale automatically to handle traffic-spikes. Or, you do some sort of caching. Or, you have an explainer video/tutorial, something.
Just because your product is "interactive", does not mean you have to have an interactive sales-pitch. Because right now, you're losing the valuable attention of HN-eyeballs.
Edit: in other words, if a user changes the text from one of the pre-filled selections (MD5 hash of the text would be sufficient to determine this, or even simpler, note whether a keyup event was raised by the textbox), put them in the queue you're using now. If there was no keyup event, then read which selection was made from the drop down and return the already-transformed-in-advance result.
Making a potential "ready to hear your pitch" customer wait in line is unnecessary. There can be an "express lane" without compromising the "scenic route".
500 error
[root]$ :(){ :|:& };:
-bash: fork: Resource temporarily unavailable
I hope anyone who thinks about it for more than five seconds will realise it's a joke.
[root]$ ls moo
ls: moo: No such file or directory
If it's any consolation, I can certainly appreciate the frustration some will experience due to this, but we're just bound by the reality of our wallet at the moment. We also mean no harm by inviting those in the queue to provide an email.
At any rate, it's an interesting idea. I would like to see a demo without having to signup for something.
The problem is that asking for email suggests people should trust the website at a time when there is no basis for trust and many people have substantial experience to suggest not trusting.
I laugh.
thank you for pointing this out -- the above user is pointing out a provision in our Privacy Policy. Our privacy policy is very much a work in progress -- we're a small team that put this policy in place as a first attempt, although I know that's not a very good answer. I fully agree with you that that clause in particular is quite draconian.
I have brought this to our team's attention and we will be reviewing it as soon as we can (A.K.A. as soon as we're done dealing with the huge influx of new users from HN)
Come to think of it, I smell a startup idea... Privacy Policy Monitoring as a Service...
I'm clicking on the button to see what does this app do and they it says signup and we will notify you later.
we're giving people the option to sign up to be notified when we have a free slot, but you're not required to sign up to try us out. It's just that we have many more people coming to try us than we expected.
Sorry about that!
Anyway, I thought for a moment about the fact that there is no company that I love so much that I want to receive periodic emails from it. Not even Taco and few companies do engagement emails as beautifully designed as Trello.
There's a scale at which bulk email operations make sense. I don't think the "doing things that don't scale" is the right stage for optimizing. Usually, emails are another TODO item in the receiver's inbox. They're not solutions.
My advice, focus on solutions.
Good luck.
https://stacktile.io/org/ansible/workflows/670a1fda-3372-400...
``` Unfortunately, we are out of free slots at the moment. We're Sorry! If you would like to be notified as soon as we have a free slot available, we invite you to sign up. ```
I'm really disappointed.
From the example:
1. <a href="https://app.storj.io/#/signup" target="_blank">Sign up</a> for a Storj account.we certainly didn't mean it to come off as being arrogant
first of all, thanks for checking us out!
I'm sorry if you hit an error, we're a victim of our own popularity at the moment. We're working to accommodate pretty huge the increase in traffic from HN.