Why the World Needs Another Git Repository Hosting Service
legitteams.com
legitteams.com
2. I don't know how good I feel trusting my source code to a sorta-startup run by a small group of fulltime students. I don't think you should quit school to run this startup, but I do think this is an awfully serious service to try to offer in your spare time.
Yes, it's a developers job to ensure that he has backups -- and Git repos lend themselves to this very well. But that doesn't absolve you of the responsibility to treat your user's code as if they have no other copies and no other backups.
3. Your post about why the world needs another Git hosting service just explains why you think Github isn't the right fit. It doesn't really make your case.
4. When you're talking to engineers and you write this big setup paragraph about how much work it was just to share a git repo, and all of us are familiar with the myriad of hosting options, it just makes you look like you either don't know about your competition or you're hoping we don't. Not an effective strategy.
5. Github will give free repo's to students. And if you're not a student and you want a private repo paying a small amount for it is not a bad thing. In fact, it's a good thing. My code is valuable to me. I want to pay you a fair sum for a fair service.
I don't think you should quit what you're doing if you're having fun, learning, and believe in your idea. But GitHub is a huge brand with a ton of goodwill from the community. BitBucket is own by Atlassian which generally makes great things. Both have fantastic GUI's for Windows & Mac and great websites. So far I haven't heard anything that differentiates you. Don't treat me like I'm dumb, just show me why you're better.
2) Yes, we are college students, and I'm sorry you feel that college students can't be trusted, but I urge you to reconsider this opinion. Its not fair to apply such a generalization to all students.
3) We chose to address the primary service that we ourselves used for private repositories before Legit Teams. We understand that there are a myriad of services available for git hosting, but we are unable to address them all in one post; we limited the scope of the article so we could get our point across succinctly.
4) I think there is a slight misunderstanding here. When we described setting up git hosting, we meant on our own servers and not using a third party hosting platform. These paragraphs were simply laying the groundwork for why we created Legit Teams—they were the context.
5) We are aware of this; they offer a free micro-plan to students and educational institutions. This, however, still limits us to five private repositories. The whole point of Legit Teams is to get rid of limits on repositories and collaboration, which we feel are large pain points when developing with others.
You could probably overcome that by going the balsamiq route and showing a consistently growing, profitable business. It's not an accident that it's normal to announce funding rounds in a press release: being able to associate yourselves with either massive profits or trusted brand name investors gives you credibility that being a couple guys with a good looking landing page doesn't.
I hope you take this all in a constructive way and know that I, and most other people in our industry, applaud you for shipping.
> number of collaborators we can have, thereby stifling productive group work.
> As college students, we're always collaborating, be it for assignments or our
> own side-projects, and BitBucket doesn't make sense for this.
Bitbucket provides free, unlimited hosting for students. There's no limit on the number of collaborators. All you have to do is validate your university email address and you'll go from 5 users for free to the unlimited educational plan.
Not necessarily a reason to avoid the niche, but the reasons you listed to enter aren't very good (namely, too expensive for lots of small projects) as BitBucket solves that problem.
Never ever ever ever compete on price.
A single price point would be less confusing, but I don't really understand the appeal. Anyone who doesn't trust github and/or needs that level of secrecy will be willing to shell out the $10 a month for a dedicated instance that they can install git on themselves.
In short, I don't think you can be competitive with github because I think the frictional market you're trying to target doesn't exist in the capacity that you would like to think it does.
I host all my private work with them and have never had a problem.
I'd focus on why you're different than the (already loved and highly used) existing options out there. Then I'd think about revamping the pricing to have each plan be more differentiated.
Gitblit? http://gitblit.com/
If you EVER take one thing away from HN, 'tis this: NEVER compete on price. It is a race to the bottom. There will always be someone willing to provide the service for less than you. Just don't do it.
The various competitors in this space compete apparently on public/private visibility, price, storage quotas, and user+repo counts. If you compete on these dimensions you will have a very difficult time differentiating yourself -- there simply is not enough difference between one repo provider and another on these bases to matter. Cost of switching, I would imagine, is relatively easy -- `git remote add`, `git push`, and done?
There is also, perhaps, competition on UI/UX quality. This can be a differentiating factor for some, but I think not as strong as it is for other markets, given the strong technical background of the target market. If you had some original and compelling offer which had a poorer but workable UI (which improved rapidly over time), that could negate the advantage that e.g. Github has over you on interface.
I don't have any better ideas for this space -- the generic advice for you I would give is to innovate in some different, not-already-explored way. Can you provide something completely different from more users, more repos, more storage, lower price?
We don't view this as a business that's going to make us millions of dollars so much as a product that we'd love for both us and others to use. It solves an issue we were experiencing and, at the least, we'll use our own service proudly.
Your points about competing on other dimensions do make sense, but as you seem to imply yourself, it is hard to find exactly what those other dimensions are. We're searching for this ourselves, but based on feedback we've received from our friends, this is at least a preliminary service that they'd like to use. We plan to iterate from here.
Ok, you can create a new service, but you shouldn't act like you're the only one around that do what you do.
I'll gladly pay a reasonable fee for hosted services so I don't have to worry about such things.
(5. have repo world readable when security fails)
Not that I'm recommending this approach. That side, I do have GitHub repos that are also in my Dropbox, so I can collaborate with non-technical folk. It works great and haven't had a single issue with it in about 6 months of usage.
The current version includes self-service key management, regular users are able to create repos in their own namespace, and easy forking of repositories. It's extensible, you can write your own commands in any language.
Granted, it has minuses. It only has a command line interface (no GUI), requires a little setup and editing of configuration files and reading of docs.
* Unlimited repositories
* Unlimited users
* Web interface / Trac / WebDAV, SSL everywhere
* Responsive support
* Automatic scheduled backups to Amazon S3
If I am correct in my guess, then I really think its a great marketing strategy, and if not then BitBucket guys should really think of marketing in this way.
I have a lot of code. A LOT. It's mostly random things around data to make tracking things in my life easier (diet being the most recent one). And most of the code is crap in two ways: (1) I'd never want to be associated with it in a public sense and (2) It's so specialized to my life that it's unlikely that anyone would use it or contribute to it. Sure, there might be a few hundred people in the world that could find it useful, but those few hundred are unlikely to happen upon my kludged-up solution, and if they are, I'd feel badly when it doesn't work for them the way it works for me due to my personal configuration being hard coded throughout.
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