Show HN: Pingpoint – Business logic alerts to the right person at the right time | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Pingpoint – Business logic alerts to the right person at the right time

pingpoint.io

29 pointsshaharsol20 comments

I'm... still confused as to what this is. It sends emails, based on events? The FAQ link at the bottom leads to nowhere, there's no explicit "Pingpoint is an API that does XYZ", and nothing beyond the front-page multipage. Your website has virtually unlimited space - you should use it to explain what I'm actually looking at.

I agree the home page is still a bit sketchy. Sign up though and you land on a more detailed page explaining the API usage.

$5/mo for an out-of-my-control ActionMailer setup? And I'd be limited to 100 events/mo?

I mean, we're doing this already for registration on our platform and it took me 45 minutes to setup in Rails for a range of events, and I can style the output to send to the human C-levels.

Not sure what this will accomplish, hopefully you can fill me in on the value prop.

Whats the added value of sendgrid over gmail api? of zencoder over ffmpeg? you can do everything on your own, of course. All depends on your abilities and resources. This is something I found myself doing in many apps, and thought to spin it off to a separate and independent service for the joy of others. It can save them from [usually] ugly coding, it adds a central and single place of mngmt for all this notification management, both for events and for recipients. IMO its useful and worth it but I'm of course totally biased.

But in this case you _literally_ have to do exactly the same amount of work as you'd do while doing it yourself.

I think the value you provide isn't the notification, but the surrounding data.

Consider that my app may not have deep integration into Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever. I just have a simple signup page that accepts the user's name, email, and a password. Where your app could shine is if I could send the information I do have on the user to your API endpoint, and it takes care of going out and figuring out who this person is.

"Hey, the email address this person used to sign up for your service is also tied to a Twitter account with 1.5m followers" or "A person with the same name as this user is a tech writer for Gizmodo" are things that could be very important, but that most individual devs or small shops aren't going to have the resources to discover for all of their users.

This sounds great, thanks for the idea. It's like adding rapportive to it.

Clearbit offers that data and more: https://clearbit.com.

Unfortunately, the example on the homepage shows the output of this system as an email, which... I could already call `sgMail.send(msg)` instead of `pingpoint.pint(msg)` and get emails, so starting with the example, the "central and single place of management" that you describe here isn't being demonstrated at all.

I appreciate the title for being successfully attention grabby, but it oversells and under-delivers. The value of Zencoder over ffmpeg is I don't have to get lost in the weeds of encoding profiles like I do with fighting command line arguments to ffmpeg, just follow their recommendation. Part of their service is I trust them to deal with that.

With this service, as demoed, I still have to spend all my time writing the code for what an "important signup" is. Based on the premise of "never overlooking a Mark Zuckerberg sign-up again", I'm not going to do that work (because I have other things to work on) and thus will overlook signups by Mark Zuckerberg.

It's just not clear the benefit of this service when the example show me still having to do the work of coding "important", and the output of the system is an email.

Still, there's promise - if I gave Pingpoint user sign-up data, it could webhook back into my system when there were important people/companies signing up.

(Other things: dashboard is currently throwing an exception -

    /app/views/users/dashboard.ejs:3 1| <div class="page-header"> 2| <div class="page-title"> >> 3| <h3>Welcome <%=user.google.display_name%></h3> 4| </div> 5| </div> 6| Cannot read property 'display_name' of undefined

Another recommendation about the laziniess of developers... the API key page shows example usage with the API key baked in... go a step further and provide a curl command I can copy and paste.)

Tomorrow the PM asks to be getting push notifications to some internal admin app instead of emails. Then a day later he wants his deputee to be getting emails as well. How easy would it be to modify the sg.sendmail to comply? How easy would it be via the pp interface?

I can see the value where you would need to fire email alerts from different parts of your stack, and have a central place to control and config them. What happens next, for example, when you need to send alerts from frontend events? Or from other non-Rails parts? Duplicate code and logic?

Looking at the documentation I would have to figure out who a VIP is. Then call an API method. The service converts the payload I send into an email. The example in the documentation looks at the last name of the user ("Zuckerberg") only. I don't think the service solves the use-case described in the title.

I admit the title is a little scoopy but it needs to grab attention. As for identifying celebrity signups, if they sign up via facebook for instance, you can quickly count their followers count for instance and alert if it's >X.

I am not sure who will use this but I solve this problem for myself by sending alerts to slack. It's just a simple POST request with my event/message, I don't think it can get simpler than that.

I think your biggest issue is the documentation. I can barely tell what it is based on some of the comments here sounds like it does something completely different.

edit: I see you have to sign up first. Come on dude. Just show the documentation.

I'm curious if you already got some subscribers for you service. Did you?

paid subscribers? honestly not yet. Just have a few trials out of some tiny marketing efforts, nothing serious. If this goes to HN front page though then we can consider this launch.

Is this a zapier for developers? Not sure what it is.

The title feels very clickbatey. I did overlook the Show HN part but thought it was going to be an interesting article, not an event system for emails.

Yes, we've updated the title to a representative phrase from the linked page.

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