Would love your feedback on this startup (+ free use) | Hacker News Reader

Would love your feedback on this startup (+ free use)

labslice.com

8 pointsLabSlice4 comments

We have a startup that allows the sharing of machines hosted in the cloud. It can allow some cool stuff, like sharing of virtual POCs and evaluations of enterprise software -- ie. It's a tool that can ultimately increase sales for a business.

I would love some feedback from those stuck at work in the Christmas/NY period :-).

Note 1: Using this product requires Amazon EC2 Access Keys, as you are using the Amazon datacenter environment.

Note 2: I would like to extend an offer of completely free usage to anyone from HN that finds this product useful and provides us helpful feedback.

BTW, this tool was recently announced as a semi-finalist in the Amazon AWS Startup Competition, which I am sure others here were part of. Some startups asked me questions about this comp, so happy to respond to those queries here as well.

Open articleView on HN

In my career I've never encountered an IT lab so your product isn't clear as to what it does/replaces. I suspect I'm not your target audience, but I feel that under all buzzwords there are real problems shared across businesses. Try to find and use those problems as a starting point rather than language which might limit you to established ways of thinking.

I feel like some example use cases on the homepage might be helpful, perhaps as a short illustrated video or slide show. I'm not quite sure how this product will benefit me from a quick skim. What's the difference between a "lab" and a regular AMI?

Lab environments are places were you can play with machines -- eg. customer POC, product evaluation, training environments etc. The objective is to move those lab environments to the cloud, for certain customer use cases.

We use regular AMIs. What we do is add management around it to make it into the 'lab' type environment. For example, we offer policies to help control costs, we can allow you to share an AMI simply by sending an email and we offer a multi-user environment for all employees within a company. These are all features that aren't readily available in the off-the-shelf EC2 environment.

This is a great idea - any company that does training or demos should be interested in this kind of thing. I was thinking about trying to put together a product around this area, but of course, you know the drill :)

My old employer needs virtualized labs for MS Project teaching - email me and maybe I can arrange a meeting with them.

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