Review my startup, Lettur | Hacker News Reader

Review my startup, Lettur

lettur.com

16 pointsRobMcCullough23 comments

Anonymous message boards can be fun sites but I'm not exactly sure this in itself could really be considered a startup. Is there something I'm missing?

Well, I called it a weekend project until I got to debugging. Just kidding, I am pushing the anonymous part as it is a bit of a buzz word these days. I am in the process of reworking the UI, and may re-brand as more of a simple web publishing solution.

I think there is a ton of potential use cases. Eventually I want to give the users full control over the page style, or possible offer different page templates. This will allow anyone to publish a totally customizable webpage in minutes.

While there are no ads now, monetization will come from advertising in the future. Or, possibly a small charge per page to have advertisement removed. This could be purchasable by either the author, or a reader.

We'll see where it goes.

Attractive site.

One point, though... the kind of people who place value on anonymity are probably also the kind of people who disallow Javascript, Google APIs, etc.

Just sayin'. :-)

And would also likely not wish to pay to have advertisements removed, lest a payment carrier have their information.

It seems like you don't really have a direction and you're just using the "anonymous" buzzword and hoping to hit something.

You're limited in terms of monetization as no one will be paying you and leaving a money trail to themselves if the entire principle is to be anonymous.

What's special about this as opposed to just creating a tumblr account using fake information? There they already have control over the styles. How are you obscuring user information on your end. In other words, is it anonymous, but you have records that could identify every user on your server?

To me, the acid test is that if you haven't formed a separate legal entity for this site then it's not a startup. Of course, someone can do this for their weekend project of building a lemonade stand so perhaps it's best said that it's a necessary but not sufficient condition.

The claim for anonymous blogging would not be held because of the limitation of TCP/IP, where the origin of packets, without special treatment, would be exposed to your server. Nobody can be certain that your server is not compromised at any time (which we cannot even assume that you are not spying on the logs, for example), a claim in such degree may actually got believed by less technical users of your app.

Please consider this as anonymity may be live or death situation to some people in the world.

In response to this, and a few similar comments I intend to add a privacy policy that explains, in detail, the level of protection we offer. I imagined this site as more of a fun communication tool that a resource for whistle-blowers. I definitely do not want to put anyone in danger. I appreciate the input.

Don't use a blacklist to filter out XSS attacks.

Here's a valid title:

"></title></head><body onclick="a" ondblclick="a" onload="alert(1)" onmousedown="a" onmousemove="_onmousemove_" onmouseout="a" onmouseover="asdf" onmouseup="a" onkeydown="a" onkeypress="a" onkeyup="a" onunload="a">

The other stuff is just there to mess up your filter. Just escape <, >, ", and '. And then test it to make sure there aren't other clever attacks.

grr...ty

Thanks a ton for the feedback. I am paying close attention to what is being said. The more feedback I get, the more I can adapt to what people really desire from a service like Lettur.

Also, @tansey you're right. It does look like we have the same idea going. I can honestly say I haven't seen thrsti before. I am sure we will find our separate paths, and I welcome the friendly competition =)

Absolutely Rob. Happy to collaborate also, if you're interested. Out of curiosity, what is lettur implemented in?

LAMP

So... it's just like thrsti? (www.thrsti.com)

Full disclosure - I am helping with thrsti, we are deploying a ton of new features over the coming weeks, but lettur seems very similar to our initial release. It's very interesting what people will post just to get it off their chest.

should change name cause it sounds like thirsty, but u spell it differently. Would be impossible for me to correctly type the sites name at the first try.

Thanks for the tip. Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the name personally. My co-founder picked it and had the initial code already started when I met him, so we just went with it.

You're assuming that the OP has heard of thrsti. Shockingly, not everyone on the internet has heard of or cares what you're working on.

I wasn't trying to say he should have heard of it. Sorry if it came off that way. I was actually honestly asking if he had any different features, since I was on my iPhone at the time and didn't have time to check out the site.

I think this is cool. I'm still not sure what my use case is though...

I think the term 'startup' is being thrown around too much these days. Don't get me wrong, I do see potential in your idea but it's probably a bit soon to be considered a startup.

wait, this is a startup?

How will you make money? ;)

Err.. Okay.

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