Ask HN: How best to describe my service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How best to describe my service?

7 pointsishener5 comments

I'm a technical guy. I know nothing about marketing and how to speak to people who are not technical about my ideas.

Recently, I've been working on a side project which is nearly finished. I'm building the homepage and I have a hard time finding the wording that will make non-technical or semi-technical people know what it's about.

This is what I have so far: http://discrete.li/

So I'll explain my service to you, technical people:

It's basically google analytics but only for AJAX requests. You plant some javascript code on your web application, and my service logs every AJAX request your application makes. The problem this is solving is analytics for single page applications. I have found current analytics solutions to be inadequate for large SPAs. In google analytics, for example, you would need to manually track every AJAX request.

Sure, you can use server side logging, but you can say the same thing about page views, and still everyone are using google analytics... it's not trivial and people are using services to make it easy for them.

Plus, my service also tracks errors so you will have the client side data when researching issues. Also, it automatically tracks request latency (again, from the client side so you get a clear view of user experience), and full searchable payload logs.

Is my technical explanation clear? Does the homepage present this service in a good way?

thanks for any help...

I think it is important for you to think about how/to whom you want to sell your product. Do you want to have a bottom up approach where you sell to the engineers touching the code everyday? Or do you want to sell to the CXO of an organization?

If you want to sell to engineers, I think your page is fantastic. It is solving a problem that engineers face regularly - error/performance related analytics. But I don't think it really appeals to the business side. Most business folks do not know how to translate those pieces of analytics to business performance.

Your homepage and demo look good. Everyone will appreciate this. The information is concise. Technical people will appreciate this.

What's missing is an explanation for non-technical people why this information is valuable.

Taking the extra step to illustrate ease of use, why the data is valuable and how it can be used in a context would be helpful.

Your pricing seems a little off, meaning very cheap to get started and then it jumps to expensive. Is this is achievable with AWS CloudWatch, or something similar? How does their pricing compare?

To answer your additional question, the service is presented well, and I think you are 80-90% there. I'd like to see an update.

This is pretty good already. You might want to consider narrowing it down further to "Analytics for single page web apps" like you mentioned above. It might make it more understandable for nontechnical folks, even if it doesn't cover the full AJAX scope.

I think it's pretty clear. It seems a little like Segment / Sentry. There's definitely a need for this type of product.

The live demo is cool, although it was a little slow for me. Looks good overall.

Thanks for your feedback. I'm trying my best to make it faster. Because It's based on analytics warehouse (BigQuery) it's not trivial...

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