Show HN: A DigitalOcean-like support community for your website in 3 minutes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A DigitalOcean-like support community for your website in 3 minutes

haash.io

165 pointsmaliman97 comments

I'd suggest allowing people to signup via email.

Many people don't want to attach their social accounts to business functions.

yep, as soon as I saw facebook integration I quit.

Sorry about that, it's only a quick way to get started and a lazy way to have its avatar and bio autofilled. We'll add the email signup very soon.

Can you send me an email after you add it? My email is in my profile.

I don't do social media at all. I don't even have a facebook or twitter account. This looks useful (something I would pay for), but I need to take a closer look at it.

Cool, I'll definitely do!

Many people would not be permitted to attach their social accounts. My workplace requires that we associate our accounts strictly through things they will be able to access after employees leave (IE a company email address).

Sorry about that, we'll add email signup very soon

For those frustrated that there's no email signup, please fill in this form https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI . We'll notify you once we add it very soon. Thank you!

This is epic. As a former-digitaloceaner I know how much work went into building the community (the community director at DigitalOcean is incredibly good at her job) and how well it as served the business. If you have the ability and time to build a community around your product, I highly recommend it, brand evangelists are something you simply cannot buy.

Thanks neom for the great feedback!

However, if you can pay people to write high-quality documentation, you can use money to attract brand evangelists.

For those frustrated that there's no email signup, please fill in this form https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI . We'll notify you once we add it very soon. Thank you!

I like it. In fact I have a project in mind for which I might use it next year.

I think your pricing model might need a bit of work though. I think you're offering too much in the free tier (particularly given that I can run a free community with unlimited entries but have to pay $94/month for 50000 on the other plan), and pricing per registered community user might be worth looking into.

Other than that I'll definitely come back in the new year when I'm ready to give it a try.

Thank you, we'll definitely fine tune as we learn.

A DigitalOcean like support community for your website in 3 minutes Hi, Soufian from Haash here, i've always found DigitalOcean support community https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions smart and fascinating. A clever way to deliver support and manage knowledge. One of the reasons they came from nothing and became rapidly popular.

Haash is basically getting the same community support hosted space in few seconds. Just signup, create, tweak it to match your website feel and start using it.

Would be happy to answer any questions

Are you in any way associated with Dropbox? If not your site feels a little too familiar.

No. kind of, the colors and the simplicity maybe. Dropbox's UX is a good design and UX standard.

Wow no, it's not just the colors. Putting their front page and yours side by side the similarities are unmistakeable (nav position and style, button styles, use of centered line drawing on landing page, some of the copy). Whether it was intentional or not, I would change some things up to avoid confusing people and any legal implications that might have.

And don't forget those buttons with round corners. /s

Sooo... basically they used Bootstrap like every other site?

The thing that's throwing you is the hand-drawn picture of a computer, like Dropbox has. Other than that, it looks like every other site that uses Bootstrap.

I'm sad you were down voted because I felt this was a Dropbox project, too. Especially with the graphic element. It DOES feel a little too familiar. If multiple people's opinions are to be rejected, well...

Yeah my first thought was this is a Dropbox project.

A lot of startups now are using almost the same styling libraries.

Would this be a viable replacement for a support / community forum? I'm a DO customer but never have questions so I'm not sure what their support setup looks like.

Yes it meant to be a better replacement for classic forums that are generally noisy and hard to deal with. Haash works more like Stackoverflow when it comes to questions and stays very simple with tutorials crowdsourcing too.

For using it as a customer support, generally DO encourages you to publish your question on the community instead of going with private chat and support tickets as when the question and answer go public everyone else can benefit from it and most importantly find it in milliseconds when searching on Google.

another reason is that your need for creating docs out of repetitive support queries massively drops as the Q&A is your docs.

Small piece of feedback but I would increase the contrast of your fonts to make it a bit easier to read (it's far from the worst I've seen but if you compare it to the DO community you link to, theirs is easier to read).

Also, the home view eg. https://slack.haash.io/ feels quite wide and is hard to look across to see the 'Date' and 'Views' which are all the way to the right. When you click into a question eg. https://slack.haash.io/151/how-can-remove-files-that-deactiv... this width seems good and is easier to scan.

Overall I like the clean and simple approach. Very little noise to distract you which is nice.

Hi Yalooz, thanks for the insights. Ok we'll work on that

> I would increase the contrast of your fonts to make it a bit easier to read

Changing it from 300 weight Lato to 400 weight of the same font would also help.

Got it, we'll revise it sure,

Just nitpicking a little. It's not the contrast that needs adjustment. The font color is almost black which should give sufficient contrast on a white background.

The font width is very thin however, and it would make it more legible to increase the font width in the body text.

Nice idea, I like it. Not sure about the name at all. Sounds like marijuana distribution as as service :).

Hahahah, Illegal Substances as a Service aka ISAS. It's a metaphor from Haashs on ruby, a collection of data :)

Well that would be profitable from day one...

Guaranteed!

I second thinking about the name, again.

How do you get marijuana from haash? I know the word "hash" in marijuana terms, but I associate the word more with hashing a password (or maybe hash browns) than with drugs.

I like the name. At least I remembered it easily enough that I was able to give the name to a coworker 1hr later. To me it sounds related to hashing passwords and to the DigitalOcean inspiration, which is enough to remember it. People will remember it, it's short, the domain name is available, the only drawback is the collision with Ha-ash the music band, and not being at the top of Google when searching for "haash". But that will change, right ;) ?

Yeah we hope so. FYI, the origin of the name go back to our early days with ruby, A hash table (hash map) is actually a data structure used to implement an associative array (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table). Basically a collection of data in our case product information.

Always start with email signup first. Not the other way around. You just lost a ton of potential beta-testers and users on your HN moment.

Got it, We though Twitter & Facebook are a good way to get people easily onboarded and their details filled in effortlessly.

PS: For those afraid of any privacy issues, the permissions are very basic, we do only get your email, avatar and short bio.

Really looking forward to trying this out, but definitely need this first. Seems fine for users, but would rather not force my support team to log in with their social accounts.

We'll add email signup very soon, can you fill in this form so that we let you know https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI . Thank you!

Social accounts are fine for consumer products but many people justifiably don't want to use them for business products. Keeping them separate is a key part of business hygiene.

For me, it's not about the privacy issues. It's that accounts tied to my personal social networks are much harder to transfer/remove/control.

We've put up this form https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI for those who exclusively want to sign up with email. We'll add email sign up very soon and let you know. Thank you!

The UI of your site needs to be a little reworked. I don't want to click on every single FAQ question and get taken to another site, for example. Also, being able to only login with FB or Twitter is not acceptable. There absolutely need to be free accounts, as well as Google Account Logins.

A nice idea, needs some remodel and some smoothing out edges.

Thank you feedback noted. We'll add email login and fine tune the UI soon

Is there a 'whitelabel' capability with this service? Ie, could I point community.mysite.com at your servers with a cname record? Does anyone else care about this?

Yes you can use your own domain name with a CNAME. Email me at malih.soufian at gmail.com once you create your Haash and we'll make the config for you

One thing you may consider is having private or invite only communities. Almost all the offerings out there are for public communities, which leaves in house self help an untapped market.

Yes that's a good way to go to. Although you might hack Haash right now to not show questions and answers to the public, we might consider a sophisticated version of that.

Tried to read the terms and conditions.. got an error [0]

Whilst you are there, the terms and conditions aren't obviously clickable.

Also, would love to be able to sign up with email, but only get Facebook / Twitter auth options. Ironically the tab is titled "Log in with email | Haash"

That aside, I can see this being useful, really like the setup.

0: https://s12.postimg.org/z1cuq8lzh/Screenshot_2016_11_23_14_3...

Same error on haash creation terms too.

Thanks for catching that we'll dig into that

Can you retry now?

Thanks for following up. Still seeing the error.

email is in my profile if you want help troubleshooting.

To create an account, you have to agree to the terms of service:

"By signing up you indicate that you have read and agree to the Terms of the service"

Being a conscientious user, I click through to read what I'm agreeing to and find:

"You do not have permission to perform this operation"

IANAL but I'm pretty sure this won't be legally binding.

Sorry about that, it seems like we misspelled the link

No need to apologize ... I just thought you'd want to know.

$5 a month for the FAQ product? Charge waaaaay more for a product targeted at businesses.

I'm using http://www.question2answer.org/ , how does it compares to it?

Q2A doesn't have: - instant search - Intercom integration - Single Sign-on

In addition One-click setup, Realtime notification, Custom URLs FAQs Tutorials management

And other cool stuff we'll be shipping soon

I don't get this. Is this different than installing a modern OS forum engine?

It's a Q&A which is different from a forum, i will quote Adam Lear [1] from this answer [2] on Stackoverfolw to point out the differences(Stackoverflow being a Q&A)

[quote]

Stack Overflow is not a forum. Forums are largely discussion-based and tend to follow less strict rules about what posts can be like.

On Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general), we require every new thread to be started with a question and every response to that question to be an attempt at answering it.

For example, on a forum you might ask how to run a game in windowed mode. You will get several responses, some of which will be nothing but "oh, I love that game!" or "I haven't played that in a while, wow." You'll be lucky if you get a relevant response. By contrast, on Stack Exchange you'd get practical responses that are 100% relevant to your question.

[end quote]

This model (meaning the Q&A) has been proven to be extremely efficient in managing community driven support. DigitalOcean community https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions is one successful example.

Alongside with the Q&A, DigitalOcean introduced Tutorials crowdsourcing which also proved to be a smart and cost efficient vector of educating customers and sharing knowledge.

What Haash does is letting you create a similar support infrastructure at very low price and in just 3 minutes.

[1] http://meta.stackexchange.com/users/155160/adam-lear [2] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/is-stack-overf...

Do you provide the community pool as well? I have this confusing feeling but that would sound too good :)

Do you mean the stuff to take care of it? We wish we could :) For now it's only the tool

https://buffer.com/ -> https://haash.io/

What do you mean? They are both very different tools, no?

I love the branding on this product, very light and fun, also friendly and catchy. It reminds me of dropbox. Great work, maybe when you make some money you can get a good logo to go with it. Good stuff!

Awesome, glad you liked the design

Cool idea but I would highly suggest that you fix all the misspelled words.

Ok we'll so sorry about that

Isn't the good thing about community support the people who help rather than the tool that's used to run it? You can't build a community of helpful, interested people in 3 minutes.

Yes, but tools matter.

Seems like a great service to help guide users into helping one another (at least more so than just having a separate support email and maybe a knowledge base).

Call it a lack of coffee but I also clicked out of intrigue as to how they were going to slot your site into a community of willing volunteers.

Very funny lol

Not sure what's up with the A/B testing though. Plus pricing seems to change between a slider starting at $29/mo and a flat $5/mo fee.

Oups! sorry about that. Alongside with the support community, we have a FAQs module. The two makes a smart help center (FAQs and community). You ended up on the main help center landing page where there are two pricing schemes . One if you use only FAQs $5/mo and the other if you use both (FAQs and community) starting at $29/mo.

Looks really nice!

Searching is a tad slow but I have seen slower. Maybe implementing ElasticSearch might be a nice idea. Would also result in better search results.

maliman, I found this: "Can I control who can ask and answer on Haash\'s support community?".

It looks like you're not escaping things correctly.

Communities don't seem to work on mobile at all.

Sorry about, we're digging into that

Not a DigitalOcean user here but this looks like StackExhange clone for small online businesses. Is this correct? Very nice and clean.

Yes, the Q&A is Stackoverflow like but the overall support community is DigitalOcean like https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions

YES! I was looking for exactly this last year. I'm so glad somebody found the time to make a product out of it.

Error on your homepage: "our's" should be "ours". :)

Typo in the "A built-in Q&A engine for community support" section..

publicaly -> publicly.

Thanks for catching it

Digital Ocean tutorials are probably the best and simplest ones to follow. Neat idea.

This is actually nicely done.

Thank you!

You had me until I had to use pedo twitter or Fakebook. No thanks.

I don't like DigitalOcean community.

What don't you like about it? (Just curious, I don't have much experience with it myself)

I don't know. Too much duplicated content and unanswered threads. I have to sign in to participate.

All the communities have to deal with that at some point, but that doesn't prevent good value from happening. One thing we did at Haash is letting members know of existing questions while they're typing a new one.

Why?

For those who are interested in creating a more full featured online community, I run HelloBox

https://www.hellobox.co

Haash.io looks simple and nice. HelloBox would be for those looking for other bells and whistles.

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