Show HN: I made a site that rings a bell every time you have a new customer | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made a site that rings a bell every time you have a new customer

bellbot.com

85 pointspud50 comments

From the landing page: "One of the programmers set up the computers so that a bell would ring every time an order came in."

Continuation of the quote in the WSJ source: "A great novelty at first, it quickly got annoying and had to be turned off."

I love that. Though I think what the author was trying to say (I read an interview with Bezos somewhere) is that "[amazon orders started pouring in so rapidly that] it got annoying..."

Nevertheless, I think I could find a "softer" sound that would be less jarring. Maybe let users select from different sounds or upload their own. Or something.

I read somewhere about a company that did monitoring by playing white noise that corresponded with certain key metrics (such as the rate of new users). The noise was invisible until it changed slightly in pitch, which meant something unusual was happening.

The white noise idea is fascinating.

We used to have a computer play a gong noise when we sold something. It was just an email client that got a copy of all the receipts and played a sound when mail came in. That got really annoying so we killed it.

Now we have a physical gong in the office that our sales reps get to bang on. We don't learn from our mistakes.

We used to have emails that got sent to our inbox every time a user converted. But that got annoying during all of the peak times.

I can't imagine a bell or sound happening.

Fair warning: a similar system nearly caused me to destroy my cellphone, the screen over my window, and the windshield of the Honda beneath it.

Patrick, I don't get this comment. Is there an inside joke I am missing?

He violently threw his phone when it wouldn't stop ringing and he was in a mental state that didn't want to experience said ringing.

In other words: understand that it will ding for all new users. all of them. Get a lot of dings. Get them at 3 in the morning. Get them during a date. All dings.

To relate: if you're the kind of person that turns off your IM sounds because they annoy you, this is not for you. I am one of those people: even a window blinking too frequently bothers me.

This also happened to me. I have since made sure that I have absolutely no part of the order process for any of my software. I don't want to be notified. I don't want to have to click a button. I don't even want to think about it, except at the end of the month when I count my money.

"So many new customers that the new-customer alert gets really annoying" is a great problem to have, though!

Philip, just know that the rate at which you put out projects of all sizes really is inspiring.

This reminded me of the Netscape FTP server rigging. They had an Indy play a cannon shot every time someone successfully finished a download. It's a small part of a much bigger story, and all of it is good as far as I am concerned.

http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html

Interesting looking back on the truthiness of "pushing bits around in ways only meaningful to other nerds", then-and-now.

Okay, having put Bellbot on one of my sites today I can see that the sound I chose can get irritating. So I just changed it.

Old sound: http://bellbot.com/sounds/up.mp3

New sound: http://bellbot.com/sounds/bell.mp3

Reminds me of Middle Men. "We just made $9.99..." http://www.traileraddict.com/clip/middle-men/we-just-made-99...

I was thinking the same thing. Now he can make different sounds based on type of customer...

A slightly less annoying suggestion: rig up a box to make a noise every time a build passes the tests on your CI server. I suggest a golf clap, or the sound of a slot machine paying out.

Instead, play a truly annoying sound (rickroll?) when the build fails…

…on the computer of the developer that broke the build.

I have nothing useful to say, but I can't help but wonder if I'm the only one who read "Beeps when you've got customers" and immediately thought "Goes ding when there's stuff!"

I had to Google that for the reference. I'm still not sure I get it but "Goes dint when there's stuff" would be a brilliant slogan - might have to appropriate it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LqmAQwHNA0

Also completely irrelevant, but made me think of http://www.savewalterwhite.com/ (from Breaking Bad) and the donation dinger.

Nice work! It would be very helpful if there was a special URL that could be shared with employees that want to receive the notice.

Perhaps also a small Win/Lin/Mac resident service, and mobile app?

Good idea about letting users send out a special (obscure) URL for public consumption.

Also good idea about an app.

As for Win/Lin/Mac resident service -- I just open a browser window, load bellbot, then minimize it.

I've worked with numerous retailers who use something like this. Usually an eMail server just makes a ping when a payment notification comes in.

During peak seasons (read: December) at an ecommerce company of mine a few years ago, we did pretty much exactly this. We used a cash register sound, though. Played it into the office and warehouse so everybody knew how fast things needed to be going. Totally worked, the faster the register went, the harder everyone worked.

There was a pretty funny scene in Middle Men regarding this very topic. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1251757/

We just got a new system like that for Levion. It was fun initially when you have no customers but when accounts are being made non stop it gets impossible to work. It did give our employees energy initially until they made us turn it off.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3521108

Last week I set up a heroku+twilio app to call me and yell whenever I curled its URL.

The idea was to use it to train myself to stop hitting ESC in vim, but I'm sure it's portable for other pavlovian needs.

https://github.com/dpritchett/no-calls-please

Im hitting ESC in vim all the time. Is that a bad thing?

I'm somewhat curious- why were you trying to train yourself to stop using ESC, and why couldn't you just unmap that key?

I mapped <jk> to serve the same purpose (quit insert mode) - it's a common power user tip but I've never gotten used to it. Unmapping wouldn't have been so fun... I also display a `fortune -o | cowsay -f hello-kitty | lolcat` on screen for five seconds while the phone is ringing.

@dpritchett, how is your key mappings defined for this?

I have the following in my .vimrc, it's commented out because I had gotten some weird behavior:

inoremap <esc> <nop>

inoremap jk <esc>

When I'm in insert mode with these mappings un-commented, if I hit the arrow keys I get input like the following:

0A0D0B0C

(up, left, down, right keys). It prints the hex values into the editor instead of moving the cursor. And if I click with the mouse or drag in insert mode:

[M_M1[M@M2[M@N1[M#U ... etc.

With those mappings commented out I don't have this problem - of course I'm back to stretching my pinky 3 rows of keys up to the escape key :(

How does it know when I've got a new customer... a new site visitor? So confused...

It sounds like your place the js file on some post-purchase page. That way when they request it you can be pretty sure they just completed the transaction.

When you sign up for bellbot.com, it gives you a small Javascript snippet. You embed that snippet in your "thank you!" page (or whatever page your users see after they do stuff on your site).

Every time a user hits that page, you'll hear a beep on your end if you're logged into bellbot.

This is awesome. When blackberries were in use we were able to customize our ringtones, which created the same affect. We have downloaded iPhone apps and created additional email accounts to mimic the new sign up "gong."

Hah, I remember seeing that quote from Bezos and wanting to do the same thing. At the moment, I make do with Jabber and a cron job, but a bit of semi-realtime feedback on positive activity is fun.

If you are curious what it sounds like, just hit this url: http://bellbot.com/sounds/up.mp3

Gah! Made me jump!

At Buffer we have the mario coin noise every time a user upgrades. It's just often enough to be pleasant rather than annoying!

Great idea - nice when you've just launched. FYI, GetClicky does this as well as part of their Spy section.

Clicking on bellbot.com with headphones in... not recommended. I almost crapped myself.

Sorry about that. I put the sound onload because I thought it was kinda funny -- and also as a demonstration in case some potential users were unaware that a website can make noises (thank you HTML5. no thank you to Chrome/Safari supporting only mp3 and Firefox for only supporting WAV).

Perhaps I should get rid of the onload sound. Or have a link that says "click here to hear a sound" or something.

Update: I just commented out the onload sound. In retrospect it was annoying. Thank you.

You didn't include a button to hear the sound without signing up? Come on!

A cash register sound would be appropriate!

Pud, you make really useful and rad stuff

Customer != Potential customer

hey pud, did you do your own art?

lolz

If instead of a ring it taught you a new French word, then that would be something, but this would drive me insane.

Awesome landing page though!

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