I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is. | Hacker News Reader

I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

theappifier.com

342 pointsgozman191 comments

You need to move this site to a host that can handle the load today. I'm getting timeouts and finally got the home page to load. I can't get any of the other pages to load either.

I can't even get on the site.

Sorry guys! We weren't expecting this kind of load. I'm doing everything I can to redirect traffic to http://engine.theappifier.com

HN has grown a good deal in the past year or so. It has quite a big "slashdot effect" now :)

Has anyone who's been hackernews'd done an analysis on the load numbers?

Back in the day there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_refer...

Rob "CmdTaco" did some analysis - http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/

John Sheehan mentioned numbers the other day too - https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480

Seems like the "Hacker News 10K" would be an approximate general number or its going to approach that soon.

I never got 10K from Hacker News alone, but on my blog I got 10K from HN combined with Reddit, with the links being submitted at aprox. the same time, for 3 articles I wrote.

My website is static, with no MySQL or PHP to speak of (by means of Jekyll), right now hosted on an AWS micro instance, served by Nginx. Prior to this it was hosted on Heroku's free plan, with offloading of static assets to GAE. For free and it didn't even blink.

Seeing how people are talking about caching, load-balancing, clusters, beefy servers and so on, just makes me think how extremely awful and bloated Wordpress is.

I don't think it's fair to conclude that wordpress is awful and bloated based on it performing worse than your setup. Static files and a cdn and no dynamic script are the ultimate optimization. Wordpress compares unfavourably because anything involving dynamic features would compare unfavourably.

In the 36 hours after being on the home page the site had 13.5K visitors, 18K visits.

I got about 12k people through to my blog post "Thanks Louis C.K now here's my dad" post the other day, and then about 4,000 of them clicked through to nickdooley.com (which is on the same server).

I had already increased my MaxClients setting to 120 a few weeks previously when I got about the same number through to "Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti code" post but I forgot that with people downloading those mp3 files, the connections would get held open for much longer so I had to put MaxClients up again to 220 and restart apache at one point (which I'm sure kicked a bunch of people off, some of whom would have abandoned trying to load the site at that point).

With MaxClients set at 220 the site was able to serve pages quickly and reliably the rest of the day as well as allowing roughly 5500 people to download my Dad's music files.

I'm running the site on Apache 2.x on a CentOS VM with php 5.2.x. We don't serve static assets with nginx so it's all coming out of the same apache instance so I have 2GB of RAM on that VM (yes I know I really need to get around to sorting that out).

We have a crappy cache in Decal CMS (which we make and which runs all our sites) right now which still serves pages from PHP but does so from cached content.

At some point we're going to move to using Varnish in front of nginx for static assets so that the only requests that get through to apache are to generate the pages after a site publish and requests where a cookie is present (ie. when someone is actually editing their site) but for now we're able to manage with just the shitty hack we've got in place to served cached documents.

Setting your max clients to 220 on that setup is a terrible idea. You will probably cause the machine to start swapping as there is insufficient memory for each PHP process. It will grind to a slow halt. You should calculate your MaxClients based on the amount of load the machine can actually handle, not the amount you wish it could handle :-)

A conservative estimate of 20MB per PHP process would already put the requirements for 220 of them at over 4GB (twice what you have) and that's not allowing anything for the OS and anything else running on the machine. Its not an exact science figuring out the appropriate MaxClients, but you should find out how much the rest of the machine needs, look up the average Apache process size (ps), divide the available memory by that and then reduce it a little. Use this as you starting point for figuring out the MaxClients. Keep an eye on the available free memory for a while (vmstat) and gradually up that limit until you reach a comfortable working level for the setting.

Yeah - what's weird is that it didn't start swapping. I haven't really looked into it, but maybe because so many of the processes were downloading those MP3 files they didn't take up as much memory (although that sounds wrong as I'm pretty sure as far as Apache is concerned, a process is a process regardless of what's being downloaded).

At any rate it worked fine and was maxed at one point so hell knows why. I increased it gradually and was looking at the free memory etc. but it never exhausted it - but ps ax | grep httpd showed circa 200 processes.

I've put it back down to something safer now ;) when I have some spare time I'm going to try and figure out if/why it didn't appear to run out of memory when it looked like it should have.

But then again when I have some spare time I really just want to set up a better hosting environment that doesn't rely so much on apache.

Here's a screen grab that was done:

http://www.klonix.org/jan2012/appifier.com-20120111-104926a-...

Server will be back online in a few minutes. We're scaling up.

Trying to reach you via e-mail -- www.wpengine.com can help with your site. We specialize in high traffic!

I told Trafton and company about this because I'm working on-site at WPEngine this week and this looked very relevant to their interests. They specifically want to rescue your site (gratis) so that they can use it as an example of "Wordpress hosting is hard to do right. You don't want it to blow up on launch day. We're very experienced with not blowing up on launch day."

i.e. He doesn't want to sell you on WPEngine, he wants to save your bacon and use the bacon-saving to sell other people on WPEngine ;)

Jason Cohen (their CEO) says "We'd handle the migration immediately and give him a year of free hosting to get a case study out of this."

You should add to your marketing more info about how you are good in handling traffic and most importantly why. In a way that will make sense with both tech and non tech types. (Non tech has no idea what aws is or a cdn is for example). I've looked at your site a few times (even right now) and that isn't the thing that stuck in my mind from your marketing. The takeaway for me was "expert at WP" not necessarily "expert handling of traffic and here's why". I'm not saying it's not mentioned. I just think that point has to be driven home better.

We're (literally) working on a website refresh right now, which hits that and other points. Sample factoid: One of the customers was on 20/20 recently and sustained 2,500 requests per second for 15 minutes.

Boring technical details: Varnish caching, automatic load balancing, redundant servers (beefy physical hardware to avoid poor disk performance on virtualized systems), "Death to KeepAlive", etc.

(Ooh, it is live now: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/ )

That's great. I actually read the whole page.

I would add an additional bullet to the home page adapting a key statement from that page where they said "sit back and be happy you're not having to do all this yourself."

Why our engine never stops

-----------------------------

(Hey, why are we so fast, secure and scalable?)

Sit back and be happy that you're not having to do all this yourself

Linked to the "our-infrastructure page".

Thanks for the suggestions. We're still in the process of updating things, but we'll make "Compelling for non-technical users who just want things to not break, comprehensive for technical people who want to understand we're not snow-jobbing them." a priority.

I just grep'd the log and saw that in the three hours since I posted the screen grab there were 1610 unique IP's. So obviously many more people were not able to reach the site.

http://twitter.com/#!/cwood/status/154373999382630400

These guys? Can't say it sounds very promising.

Kudos to you for following your dream, but I do have to say I'm fully against making it easier for people to move that which should stay on the web to native apps. We have web browsers for a reason.

hey mark!

it was strange to me too at first, but we built it in response to the fact that we kept on getting asked about getting onto the "app store" by small business owners who were going digital and building Wordpress sites. Everyone wants an app nowadays - so we're filling a niche.

In the end, browsers are great but mobile safari doesn't yet let you have access to everything you can get in Cocoa. We want to open those features up to anyone with a Wordpress site.

Mike

Mike, not the OP but which features are you opening up? This question is not attacking you, i'm just genuinely curious. I'm in the WordPress business (http://thewp.co) and would love to offer this to my clients!

> we kept on getting asked about getting onto the "app store" by small business owners who were going digital and building Wordpress sites.

Ugh, that makes my stomach turn, but I know it's true. And I don't fault you for capitalizing on it, but man is it irritating.

> Everyone wants an app nowadays

Every merchant wants an app, but their customers couldn't care less. Not that it affects your business model in any way.

I feel like everyone with content on the Internet wants an app. My old co-founder wasted about 3 months worth of time talking with an Obj-C dev and drawing screens because he was obsessed with having an iPhone app. His proof that we needed it? Every time someone saw our icon on his iPhone (which just launched our site in Safari) they'd ask if we actually had an app. These people wouldn't even use our site in the first place, I'm not sure what made him think they'd use an iPhone app instead, yet he was dead set on getting one into the app store.

i don't think his intention is to move content, but rather just to make that content more easily accessible and visible to mobile users.

the problem with mobile websites is that they have to compete with the app store. if an iphone user wants a train schedule, are they more likely to open up a browser and search google for "train schedule iphone" and scroll around clicking on random sites? or would they just open the app store, search for "train schedule" and easily see all available apps, ranked and reviewed, easily added to their home screen with a single click?

i run such a mobile website for metra trains (http://metra.jcs.org/) but because i have no native app in the ios or android stores, it doesn't see much traffic. i've thought about developing an app that just embeds a browser and goes to the site, just so it can be listed in the app store.

apple does in fact have a listing of mobile web apps at https://www.apple.com/webapps/ but i doubt most iphone owners even know it exists. it's also not very easy to use from mobile devices, strangely enough.

When I want to look at the train schedule, I just touch the bookmark on my home screen, which takes me to the web page with the schedule.

And if every iPhone user understands bookmarks as well as you do, perhaps this service will fail.

But I hear rumors that a lot of App Store apps get lots of downloads, even if they're nothing but links to existing web sites wrapped in an app shell. Many customers don't understand bookmarks.

I think it's genius. WP site owners don't care about channel redundancy, they just want a push button method of putting their content into as many channels as possible. Catering to the "Look Ma, I made a mobile app!" crowd is a big market.

Although I agree - I'm not sure this is monetizable.

The real question - are these people willing to pay $500 to say "Look ma...."?

compared to the cost of an IOS dev. I'd say it's definitely worth a punt.

Supply and demand. As long as there is a demand for native apps then it doesn't really matter where we think things "should stay." I think this is a great step toward making Wordpress sites more accessible via mobile devices. Good work!

Have you run this past Apple with regards to their App Store approval policy? I'd be worried about clause 2.12:

"2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"

I think his business provides much more than just a url and a webview. The offline pages, organized layout and category browser is much more than what that clause is made to prevent.

The unfortunate thing about having a business that is at the mercy another business (such as iphone apps) is that apple can at any point block anything coming from OP's site. But thank god for competition.

I think the "web sites bundled as apps" is speaking more of an app that consists only of a webkit view which loads some web site. A single-site browser app.

There's a service called Tapatalk that does something very similar to what Appifier does, but for forums, and has a number of generated "native forum apps" in the App Store.

I'd be more worried about the Sandbox app getting pulled. It basically presents as its own app environment, which is a huge no-no with Apple and I'm surprised it even was approved.

This is a very legitimate concern. As an app developer who has had an app rejected 6 months ago on similar grounds (section 10.6), it is something that should be tested. Upon my app being rejected, I added things like push notifications and it still got rejected for the original reason.

For your reference this was the complete description of the rejection:

=======

10.6

We found the user interface of your app is not of sufficient quality to be appropriate for the App Store. Apps that provide a poor user experience are not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.

Specifically, we noticed your app does not take advantage of the iOS platform. It would be appropriate to add iOS specific UI and functionality.

Please evaluate whether you can make the necessary revisions to improve the user experience of your app.

Alternatively, you may wish to consider building a web app using HTML5. HTML5 is the major new version of HTML and enables audio and video to play natively in the browser without requiring proprietary plug-ins. Using HTML5, web apps look and behave like native iPhone and iPad apps, and using HTML5's Offline Application Cache, your web apps work even when the device is offline. With web apps, you have flexibility to deliver as much or as little functionality as you desire.

If you wish to build an HTML5 web app, you can do so and distribute it directly from your web site. It is not appropriate to resubmit an HTML5 web app to the App Store.

To get started with iPhone or iPad web apps, please review Getting Started with iPhone Web Apps.

For a description of the HTML elements and attributes you can use in Safari on iPhone, check out Safari HTML Reference: Introduction.

My biggest worry for gozman is that he'll start seeing rejections for template based apps. Apple has been cracking down on these kinds of apps even for very high profile companies. For example, one company I know of has a template based app for every major college in the app store right now. The only difference between them is the icon, splash page, and theme colors inside the app along with distinct data feeds. Apple is threatening to remove all their apps unless they do something to differentiate them further.

Nice idea. I'd be interested to know (and if you're willing to share with the community):

1. What was your job.

2. How much did you get paid.

3. How much savings(runway) do you have to support this product.

Thanks!

1. I was a software engineer that got an MBA and was doing management consulting. 2. Over 80k / year 3. My runway is private, but we financed ourselves by taking on short-term iOS/Wordpress dev/design consulting gigs to stay fed.

It would be interesting to see more details in a blog post about your transition, such as whether you started working on this before quitting your job, how long since you quit your job, what the makeup of your team is, how you met your team, etc. This looks really cool by the way, good job on launching!

EDIT: Correcting typos

Thanks. Did you change your standard of living to to follow your dream? If so, to what extent? Are you now eating raman? Also, do you have any dependents (wife, children)? Oh, and how old are you?

Sorry, I know you are really interested in sharing your product but many of us want to know what people are willing to give up to chase their dreams.

Thanks again.

+1 "many of us want to know what people are willing to give up to chase their dreams."

I did change my standard of living somewhat - I didn't travel this year as I usually do, cut out most useless expenses and took public transit whenever I could. We need surprisingly little to live when you think about it. At the same time, I made sure to take on small paid projects to keep fed.

I don't have any dependants, but I am married and contribute to the household financially. That hasn't stopped, I just had to take it into account when planning my runway.

I'm 28. At this point it's an experiement, If I can turn this into a business I will, if not, I'll dive back into the salaried way of life. It's a great way to live, but I just had to give my dream a shot.

get lots of exercise too! hit the gym at least 3 times a week, one hour per session.

Totally love your suggestion. I myself am on my own Startup for over 4 years now. Once I realized that Startups should be treated like marathons, I myself started running. I run about 5km, five or six days a week. To me running has had a big contribution in staying healthy and coping with stress.

I hope he's not eating ramen! Staying healthy is important. Good luck!

You have to put up a blog post on this...

Completely agree, it'd make for a very informative read. You quit your job, worked hard, and now have something impressive to show that many people seem to want to purchase. I'd say you're on the right track!

I'm in a similar situation (quit high-paying job, following startup dream).

May I ask how you broke into dev/design consulting? I'll have to go that way too, and soon. But I'm still a bit mystified about where one finds consulting gigs... Places like ODesk/Elancer?

+1 - best fastest way to find freelance jobs? edit - not sure why this was downvoted 4 times - but to elaborate on my question - what were the most rewarding gigs - in terms of ease of getting hired & finding them, most money, learning stuff that was relevant, expanding network, bbb

the best way is to expand your network and go to networking events. go to mobile meetups, tech meetups, business meetups, etc. From there you will notice a lot more opportunities will arise. This is also assuming you are good at something. Wether it's development / design or making pancakes. You have to be good at something before someone else will bring you on as a consultant / freelance.

Networking by and large will be your best bet. An odesk may get you some short-term work, but it won't necessarily be all that high paying. With a decent rep on odesk or elance you might get some good gigs, but those will probably develop in to non-odesk relationships with clients ("going direct").

I don't know many people who use odesk who pay more then $20-$25/hour, and it's typically for smaller type stuff. There are people who get "I want a full copy of XYZ for $500" and a number of people who bid on that, but there's "real" projects in there too sometimes. I just have a hard time looking at elance/odesk sites as something that 'real' companies use for 'real' (read: valuable) projects.

I didn't cover "pricing" in my post since it all varies based on your situation, your location, your skills, and the project itself. (crappy project/crappy client = ++rates).

I know a few YC founders that pay $70/hr - $80/hr for really great Rails devs, iOS devs, and front-end engineers that are not local to SF/PA (mid-west devs or southeast devs). I think the price for an experienced Rails freelancer in a big metro is around $100/hr - $125/hr.

On the design side, I have friends in DC, SF, and Chicago that are top notch visual designers and have worked on big "brand" sites, and depending on how busy they are, they'll charge anywhere from $75/hr - $80/hr. An art director I know will not go below $150/hr bc it's not worth his time to do more work outside of his day job.

But there are price inefficiencies everywhere, and if someone fresh out of college doesn't really understand how good of a designer they are or the going rates for freelancers, then you can find someone who's good for your MVP for $25/hr.

All of the above assumes you are pricing projects on a straight hourly rate (legalese = "Time & Material Rates").

Be warned that most small business owners will want firm-fixed pricing (ie - "I want a fully redesigned site for $a,000"). In that case, you'll need to figure how long it will take for you to complete the project, add a 10% - 15% buffer for client changes/indecision, and then settle on a firm-price of $x,000.

It takes patience. I left a finance to learn to code a couple of years ago, but only got smart about networking last spring. I'm just now beginning to bring in some freelance / consulting jobs. You just have to keep at it -- and deliver on time, on budget, on spec.

I don't know how the author of this post found consulting gigs, but the way my friends did it and the way I did (before going back to a design/dev agency) was by first and foremost deciding on a the type consulting service we're going to offer and then partnering with other freelancers on projects. Another friend did two "free" gigs to build a portfolio and have references to send prospective clients to, and that got the ball rolling.

If dev, then will you be providing back-end dev? Front-end dev? What language/framework? Any CMS preference? Or blogging tool preference?

If design, are you helping out with everything from UX/strategy to branding/visual design, or are you just taking black and white wireframes (UX design) and turning them into fully baked/designed photoshop files?

If marketing/SEO, then what sub services are you offering? Social media management? Blogging/ghost writing? Pay-per-click management? SEO backlinks?

Two things to remember. 1) Most small business owners aren't going to roll the dice if they are your first client unless you can sell like the best of them. 2) Your reputation is your source for new business/referral business, if you are poor in one or multiple areas (let's just say design and marketing) but are an expert in one area (let's just say back-end Rails dev + front-end HTML/CSS/jQuery), then focus on providing services/consulting where you are the strongest.

The quickest way to start is to either to free work/discounted work for a family/friend or find a designer that doesn't do what you do and figure out way to partner/work together. If they get a client, partner up to do dev component. You could also find a marketing/seo freelancer and help them setup custom Facebook tabs for their clients.

Once you have your initial client or two, then put up a site and list it at sortfolio and other relevant directories. From there, blog often about topics that you are familiar with, topics that are relevant to the community you are trying to help, and make sure you are relevant. Go to meetups, attend local events, be part of the community, and don't be shy. If you are shy, you are not going to be heard. If you aren't heard, you aren't going to be considered for business opportunities.

28, an MBA and 80k / year. I must be doing something very wrong.

Me too. 29, no MBA and not even half of that :-)

I'm 26 and I make 160k in financial services. Its enough for me and a girlfriend to afford a 600 sqft loft.

80k will get you 5 roommates and bedroom with a curtain.

In San Francisco 250k to 300k/y is high paid. 100k-150k is making it, 80k would be in the low paid arena.

Nah,you can get a nice 1bd in SF for $2100 a month and save $1k/mo

"San Francisco ranks third of American cities in median household income with a 2007 value of $65,519." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Demographics

You're full of shit.

Meh, quit whining. Try 32k in Boston and get back to me about "low paid"

I've got a 90m^2 flat next to the beach, a car, a girlfriend who has no income since November, a cute dog :-) and money in the bank. All paid with my less than 40k€/year income. Of course this is not The Valley, this is Barcelona.

I didn't know that living there was so expensive, I'm sorry for you :-(

I'd love to hear about your experience as a tech person getting your MBA.

Also, great idea and website. Oddly enough I just heard a presentation yesterday about MobileIgniter, who amongst several other things, does something similar. They did the TechStars iOS app, which does exactly the same thing - pull blog entries from WordPress. Nice work!

Since when is 80k / year "high-paying"? Hopefully the per diems were high enough to compensate the salary level.

I don't know what you consider high paying but to me that seems like high pay

You have to realize that in Quebec, Canada, that's actually a high-level salary.

If you are living in NYC, nah.

Depending on where you live that can be considered to be in the higher scale as far as pay grades go - and obviously in other places it might be lower or average. You can't only go by what people are paid where you live.

Whoa. Let's not forget that 80k/year puts a person among the top 0.78% richest people in the world. [1] Just offering a bit of perspective.

[1] http://www.globalrichlist.com/how.html

It's a cool idea with a few players in the field. Did a quick check on a WP Blog and the application sandbox keeps crashing.

I only have two concerns. You are entirely at the mercy of Apple with this product. There isn't too much customization available so Apple may at some point decide to reject your customers apps. A lifetime membership might not help without the code for customization if you ever go offline. The second is the other players in here. I think people are going to want a lot more customization.

Either way, you've selected a market with a lot of demand. WPTouch and http://www.wiziapp.com/ are the main competitors I can think of. (WPTouch built into an app of course)

Genius, I'd invest all my money into this idea. From a marketing perspective:

1. big market (a lot of wordpress sites run by small & medium businesses that would love an easy and cheap app) 2. practically sells itself (costs, ease of use, service) 3. if possible try to roll it out both ways (drupal and android)

Questions:

1. What about more complex and altered WP sites? 2. What will your to-market strategy be? More specifically: target customer

Again, a great idea and a very good feel for what the market needs. Congratulations!

Interesting idea, but can't get it to work. I created a test account and added 2 WordPress blogs to it: TechCrunch and the official Wordpress blog (http://wordpress.org/news/). Went through the steps, downloaded the sandbox app on my iPhone 4S and tried to preview them. App instantly crashes when loading both sites. Is it just that these blogs don't have the required JSON plugins (possible)? Or is it that they have too much content for Appifier to handle? Either way, an abrupt crash doesn't inspire confidence. Do you have any sample blogs we can try to test this with?

Sorry Magsafe, you need to have JSON API installed. This is written on the site.

My point was the app should never crash, for whatever reason. You need to handle failures gracefully.

(read as: this toaster didn't fail gracefully when i tossed it in the tub)

You're right. We didn't anticipate this kind of traffic. We're working on it. Thanks for letting us know. :)

That plugin is a core part of their app. You have to download and install it. You can't just put in someone else's blog URL; they don't have the appifier plugin running. WordPress doesn't have a JSON API built in, that's something he created.

For those having trouble with the site, I ended up looking at Google's cached copy and then finding the walkthrough youtube video that you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/embed/QkwDDB0I5_g?autoplay=1

That video is really well done. The product looks slick too. I do wonder how much demand there is to read individual blogs on an iOS device? Would an RSS reader meet the demand better?

First, congratulations!

The site looks good and the product seems interesting and useful.

Unfortunately, you're getting hit hard with HN traffic being number one on the front page currently and thus things are slow.

However I was able to load the index page and watch the introductory video.

One thing that bothers me is I clicked on your Terms of Service link and was prompted to login: you might want to consider making as much available to logged out users as possible and esp things like terms of service which I may want or even need to read before signing up.

Otherwise, best of luck!

Sorry about that. We redirected all of our traffic from our marketing vps to our appserver (heroku) to handle the load. Check back tomorrow for the terms or send us an email.

I don't want to knock your product, because I know site owners will love it, but does anyone actually like and use these simple apps that wrap a website?

Yes. I do, for one. For a site you like to use every day, being able to just tap and swipe to get to everything is so much better than constantly pinch zooming, aiming for little links, waiting for the page to load, pinch zooming, aiming for little links, etc. of a website.

of a website.

Of a non-mobile optimized website.

Congratulations on the move to startup life! Great looking website and nice user experience for publishing.

Posting the service on HN is one of those things I wish I had thought of a few months ago, I still have a lot to learn - thankfully a friend sent me this link since he knew what we were doing. TainoApp (http://gettainoapp.com) does all that (Wordpress to native iOS app), plus full platform support for Windows Phone 7, and Android (wrapping up Blackberry and MeeGo support as of this posting) you can see it at work here - http://goo.gl/nuZcm. So far, it seems we're the only ones that can do Windows Phone 7 - hopefully someone in the community can point out other projects we haven't heard from that already does it, so that we can continue learning from others.

We have the tech specs ready for implementing support for most of the CMSs out there (Tumblr, Posterous, and others including Tresite - heavily used in latinamerica), but decided to focus on Wordpress installs first since the install base was larger we were able to churn out an mvp faster since we were more familiar with the wp architecture.

Our focus had been on engaging one on one with customers and quietly testing out different revenue models - but this kind of torrent of feedback would have been truly welcome. It wasn't until the start of the new year that we decided to test an introductory offer for the platform - aimed at the latinamerican market first (it's google translate friendly - http://goo.gl/Y5JZL). I felt we were missing a lot of the features I wanted, so I held back from doing a public push to get feedback - that was a big mistake. Seeing everyone's comments for Appifier has been an uplifting experience - so keep at it!!! One of the toughest things I've felt is being out there and being open to scrutiny by other startups. Maybe we can chat sometime and talk a bit more about some of the mistakes we've done along the way - drop me a line at jramphis at gettainoapp dot com. Best of luck!

Don't you think you should've posted this in a seperate link? It seems like you're trying to hang off Appifier's coattails...

Sites that hit the homepage on HN crash so often I dream of quitting my job to launch a startup whose sole service is to HN-proof your site </jest>

Where do i sign up?

I love these people who are voting me down cause I am giving positive feedback on HN. LOL!

What feedback? All I see is "+1" ? There are upvote buttons for a reason.

Ah ok. Let the hate continue.

I downvote people who respond "+1" for the same reason that I downvote people who respond "LOL OMG ME TWO!" To improve the signal:noise ratio. Downvoting you was and continues to be, the correct course of action to achieve this aim.

I actually agree with you, once you bothered explaining.

Hey - if there was a low-to-no effort way of signing up for something to handle a one day burst in traffic then I'd imagine you'd rake in a pile of cash.

Congrats on the launch. I have some feedback, but a random question for you first - did you work at Deloitte in their S&O practice?

Now for the feedback - assuming your audience is a non-tech WordPress user, I'm suggesting that you do A|B testing on the use of "Native App". From experience talking to clients on the marketing team or communications team, most don't know the difference or meaning of "native app". To them, an app is an app is an app - native or not.

The key question that these folks care about is "will my app have a custom icon that represents my brand", "can i submit to the app store", and "will my customer see this icon on their iPhone once they download it?".

So, my hypothesis is that if you strip "native app" from your copy (all of your copy) and just focus "custom app", "custom icons", "app store submission", "WordPress to iPhone", your target audience won't miss a beat and won't blink at "native app".

If you end up testing this out doing A/B tests or user research, I'd love to hear the results.

Cool! I will be using such a service several times this year. Honest question - what makes your service more special than the other services out there that claim to do the same thing?

P.S. I do like the one time charge option... I haven't seen many that have that as an ooption.

Thanks dholowiski!

Here's a few ways that we stand out: * Our apps can be distributed on the app store like all other native iOS apps. You can even charge for these apps and we won't take a penny. * We support push notifications. You can send messages to users of an app as long as they have it installed on their phone. * All content is available offline, even when the phone is in airplane mode. * Our architechture opens up the possibility of more interesting native features (text-to-speech among other things) * You can preview your app on your phone and get a really good feel for how it will look and operate once deployed. * When your app is deployed, you can change its parameters and branding at any time. Changes are updated across your installed base instantly.

Do you include the WP markup in your generated app? Or do you transform the markup into Objective-C code (so no HTML/CSS included in the app)? The latter would be much harder to implement I think.

I'm not sure I see the benefit of converting a website into a pseudo-app, then charging for that app. Users would effectively be paying for the wrapper when the same content is available without charge via a browser. I realize this happens all the time and there are a plethora of site shortcuts-as-apps in the app store, but the fact that they are abundant doesn't make the practice any better.

I'm honestly curious about the use cases for this and what extra value this provides for the user over using the website in a browser.

The site owner wouldn't have to charge for the app (unless I missed something). They just now have a native app for their website. Native app interaction speed and offline use are obvious advantages over using the blog in the mobile browser, so there's definitely value here. And the number of WordPress sites is so huge (over 70 million) that there's undoubtedly a market for this.

Support for push notifications would be a huge plus as well.

It does support push notifications.

Should have clarified - I was trying to say that it having support for push notifications is a huge plus! :)

Unless the app auto-updates its content to be sure it is always in sync with the website, having native app speed and offline use grows increasingly less desirable the farther out you get from the date the app was created. For Wordpress sites one would expect new content daily. If Appifier pulls content and makes it all available offline that's great, until/unless the site being "appified" has new content. Will the app re-roll itself to incorporate that new content for offline and/or native access? If not then an appified site is useless the moment the app is generated.

I’m not questioning whether there is a market for this. I’m questioning the purpose and value to the user if it’s really nothing more than a snapshot of a dynamic site or just a site shortcut.

I don't disagree with your premise, but I do think there's a fair number of people who push wordpress as a CMS rather than a 'blog' as such. Given that, many WP sites are rather static anyway.

I agree on the 'auto update' aspect, but if you only update your CMS once every 2-4 months, it may not be that big a loss if there's no auto update right now.

I saw a demo of mulberry.toura.com and that was a question that came up - auto-updating. Apparently the iTunes store is a bit iffy about updating the apps if the functionality has changed too much, but if it's just content, it should be OK.

You should check out the site when its back up, obviously the app auto updates when new content is published.

It works because you have to install a plugin in your WP blog, which presumably has WP publish/edit hooks etc which notifies an Appifier service, which then pushes to the apps, making sure all content is up to date and available offline. It's a pretty popular, if not the only, design for content surfacing apps.

It is actually not obvious. Now the site is back up I can't find anything that explains how updates are handled, or how offline works. For all I can tell the plugin might just be to build the app... I hope you are right as that is more useful. Some explanation would be good...

If you put a "Pay me a dollar just because you like my site" feature on your wordpress site you will probably not get many dollars. But since people are already comfortable paying small amounts of money via itunes and the app store it seems like a nice additional revenue channel, and probably leads to more site traffic, especially from the core fans.

As for the extra value to the user, no idea, maybe they can make it easier to submit comments? No ads maybe?

I work for a company that has a revenue stream making apps like this for big brands. The apps themselves are free though and development costs are covered by our client's marketing budget. Most of them are basically the same though, take content from A and reformat it into B.

This is awesome, I know loads of people who will use this, including me if I ever have time! A couple of questions though:

How does payment/subscription work? Is there a limit to the number of apps you can publish under the monthly plan, or is there a cost per app and then a monthly fee for the analytics and push? Is there a nice user interface for push? Where can I see a demo of it all in operation (the management of an app that's out there)? :)

Congratulations! I am sure its a proud moment after taking the big step in life :).

A nice concept as well (btw, the hackernews effect is slowing down/timing out your site).

On a tangential note (maybe), are you also liking running the startup (a company)? I am sure developing the product would have been an awesome experience, but when it comes to manage and run the company it calls for something else. How are you liking that?

Go Montreal ! :) Slight issue though - I created an app, says everything went well, downloaded the sandbox, but nothing appears under "My projects". Does it take time to update ? Also, "Push composer" and "Analytics" in my admin panel link to "#". Are these just placeholder links to let users know that the functionality is coming ? Good job on shipping the product !

go mtl!

How is this app different one WPTouch which also turns your WordPress into something iPhone friendly: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ I know you turn the site into a native app, but WPTouch works just fine with HTML and CSS. Is there something I'm missing?

WPTouch doesn't put you in the app store, it just makes your site usable from a mobile browser.

You can wrap WPTouch into a native app with a little bit of work. The selling point for this service that there is little to no effort for anyone involved to get the native app submitted and with support for push notifications.

http://mobilito.net/, the free website I launched this week (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3419941), could help you to promote the app: show users how their website looks awful/unusable on mobiles currently.

At what point is it okay to post you have started a new website / business on hacker news?

Here goes my karma. Since we are doing shameless plugs here are my two (and yes I quit very high paying jobs ... 1.5~2 times more than @gozman ...):

http://snaphop.com

http://evocatus.com

Generally it seems the consensus is:

- make it obvious you are posting your own material (using phrases like "Show HN" or "I" in the title) and not try to hide that fact

- provide insight into "how" you've done it or how you are doing.

- don't do it more than once.

Follow those and HN will not downvote you to oblivion.

Good stuff, but I'm a bit confused by what SnapHop is. From the landing page it sounds like you are an agency, but you talk about a platform. What exactly (i.e. not marketing speak) does the platform let me do? Where can I see it in action?

Signup an see! I'll upgrade your account also for free and give you SMS if you blog about us. Yes we need a better video somewhere. We kind of went the enterprise route as our competitor did (http://44doors.com) where showing less unfortunately pays you more.

For what it's worth "sign-up and see" is an awful response to a potential user being confused about what your service does.

I think you should consider changing your landing page to make it explicit how you can help local businesses. That may mean removing some of the myriad of use cases you describe.

My $0.02, obviously feel free to ignore.

Also as another explanation is that we don't think people need mobile versions of their websites or a mobile app.

We think business need mobile campaigns and that most content should be more campaign centric for business.

A campaign mobile landing page is different than an app in that your trying funnel users into a transaction (signup/buy/opt-in). If your users want an app you already got them.

I haven't been here long enough to know what the decorum is so hopefully somebody else will answer you, but you already did a couple of things I probably wouldn't do myself:

1) Plug your business in the comments section of another post (unless it's somehow related). You will likely not get as many people seeing it and also it's kind of rude considering it diverts attention from the OP.

2) Post 2 unrelated links at once. Again, the feedback you get will not be as focused, lowering the quality of the discussion that is generated.

As far as your sites it seems like you might be offering two interesting services, but the presentation is too cluttered and spammy looking in order for me for to follow through in navigating your sites. The design of both sites evokes associations to those ad-filled parked-domains making me immediately think "I probably don't want this". Simplify would be my suggestion.

1) Whoops. As my wife can tell you I'm often completely oblivious of my rudeness. Do you think I should delete the post? It was an honest question.

2) Yep your right. I blame my multi-tasking (programming while reading hacker news).

Your suggestion is extremely appreciated. The design is somewhat pinterest inspired which seems to attract people like my mom but infuriates programmers.

No no don't delete it. It was a valid question. I'm not an authority on these matters but that's just my opinion.

And yeah, like the other person who relied to you, I initially though Snaphop was some kind of marketing agency and Evocatus was a little too much all at once. Although with the right intro header it could work. Pinterest has this very prominently on the first page "Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love". That's all I need to know to start off with. Your intro header didn't jump out at me like that. Maybe it's the colours or it could also be the actual copy.

Snaphop.com's display breaks for me in mobile Safari. May be worth looking at again given that the focus of the site is on mobile marketing.

Don't stress on missing your opportunity. Your 'How Hacker News crashed my site' post will get just as much traffic

so true.

Would be interested to hear how you (and others) handle the transition from salaried work to startup life...

Nice idea! I like how it's focused on wordpress and iphone (rather than turn any website to android/iphone/etc.) Care to share some implementations details with follow HN-ers? :) I.e. Do you have a "plugin-converter"? How do you transform the "normal screen width" to a "mobile feeling"?

He's using a Native App. If you are looking for a free plugin to get a mobile feel you should use WPTouch.

The word "native" jumped out at me. I wonder, for the target users you are aiming, if it's enough to say "...an iPhone app...". To me, it's the same feeling as "to kill a running app". It's common for tech people to say but doesn't have personal touch.

Typo: Sign up today and see just how quick and easy it can __free__! No credit card required.

Lol. I caught that too, had to read it twice to make sure I didn't miss a play on words though.

Thanks! I can't believe that slipped through!

If the Google SERPs for your site are up to date, you've also spelled WordPress wrong in the meta description (should be uppercase P).

I know the WP guys are very passionate about their capital P: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dang...

Why you are using JSON API instead of XMLRPC which is more popular and enabled by default for some providers such as wordpress.com?

Disclaimer: I am doing similar thing and will launch soon..

I guess because the app was made using:

rails c scaffold Post name:string .......

The rails scaffold default replies from controllers are html AND JSON.

Nice demo video, although I am not sold on the idea people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. But, hey, hat tip for testing the idea in real time :)

Fortunately for OP, it doesn't matter if people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. It matters if business owners want to be able to tell people that their business has an iPhone app. And they do.

Good point! :)

Very very nice concept. Would attract so many WP site owners who want to have an app.

Please share some technical and transition stories. Also is the homepage a little slow, or just me?

Our VPS that hosts the website seems to be on fire. However our app is up and running just fine - http://engine.theappifier.com

Do you need a beefier VPS? I can have it deployed fairly quickly. LMK (not looking for compensation for this).

Why did you choose to form an LLC instead of a C-Corporation?

from my personal history, LLCs are just easy, but provide many of the same protections that a c-corp do but with less hassle. The only problem is growth and # of founders; it is harder to provide stock options and gets complicated during tax season when you have more than a couple founders.

Interesting.

This looks like a container similar to PhoneGap, but more specialised to some sort of feed from the WP website, perhaps RSS.

Is there really that large a market for this sort of thing?

It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content.

We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.

Assuming this is one of the standard JSON plugins for wordpress, be cautious of what this may do to the main sites load. The default install can force calls to skip the total-caching plugin most sites use, as it wont use the cache on any request with parameters.

This is a concept that I had a lot of fun thinking about but never had the resources to make happen. Good luck. Can't wait to be a client. Looks very promising.

Bad signs, it's slowing down. It's taking more than 20 seconds for me to load. Scale it up, scale it up fast, buy more processing power from your host

Does converting a WP site to a native app really enable more "features" than, say, WP's own mobile styling or something similarly built with HTML5?

I guess WP is the first step, I'd love to see this also for Other blogging engines like blogger, posterous or tumblr.

Wish you all the very best. Make sure you scale up today, as I am going to pitch for you wherever my reach is.

Your dream was to write software to reformat Wordpress generated HTML so it can fit on an iPhone screen?

How do you handle the random WP plugn?

WPtouch == 90% bang for $0 bucks + 1 minute time investment. TheAppifier's nativization of blogs has its niche: - for blogs that has large, religious, passionate following. - for marketing departments who love to announce "immediate availability of mobile app".

It does not add any "native" functionality though - just save people from typing URL in mobile browsers. True/false?

Nice idea. With 10K people signing up for lifetime you get 499*10K = almost 5 million, not bad!

Do you have any ballpark numbers for wordpress hits day -> expected revenue from appifier?

I'm one of the team at PrimaryBlogger and we would be interested in using this :) Good work!

Cool idea, but this is just going to make the signal:noise ratio in the app store worse =(

I don't feel that a lot on the app store... the sorting by relevance seems to work well, at least in my experience.

that said, I suffer it on the Android market, where everything I search returns a thousand different apps in random order (e.g. search for Skype retrieves a dozen apps - some times Skype itself is not even the first result)

Logo suggestion: The 'f' in the font you're using can very easily be mistaken for a T

gozman, you are an inspiration.

Nice site! Glad you made the jump to follow your dreams, good luck!

Looks like you're coming into the same space that OnSwipe is in.

Very nice idea. Couldn't stop admiring it. Congratulations!!!

nicely done! i wish i could do the same, must do the same ; )

risky idea. sounds good but apple just hates template-apps.

Congratulations on starting out on your own. Takes courage.

nice work,pretty useful for bloggers,I believe.All the best for your startup.Btw,How long did it take to launch this startup after you left your previous job?

This is a neat idea. Best of luck! Looks great.

our site is back up now. visit us at http://theappifier.com

great idea! who do you think the target market is for this? developers that create corporate websites?

I can't get the site to load.

Our VPS is on fire - we didn't expect this kind of traffic. However our app is on heroku and running fine : http://engine.theappifier.com

cool idea, looks nice, thanks for sharing

What tools did you use to convert PHP to obj-c?

very clever logo btw. I like the riff on the established convention.

Nice idea but you have some competition. Won't mention sites on here, played with a identical solution a few weeks ago. Also found somewhere that is doing a WP app for a one off charge of $17, you download source code, edit it, compile it and submit it to the app store.

Dave

Competition should generally be looked at as market validation. How many companies have competition and are doing fine?

I had the exact same idea a year ago. Looked for competitors and found one very good looking that provided this service for free, with a great website. That's why I didn't develop it. I hope there's enough demand so that op has success, though.

I was the CEO of a startup and I spoke to people who had the same idea that I had. They had the idea a year early but I was lunching the product.

I don't think you should stop startup up a business because there are competitors.

Competitors don't kill you. Most entrepreneurs kill their ideas themselves.

Nicely done. does it only support blog type of web-sites are can you handle more of custom wordpress sites as well? For example can it handle membership type of sites where payment processing is required via CC or Paypal?

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