10k Bootstrap Challenge: Launch of hnalerts.com | Hacker News Reader

10k Bootstrap Challenge: Launch of hnalerts.com

hnalerts.com

38 pointsTamDenholm29 comments

And guess how I found out this had been posted here? ;) Thanks!

I figured you'd notice that, been following your blog since i saw you started, figured you'd be happy to see a text altering you that it was submitted. :) Carry on, you're doing awesome.

Painting is called Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of the Ottoman Empire, by the way [0]...

Original reply was: Thou art a turkish imp, the damned devil's brother and friend, and a secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight art thou that cannot slay a hedgehog with your naked ass? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou son of a bitch wilt not ever make subjects of Christian sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with thee, fuck thy mother. )))

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossac...

This is a really cool concept - all the social monitoring tools I've seen focus on social networks (fb, twitter, that sort of stuff), which is great for some companies with an existing fanbase - not so much for startups.

I've signed up :)

It is nice to know when your site hits HN, but for me http://ifttt.com/ works fine in addition to doing a lot more.

ifttt is pretty much my favourite service at the moment. It saves me hours a day and everyone should use it!

edit: Well, let's say it saves me hour per day. Hours plural is probably stretching it

Can I ask how it is saving you hours per day... I like the idea, I just can't think of cool ways to use it.

For example, I do a little video blog where I film a 1 minute video about my startup progress most days[1]

I make the video on socialcam, which sends it to youtube. ifttt then picks up the youtube video once it's uploaded and turns it into a wordpress post, then picks up the wordpress post and tweets about it. It turns a 5-step process (full of annoying upload delays) into a 1-step process with no delays.

I haven't found any consumption use cases for it, but I love it for tying together all the places I create stuff at.

[1] http://bootstrapchallenge.com

Wow very cool - I had no idea. Thanks for the reply :)

Wow, thanks for showing me this. This is a beautiful product.

This is one of the coolest services i've seen on this site in quite some time. Thanks for sharing!

Just wanted to say that this is a terrific project (and experiment). Inspirational for those of us who need a kick in the ass to shut up and get to work on that MVP. Maybe the next product is a $10k bootstrap challenge everyone can take? :)

Can you use an email address instead of a phone number? I don't use a cell anymore.

Enough people have asked about it that I'll add it asap -- I only check my email about once a day so it didn't even occur to me as a relevant use case!

also FYI. Most people in the US do not have free SMS/text messaging plans like other countries. Text messaging is unfortunately expensive here. That is another reason to add email which is readily available these days with smartphones. I know it is weird but most carriers in US charge you extra on top of minutes and data plan.

Great idea. Now, how do I unsubscribe or disable alerts in the future?

If you reply to the text message, it will cancel all alerts going to that number.

So if you are signed up to get alerts on 3 domains and only want to cancel one, you'll have to send one unsubscribe (which will cancel all 3) and then re-add the ones you still want to be active.

Not ideal in that edge case, I know, but I wanted to make sure unsubscribing was easy in case someone got cheeky and starting signing other people up.

Nice work, I had this idea a while ago and actually owned (not sure if expired right now or still in my posession) hnalerts.com to do the same thing.

How much is just hosting this service costing you? I can't see any method of payment, do you have plans to monetize it?

Great MVP by the way.

Should "monopolise" be "monetize?" :)

I suppose we should all dream big, though...

Yes, yes it should. ;) thanks!

That's really cool! I've signed up and will hopefully wait for the sms message :D

It's super fun when they arrive unexpectedly. Here's to hoping you don't have long to wait! ;)

I checked it out. If you input is not good (for example, I entered letters in the phone number field), it breaks the app and exposes the entire Django stacktrace since it seems ilke DEBUG is set to True. I guess this is a small side project of course but thought to point it out.

Right you are. Glad I had the thing hooked up to notify me about this potential trainwreck! Big thanks for the heads up.

It's fixed & off debug mode now. It will fail silently, which still isn't exactly ideal, but at least it doesn't reveal its innards any more. Thanks again.

no problem. Are you using Django form validation ? It should take care of this then.

Looks good.

How does it work? What tool is being used to send the text message? And why text message over email or other online notification?

It's just twilio for texts plus django and a cronjob. Text messages are the use case I wanted most for myself, so I just did that first. I'll add email/twitter/etc if the simple version gets a good enough response to warrant it

Yeah, email would be cool for a lot of international "customers" as text messaging doesn't work in a bunch of European countries with twilio.

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