Should I launch my site now? | Hacker News Reader

Should I launch my site now?

3 pointskuasha7 comments

Hello,

I have been following this for some times but this is my first message-

It seems very funny to launch after just working about 4 weekend days (~64 hours) - But I hear people insist on early launch-

So here it is- I am designing a small service to verify phone numbers (and use it as 2 factor authentication among other things). The service supports two factor authentication, it has a working openid provider (so 2 factor authentication enabled openid - you can grab one, its free :) )- users can create application from developers section and using the API on their site can verify phone number of anyone claiming to be his/ her number or do whatever with phone verification (like use it as 2FA for their own registered users)- That’s all what is done for now- Is it too early? Shoudl I start buying a high resource server and install the service and launch this weekend or should I use this time to implement more features (I have a ton in the list) and wait for few more weeks?

If you suggest launching what should I do when the servers are ready to take traffic? Tell friends? Buy some ad? Start writing blogs or what?

You can find the service at http://auth2.com – [fully functional but can serve only a few requests per second]

Also what feature you think would be useful?

I have no idea about product launching and I appreciate your help.

I'm with you--it's hard to put the idea of upside risk out of your mind. (What if you tell the world and the world loves you so much your server turns into a pile of slag?) But try to put it out of your mind anyway.

You need a landing page that helps your target customers know that they're in the right place. That's a sentence or two that explains the problem you solve and how you solve it. It looks like you want attention from developers. I think a lot of developers would like to get a feel for the API without registering. (I went to the "developers" tab thinking I might be able to give you specific feature-related feedback.)

With that done, I'd think you don't need or want attention from the whole world. For a first round of feedback, 5-10 like-minded friends would do fine. If they're really friends, then they'll have encouraging words for you, but look for common points of confusion or concern. After that it's a matter of refining your message and finding wider and wider circles for gathering input.

Thank you for your time and advice!

I am removing the login required annotation from developer page- And redesigning the index page to say clearly what it does-

About the risk -You are right- I am going to get more than 10 visit per day and most will be my friends :)- But I still want to remove it from my test server 600 MB RAM- because the robot voice quality seems bad on this- and I can not test and call this production server at the same time-

I have been thinking about the need for something like this, but a bit more menu-like. Suppose I am running a high-security site that needs more than 2 factors? Shouldn't that be as easy to set up as 1 or 2? So I image having a bunch of fields, any number of which may be required or optional:

- Real Name (if you can verify against public records that might be worth something) - account name - mailing address - home address - phone#1 [voice? text?] - phone#2 [voice? text?] - question #1 - question #2 - question #3 - select an anti-spoofing graphic - RSA key -...

Some levels of security, such as RSA key may be worth paying extra.

It would be particularly sweet if you provided a simple UI (checklist as above) that writes working client code for me. Oneall.com does something like this.

Overall though I have a few impressions: - Not a good color scheme; doesn't sell it. I say this as a non-visual person. - Include a bundle of sample code, and some docs with diagrams showing the flow of typical use. Yes, we can figure it out with a minimal explanation but your business model is making it super-easy to do what we could do on our own. - I think your site (due to the nature of the problem space) may benefit greatly from iterative A/B testing. - I like the domain / service name. I would actually remember that. I think it would be worthwhile to partner with a good site designer.

Created a functional sample python django project (https://github.com/auth2/auth2_python_django)

Thank you for your thoughtful comment! I am taking notes.

And you are absolutely right about the UI. I did not get time yet for that (I even did not copy the CSS and linking directly from django site - just like viewing image from external site :D)-

Will make the site itself secure using HTTPS or RSA key as you suggested and include sample code and some applications that will help protect machines and networks.

Thank you!

Launching early is always a good idea, and there's nothing like real customer's feedback to help you prioritize your quadzillion ideas.

However, I strongly suggest you spend some time on copy and structure of your landing page - without reading your post here I would have no idea what your service had to offer me, and my motivation to whatch youtube videos on landing pages has been rather low lately. :)

I sincerely thank you for your sugestion- I'll add some text on the page- And add an image instead of the video and keep the video as a javascript soft window that will activate on click of a link-

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