Ask YC: Feedback on our new service: messagepub.com | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Feedback on our new service: messagepub.com

messagepub.com

71 pointsluccastera64 comments

The service sounds interesting, although the pricing is way too high for me (more on that later). I apologize if I sound harsh in my feedback, I'd be equally harsh to one of my own projects too. That said:

1) The color you've chosen for "pub" (#FFF191) doesn't contrast with the white background enough. I find it hard to read. The same problem arises in reverse on the "Free Trial" badge.

2) "A dead-simple messaging API and web service" doesn't do it for me. I still have no idea what your product is.

Spell it out for me:

"Get your app talking to Twitter, AIM, and Google Talk in 5 minutes."

3) The goal of the homepage is to tell me what your product is before losing my attention. The best way to do that is getting me to watch a video. Make your video the center of attention on the homepage and optimize for getting people to watch it.

4) I like the bullet points, but just stick with the first set (no animation). I would also remove the last one, "A cost effective solution!", as it sounds like you made up a 5th item to round out the list. I would also make the copy more active.

5) The upgrade IE6 message is inappropriate for a business website, especially when trying to sell a web service to web developers. You're trying to convince me that I can trust your library to handle all the nuanced use cases that would take me weeks to discover. Remember, I'm a developer so I'm looking for a reason to write my own library - don't give me one.

So if I see "function showUnsupportedBrowserAlert()" in your Javascript it says 2 things to me:

- Your site doesn't render correctly in IE6

- You don't care enough to fix it

That's doesn't give me confidence in your messaging library, which is far more complex than HTML/CSS.

Also, suppose someone does come to the site with IE6, or a browser incorrectly identified as IE6. You're effectively turning them away, is that really what you want to do? What exactly is broken in IE6 and what would it take to fix it?

6) The video on the homepage doesn't perform well as a sales tool (I'm not sure if it was meant to).

I'd make a video that starts with you typing a message into an example app and clicking send. Then your AIM, Twitter, and GTalk alert new messages while your phone rings to play the message back with surprisingly high fidelity. Then show me the 2 lines of code it took (but don't show the install process or have me watch you type out code).

7) Pricing - I'd switch away from using different prices for Email/GChat/AIM/Twitter. Even if I'm a current customer it makes them too tempting to replace one by one. If I'm already integrating with your web service whats so hard about integrating with theirs?

If its feasible I would include a ton of free credits for those services in a monthly subscription, and make your money charging for SMS and speech-to-text over the phone. SMS is a traditionally expensive technology, and both it and phone are much harder to implement than a web service.

I might also change from 1 cent per message to $1 for 100 messages. To me it sounds cheaper, even though it isn't.

I'd also provide a way for your website to call me with a message I've typed in to showcase your text-to-speech accuracy.

That's about all I've got. Best of luck with the service!

Great detailed feedback! I really appreciate this. Thanks.

Didn't see this mentioned already, but I really don't like the auto-changing text on the home page. I was in the middle of reading a section when it disappeared and I couldn't figure out how to get it back except to just wait, which I did not do.

Thanks. We've added a mini-menu so that you can control which one of the views you want to see. In addition, once you click on one view, it will stop the auto-changing all together.

Sorry, but not good enough for this particular hater of "dynamic content". If a reader wants the content to stay still, he is not going to think to click on it because clicking usually has the opposite effect: to get something static to change.

* You're doing things that are (or seem) trivial to do oneself. I'm not convinced this stuff is really hard to do myself, so why would I pay to make it easier? Maybe you can remind me how hard it actually is. There are lots of nasty little problems with these things that memory masks.

* It's not particularly cheap (vs doing it yourself which is effectively free for most delivery methods). Maybe you could compare yourself with other options. Maybe you're better in some ways, so it justifies being more expensive.

* I think a lot of people may only need one or two of the delivery methods. Maybe you can convince me I should be utilizing other delivery mechanisms to reach my users. How would it help me to do so?

If this isn't your core business, it's not just about technical difficulty. It's also about time, maintenance, and ROI on the implementation.

Are you saying that DIY is a clear win in terms of those costs as well?

What I took from his post was that he was pointing out that DIY is an option for most potential customers of this service. Explaining why this service is a win in the terms you mention such as time/maintenance/ROI for DIY is necessary to convince users to purchase.

Point taken; I see how our resource contraints make us an easier sale, but others may be more able to devote development time to this.

Agreed for some things. But in most languages it's one line to send an email, sms, gtalk message etc. I honestly couldn't believe they were trying to charge for email sending or other messages that do not cost money to anyone?

Best of luck to them, but pass.

I think the "it is one line of code" needs to be challenged. If you want a reliable, white-listed mail service, it is a whole bunch of upfront and ongoing work with postmasters to deliver a high successful-delivery rate service to your users.

And that's just one example.

Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. You've raised some great questions.

I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.

You should be convinced after reading our homepage that it is worth your money and maybe the current copy doesn't reflect that well enough. We'll keep iterating on that, gather more data points, analyze it, highlight success stories of integration, etc...

Thx for your suggestions.

I strongly believe that these things are not trivial to do well yourself and maintaining such an infrastructure will distract you from your core competency.

Don't tell that to us here. Say that in a convincing manner on the homepage.

Hi. This is interesting.

You theoretically could offer snail mail as well - there are services that translate from email to letters for you.

A left field comment -- Right now, this is a developer-orientated service. You could market it to consumers - e.g. This is my messagepub address, send your messages there. Then the consumer as a receiver gets to decide on how messages get routed to them.

A more difficult play, but it would be interesting to see. The revenue part might be more difficult, but perhaps there are ways around this.

It would also have the advantage that applications don't need to know and maintain everything about you (e.g email, phone, cell, twitter, etc, etc). Even in this model it looks like every app is responsible for maintaining all the required info.

The consumer could just maintain it in one place... Sort of like a Grand Central for the Web.

Thanks for the feedback. It's interesting that you mentioned that. We also have a consumer oriented service called ShareMeme: http://sharememe.com

We built messagepub after a lot of ShareMeme users asked us for an API.

I wrote about something like this a while ago: http://gobyairship.com/2008/06/02/notifications-how-i-want-t...

Very excited by the prospect of controlling my communication flow.

although the concept is quite good.. the pricing is a deal killer. At any scale that is quite expensive.

I agree. I'm soon to be in the market for exactly this kind of service, and seeing email and twitter don't come for free, was an immediate turn off. If I were to use this service (or one like it) I'd be forced to implement email and twitter myself, and just pass through for text messages.

If it connected with Twitter and Email for free, and SMS, phone and even IM were pay to play, I'd be a lot more interested.

I agree. The idea is great, and would save some dev time and learning about various communication streams, but it's not affordable.

Were we to switch to MessagePub just for the e-mails we send from JamLegend for friend requests, challenges, referrals, new songs, etc, our communication costs would increase by 600%. For reference, we use sent.com at a price of $25 for 6 months, which lets us send up to 2K messages/hour. Paying $2500/month would be a vertical hike from $4.16/month. I know your pricing page lists that custom solutions are available for high volume, but I can't imagine that the price would come down enough to be reasonable.

So, I think the idea of one service to hit your users on whatever communication medium they like is cool, but the pricing isn't affordable at scale. Think about it like this: if somebody else had built MessagePub, could you afford to have ShareMeme use it?

It makes more sense for products that don't send a lot of messages, and need to be able to send to all sorts of devices. One example that comes to mind is for server monitoring: if a server is misbehaving, you want to be notified, and if you don't see the first message, the message needs to escalate quickly on multiple mediums, perhaps to other people.

The pricing is crazy.

For things without a fixed cost you should be charging pence for 1000s of results not 1s.

For phone and txt you have fixed costs and that's obvious, but I would reprice with everything except the phone and text at the same prices for CPM.

I think your pricing model is not good at all. It's expensive, there is no level service, and you are using a 'credit' system instead of simply pricing in known currencies.

Also, how are you going to contact users on IM services? Don't the users have to add you as a friend first?

It's a nice idea. When I play poker, some people prefer to be contacted by email and some by text message, so I can see a use for this.

Some suggestions I would make:

1. drop the charges for sending emails and other forms of communication that don't cost anything, at least for people who make a small number every month. This will help build your user base and encourage open-source applications/libraries around your product

2. include UK SMS and phone messaging; the service is useless to me without it

3. I note you also have sharememe, an "intelligent outbox"; this needs to be more tightly linked with messagepub. How about an "intelligent inbox" too?

Can you get responses back by SMS? How does the user differentiate between my app running on messagepub and someone else's app? Does the user have to enter extra keywords to direct the SMS to one vs. another app?

The first time I tried to send a phone message, it rang my phone but never read anything back. The second time, I noticed the low-quality TTS. If you're going to charge for this, at least use something good like Cepstral. Interesting concept though, might save a lot of development time for people.

On the point about pricing, I took a sec to figure it out, because I have no idea what a penny is. Maybe just change it to cent?

Yeah, a "penny" is also GBP 0.01 or AUD 0.01 or CAD 0.01 -- I was confused as well.

Somehow meshing this in with salesforce or other CRM could be a great value add.

Overall, good idea for a service.

My criticism/questions:

- Price is way off: $10-100 CPM for simple message delivery? Does it come with delivery guarantees/retries? In fairness: What's the use case with which you would justify this pricing?

- (How) Do you ensure that email sent via your service is not marked as spam? Reliable mass email delivery is hard these days.

With a bit of curl hacking I managed to abuse their demo API to send arbitrary messages.

Just try this : curl -v -d "channel=email&address=EMAIL_HERE&commit=Submit&message=messagepub%20sucks%20I%20JustHackedTheirDemoAPItoSendArbitraryMessagesUsingCURLlolSpam&authenticity_token=1f52274baf9904dd33b012c1a4c1548afd197438" -b _trunk_session=BAh7BzoMY3NyZl9pZCIlM2JmZDg3ZDhlYTZjN2U3MzFkNmMyMWMyNGYxYmQ4YTQiCmZsYXNoSUM6J0FjdGlvbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA%3D--2e9b47678c68095440f03ce3b7558712b4fba37a http://messagepub.com/demo/create

You'll have to grab the cookie and authenticity_token from a preceding GET request, as the cookie seems to change from time to time. The authenticity token does not change among successive posts.

Hello spam!

Guys, please fix your security.

The fix is easy, just add an integer value to the message select, and server-side, use it to select canned messages from a dictionary.

This will not stop abuse of your canned messages, but at least messagepost's demo page will not become a spam gateway.

Wow, that's so l33t!

Though if you really want to brag effectively about finding an exploit here, you should probably just shoot an e-mail to the developers first and then, if you feel the need, mention publicly that you found something.

That way you look more like a white hat and less like a script kiddie or a troll.

I did send an email afterwards - forgot at first - hey, I'm new at this.

Ok, it was a 5 min exploit, but I still lolled for most of the evening.

FYI. This is no longer an issue. It was fixed even before ovi256 posted this comment which is why in the original post, he mentioned that the server was down. That's because his IP address had been blocked and a fix was deployed.

He later edited the comment to remove the part where he said that the site was down...

I got your email, too bad you decided to go this route rather than emailing me about it first. It's all good though. No hard feelings.

Glad you fixed it so fast and sorry about being an asshole earlier. It's a bit of social engineering : it gets things going - if you hate me and/or the disclosure you are more likely to fix the hole. Stupid, I know, but it works.

I confirm that in my initial post, I wrongly assumed the demo page was down. Downforeverythingorjustme.com confirmed afterwards that my IP was blocked - luccastera moved incredibly fast! And right now, the canned messages seem to be whitelisted, which fixed the problem for good.

It's an interesting service but I feel that certain services, for example Twitter, should be free and here's the reason - hook people in free offerings and get them to pay for the other services. Market it in a way that if they don't throw in the paid services to their notification, it just doesn't make sense.

And do you have plan for ppl who would like not only to push information but also receive information ?

* EDIT : I saw after posting that it was already possible. Maybe you should do a replace for send by send/receive and also, change the image to have two-way arrows. This way, it would be more obvious.

Your sign-up page doesn't mention an email verification step. It took me a while to figure it out. I finally did figure it out because after I'd tried to login a couple of time (without a good error message), and tried to register the second time I was told my email address was in use. Then I used the password reminder link, which finally lead me to my spam folder.

In my spam folder was not only the password reminder but also the account verification. Not such a good user experience.

On a side note, the fact that your emails to me go immediately in my spam (on my @yahoo.com account) doesn't give me confidence in using your email service.

I like the idea. The visual design is really nice - I like the logo, color scheme, and fonts.

The video is a nice intro for devs. You might consider preceding it with a less technical 'overview' video that shows your service in action.

Overall, I like the idea. I won't dwell on the price thing for too long, other than to say I agree that it is too expensive and that I'd much rather pay a monthly fee for an appropriate level of service than pay per message. Something I don't see mentioned a lot (here, and at messagepub.com) is the escalation feature. It is really cool to be able to call your api once and know that one way or another my user will get the message. Also, I was pretty annoyed that signing up resulted in 2 emails in my inbox.

Built something very similar and showed it to HN: http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=362906

Its tough for a startup to attract big players to use their messaging platform or service because it is difficult to guarantee uptime, reliable service, etc. Might be perfect for mashups and hackers, but they won't pay.

Cool stuff though; I had a lot of fun playing with it.

I'd echo the other comments about pricing. It seems quite expensive given what you are providing.

For example, I looked up the Google App Engine pricing for sending emails and it's $0.0001 for each email.

Additionally, it's unclear to me how your system handles things like bad emails, twitter being down, etc. From a custom standpoint, handling the messaging exceptions is nearly as important as actually sending the messages.

Thank you for tackling a hairy problem for the rest of us.

The API looks very simple to use (and I love the logo!) :)

I was just looking for an easy way to set up my website monitoring to call me when it's down. This may be it. It does seem a little expensive though, and I don't like credit systems, they just seem slimey for some reason.

"Ability to send through email, SMS, phone, Twitter, AIM, and Google Chat (more soon)"

Is this sentence missing "message" after send?

BTW, I love the logo!

very nice. this is actually something i was looking for. i might make use of this service.

how does pricing scale with volume?

Depending on your volume, we can work out something. Send us an email info@messagepub.com with estimates of your volume and we'll get in touch with you.

To bad the SMS is US only. I have for the longest time been looking for a way to send SMS from a computer.

clickatell.com

We use it and it's awesome. Pricing isn't too bad either.

Seems a little expensive. Cool idea. I'd also like to receive via the same platform, expecially sms.

I get a banner at the top saying I should use a newer browser like IE7 when I'm using IE7.

Thanks for pointing this out. You should only see the banner on IE6. We'll fix that.

Bonus points for blocking IE6. Good luck with your product! Anyone blocking IE6 has a place in my heart for that reason alone.

Bonus points?

Stupid move. If it's irrelevant to the business they should take it down. Only has the potential to turn away customers with no upside.

Well, the business upside is that they can work on features instead of debugging a broken browser.

A more esoteric upside would be that a company that speaks out visibly against IE gives me, a technical minded customer, this warm tingly feeling inside. It suggests that someone in the company is like-minded with me. Which in turn suggests that their product and direction might appeal to me, too.

It'd obviously be a different story if this was a product aiming for joe sixpack and the mass-market. But since messaging APIs are a hard sell in the joe-sixpack market in first place I can only applaud their move; focus your resources on the product, not on the latest IE bug.

The product is for developers, though. I don't think I've met a developer who uses IE6 in the past, oh, 6 years.

Nice application, but I think you should only charge for SMS.

or at least scale the clearly cheaper stuff back a bit later on once you have a solid user base?

I agree. Anything that I can do for free in 5 lines of code or less (email, Twitter) should be sub-one-cent or less. I'd gladly pay for services like phone and SMS, although it seems odd to me that SMS is more expensive than a phone call.

One minute of phone call would probably cost him/her 2.5-3 cents while one SMS will cost him 5 cents. The cost to send/receive SMS will not go down unless you buy hundreds of thousands at the same time.

A nice focused service

Who else does this?

it seem to be a little similar to Ping.fm but that is mostly focused on twitter like services.

Nice Idea. How are you going to handle blacklisting (email?). I believe expanding on the interaction part like replies to say something like surveys would greatly increase the value.

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