Show HN: Taurus.io - Create a product tour for your web app in 15 minutes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Taurus.io - Create a product tour for your web app in 15 minutes

taurus.io

87 pointsebzlo55 comments

Cool product! Congrats on launching. I can think of several companies off the top of my head who should implement this yesterday. But I have to take issue with the price point. $3 a month? If you're doing it for fun, make it free. Otherwise, the price should be 10x if not 100x your current rate. Trust me, if someone is going to go through the effort of setting up your product, they'll be willing to pay more than $3 a month. At that price point you'd need 1,000 customers just to be ramen profitable!

Thanks!

The problem with being 10x or 100x the current rate is that we can't actually justify that cost for the value we provide. When we set the price point, we basically asked ourselves how much we'd actually pay for the same thing.

Instead of asking yourselves "what's the minimum amount someone would pay?", you should be asking "what's the maximum?".

I'm really cheap, and even I find $3/month ridiculous. It should at least be $9/month, and you should find a way to have multiple plans (say, $9, $29, $59).

I'll second @therealarmen point and agree with @sgdesign.

You priced the product based on real value and not perceived value, which represents how much customers feel a product is worth and is willing to pay for it.

If I have a web app, I sit and suffer as I look at my low conversion rate, low engagement and high amount of tickets coming to the support desk with annoyingly simple questions. All these items take up my time and effort, which cost money.

If your product means five less support e-mails, three more users that do not cancel because they understand how to use my app and ten more conversions a month, that right there is worth much more than $3 a month and I'd would be willing to pay for it.

Okay, you all have convinced me. Back to the drawing board on that.

Are you saying that you don't think your product provides $30/month value compared to tooltip scripts like on Code Canyon, or compared to not having a web app tour at all?

- I think most web apps with users or revenue would get $xxx+ of value from a tour.

- I've thought about creating a tour for some of my sites, but I've always been too intimidated by the idea of mucking around with scripts that I don't understand. A WYSIWYG tooltip product might as well be the only tooltip product from my point of view.

I agree that you should be charging 10x-100x more.

What others have said, plus: I don't trust you to stay in business at $3/mo. You may deliver an awesome product, but I simply don't believe the economics will work at all for $3/month. At best, you'll cut corners and your service will start to suck. This makes me much less likely to put you in the critical path of my business. So charge more and make everybody happy!

Suggestion: segment on the complexity of the product tour? Maybe by the # of steps included? Or (better) allow me to add audio/video to my tours and charge me more for that.

Great suggestions! # of steps included is something we haven't thought to implement, will do!

In this video https://training.kalzumeus.com patio11 describes how building product tour's can increase sales by 20-100%. Taurus.io is definitely worth more than $3/month and could be priced far higher.

This is great (and flattering). We're definitely going back to the drawing board in regards to how we price this thing.

I don't mean this in an insulting way, but you're wrong here. You don't think a product tour that potentially hundreds if not thousands of people use and can significantly increase your customers' ROI is worth more than a Big Mac a month?

Come on now, don't fall into the trendy startup blackhole of improper pricing. Charge.For.This. Make a lot of money. Build in analytics. Prove your value.

No offense taken. Everybody here is completely right. We're going to change our pricing as soon as we step out of our closed beta.

You are not your customers!

If is irrelevant what you would pay or how much value you would get from the service. If a good tour helps to retain just one subscription customer a month, that easily justifies x10 the $3 price.

$9/month at the cheapest.

Cheapest? Or most?

Edit: Based on what everyone else is saying, I've assumed you indeed meant to say cheapest.

I meant cheapest. Also, I saw your comment above about once you are out of beta. I wouldn't wait. Set it at $9 or above and see what happens.

The longer you leave it at $3, the more expensive it will look when you raise it (and I really think you should raise it).

Alright. Done. I'm setting at $9. Updated now.

I don't know what these people are talking about... Call me crazy but when I saw that I had to pay for this at all I thought "Hmm, couldn't I implement that quickly myself?". Perhaps I could or couldn't, but it seems to me that it would be better served as a one time purchase. I wouldn't want to pay a monthly fee for any other premade component (lightbox, image carousel, etc).

I'm guessing there's some service associated with this, but from the tour it wasn't obvious. I'm not attacking your product, but want to give my experience/thoughts.

Sure thing. The problem we're attempting to address is not necessarily the HTML/CSS/Javascript component of creating a tooltip, but rather the creation of a system and its continued maintenance.

When we hand rolled our own product tour code for a previous project, what we quickly learned was that maintenance was a nightmare. As soon as layouts updated or changed, editing the tooltips we had created already was tedious.

We, however, have plans for other features that we think could really add a lot more value. So if you don't see it now, perhaps later on when we roll them out.

I agree. My first impression when I saw this was : Tooltip for 3$/mth ? Anyone who's capable to do good web design can do it themselves in 30 minutes max. Maintenance ? I personally don't think 5 minute CSS adjustments worth monthly pay. If you want to charge for that make obvious to customers what backend service you would charge for.

Great idea! But 3$ is really way to cheap, even at the current 9$/month I'd just have signed up without thinking twice! Why? Because I know how much value a tour provides my app/my revenue!

I already have a simple tour in Bunker App but it is really a PITA so I've postponed doing improvements to it. I have hopes that your software helps me, and if it does, it's totally worth some money for me!

I've just signed up for your mailing list, I hope I'll get into beta to test it soon. My app is a JS-heavy, single HTML page app so I'm curious to see how Taurus works with my app.

We've given the popups the ability to trigger JS events and we will be adding the ability to trigger popups with JS events as well.

Could you send me an email (ebzlo@ebzlo.com)? I'd be more than happy to send you an invite immediately if we could work together on making this work for you, single page apps are definitely something we want to be viable for.

Edit: Bunker looks really cool. If I start freelancing again, I might just have to try it out. ;)

Thank you for the nice words, I've just sent you an email :)

Ok, so a lot of people are commenting you are charging too little and your general reply was you felt you didn't deliver the value to justify a higher price.

In that case, I think you need to search for value. What can you do to make a higher price worthwhile?

Here are my thoughts:

- Analytics! What are people viewing? Plug it in and tell me what is working and getting mouse time or clicks (or conversions)

- Split testing! I'd love to test out two tours to see which converts better.

You could make the current version free, to a certain point of traffic and make all the new features points of value to charge a better price.

Split testing sounds like a really neat idea! We'll talk about working that in later down the line. :)

Feature request that will make this much more valuable - relative adjustment, if you can create a tooltip that will stay near a selector (regardless of browser resizes) and will be responsive (e.g. size and font will adapt based on size) then you'll have something worth not 3$ but 30$ a month easily.

I like that you demo the usage of the tool rather than the end result, but for some people it might be too cumbersome, at least make the demo login automatic

By the way, a solution to both issues - use your own product to tour your own product.

This was originally in our plan for beta launch, but we yanked it to get something out faster. It's definitely in the pipeline. :)

Looks like Kera.io, great project. I'd love to hear how you guys differ btw :)

This is pretty cool. We're less intensive than this, but we try to make the whole product tour setup very WYSIWYG. From what I saw, they do a neat job of delivery the full product-tour-package, but at the cost of engineering effort.

Cameron from Kera here. You're right about you guys being wysiwyg and I think that's awesome. It's super important and I think you're on to something!

Looks really great, congratulations.

A few things I picked up on though:

1. Couldn't toggle Absolute/Relative after I had placed a tooltip.

2. If you position your tooltip then click the "Display Next Button", the arrow moves, but the positioning stays the same (with a side arrow). Just a UI bug.

3. Instructions on the syntax to use for javascript event field.

4. Binding to an element would be nice.

5. Having the "Next" button move on to the next tooltip, hiding the old, and displaying the next. I think I'd like to use that flow rather than seeing all the tips at once.

Thanks! We'll look into those issues; additionally, we'll be adding a bind to element feature in the future.

what's the different with using Bootstrap tour ( https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap-tour ) or Joyride ( http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-p... ) for example?

When we worked on a previous project, bootstrap was something we based our product tour off. Joyride, similarly, accomplishes the same deal with a little more fluff. However, there were a few things that were tedious.

- Keeping track of who has seen what tooltip, when they should show up, backend type stuff.

- When things moved around, layouts modified slightly, they were a pain to update. Granted it wasn't always the case, but it was enough that we decided we ought to build a front end to handle it. And thus, Taurus was born.

We realized that while engineering the product tour isn't hard, it takes time to make and maintain, and that we could help solve that.

Thanks for the reply. You should put that on your website because from what I saw it wasn't really clear that there's a backend to manage my tours and to see some metrics.

No problem! Will do. :)

Looks cool. I think I would find it more useful if I could see a demo (not of the authoring, but of the result).

Thanks! If you create some tooltips on the page and refresh the page, you kind of get a feel of what it would be like for a visitor (though "Hide" won't permanently hide the tooltips in that state).

This is not evident from your demo. Can you include the tooltips to show up by default in your demo page? I am guessing most people would first want to see how the tooltips come up, before they get interested in editing/authoring them.

Yeah, but before I get to trying out your features I want to experience it as a user would.

I would recommend creating another page for this user experience, calling it the 'demo', and changing the current demo page to a 'try it now' page.

I signed up to be notified. But... Please include a quick summary of the app in the notification mail to make us remember what it was, when the time comes.

Will do. :)

Beautiful site. Have seen a few of these on HN but your implementation looks the best so far. We need this - looking forward to launch.

Thanks for the kind words. :)

This would certainly be useful for a lot of the other Show HN's. Can't wait to see this in production.

Keen to get this setup, we need a product tour but didn't have a good way of building it quickly.

Send me an email, I'll be sure something comes your way when we launch.

ebzlo@ebzlo.com

It's not working for me. It just says [object Object] Firefox 16.0.1 on MAC OS X

Ah shoot. Haven't heavily tested outside of Chrome. I'll check it out, thanks!

Edit: Fixed the issue. Looks like just a small problem with the bookmarklet. Pushing it up now. :)

I see the admin panel now. I'll keep playing with it.

I think the product is pretty cool. I also really like the design of the site.

Thanks!

This looks pretty sweet. Good job.

Neat tool.

Thanks!

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