Growing a SaaS: Avoid Confusing Dual Offers | Hacker News Reader

Growing a SaaS: Avoid Confusing Dual Offers

whalepages.com

58 pointsSaaS_Growth13 comments

Hi, our company (https://fanout.io) was the one that was interviewed here. The formatting of the article seems a little messed up. Hopefully they fix that.

For those curious about the technical specifics of our two offerings, we had (and still have) both a hybrid proxy/broker system and a basic JSON messaging system. The proxy system is the reason we started the company. However, we built the JSON system so we could compete directly with companies like Pusher and PubNub.

In old versions of our websites, we tended to highlight the JSON system over the other. For example, in 2014, the "Simple" category was promoted first: https://web.archive.org/web/20140207193606/https://fanout.io...

In 2015, we changed it use a left/right flow. However, the proxy system was still branded as advanced: https://web.archive.org/web/20150315032351/https://fanout.io...

Today, the proxy system is the only one we promote on the site. In order to reach that point, we had to figure out how to make the proxy system more usable. We've succeeded at this by creating very fancy integration libraries, such as our Django library: https://docs.fanout.io/docs/django-quickstart

Following on from your links, if I understand it correctly, Pushpin: https://pushpin.org/docs/about/ is essentially an open source version of your service that you support (I presume you alluded to this in the interview as "OSS is a good driver of traffic for us").

I believe that is a great model for smaller SaaS companies to follow, as it reduces a lot of the risks ("use our service to reduce your time to market. If you don't like it later on, here's your out."). Great stuff!

"here's your out" is a good way of putting it. :)

When I'm on the buyer side, often one of my top concerns is understanding how I could potentially stop using a thing. Usually this comes down to selecting tools based on open technology.

Kind of disappointing they didn't go more into detail about the dual offers touted in the title.

That's actually a really good point. I'm actually going to ask the team at Fanout to provide more detail and I'll get it added to the site ASAP.

A beefed up response to the "dual offering" was just added to the interview.

The low contrast text on this site is impossible for me to read comfortably. Gave up trying to read it.

In-your-face ads are so annoying. How on earth someone upvoted this?

Probably had ad blockers

I assume the upvoters managed to overcome the massive obstacle of clicking once to hide the advert, went on to read the article anyway, and decided it was worth even the major inconvenience of that extra click to other readers.

I saw no ads. Maybe privacy badger killed them. (I don't run a real ad blocker.)

The technology behind it is really old, but it was new to me, worth checking out.

Basically you can implement websocket like functionality, without using websockets. Super simple and robust realtime messaging from your php server code to your JS frontend, without dependencies.

Search for: text/event-stream

Oh god, this reminds me of ... what was it? 2004? with CGI and streaming HTML with multipart?

Glad to see that what was a horrible hack back then is now at least a proper standard. Thanks!

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