Show HN: Manage access to Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, and more | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Manage access to Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, and more

onboarder.co

35 pointsDerekH28 comments

Hey everyone, I ran some Facebook ads and received some feedback from Reddit /r/startups. I decided it was enough validation to build it.

If you're like me, you've probably used Basecamp, GitHub, Heroku, HipChat, and many other apps on a daily basis. One of the things I found annoying was sending out invitations to all of these different apps. Onboarder solves this. When you need to invite someone new, type in their email (and GitHub username) and you're done. Onboarder handles the rest.

Better yet, when you need to remove access, you can do so with just one click.

I'm exploring opportunities to make this process even simpler. I definitely think it would be better with deeper integration. For a first version, I think it's pretty cool.

Thanks a lot for listening and I welcome any and all feedback.

I really don't mean to be a jerk, but this sounds like a terrible idea. Four places to send invites from? That's a first world problem, not a startup business opportunity.

It's a first-world problem that can take a lot of time. I'd much rather go to a single site and send out all of my invites than navigate to four individual sites and muck about in the settings to send an invite.

Your use of "then" rather than "than" makes it read like you do two steps in a specific order rather than the, I assume, intent of using a better alternative for a time consuming process.

Ack! Sorry about that! I guess I wasn't paying enough attention.

I can't see how inviting users to a handful of services could take longer than 5-10 minutes? Is that really a "lot of time"?

Per user. If, like my company, you hired 10 devs last year, that's over an hour of savings.

We have 100s of developers using Github, HipChat. This service would be quite useful. Especially the offboarding.

Another thing that would be awesome if your could get even finer grained control of some of the services. Like having the ability to maintain some additional Github permissions. A big pain point for us right now is you need to have admin to manage teams, webhooks, etc. Have some levels between admin and write would be great (and I don't blame GH for having these. It's a more enterprise need.)

Distributed user permissions management is roughly as small an opportunity as Active Directory.

Since when were first world problems not startup opportunities? It certainly doesn't sound like the next Google, but it could be a good side project that pays for his next vacation.

Companies routinely fail to disable access to users who no longer need it, creating security risks and increasing costs.

This seems very valuable to large teams, and like a small convenience to large teams.

err... "a small convenience to small teams."

I've been involved at a few startups that over a year later my accounts still are not disabled. At one I logged in six months later and disabled myself.

A lot of really large tech startups are not even solving "first world problems".

The haters are going to hate...

Identity, access/SSO, provisioning and management are all massive problems that need to be dealt with. For an MVP you are hitting on the important stuff.

Security and being trustworthy are going to be extremely important and I would stress that if I were you. You don't want to be a weak link.

Onboarding is a pain to solve (yay), but offboarding is even worse. If this really does deactivate everyone's account across all services, it's a huge win.

Looks like a clone of https://www.meldium.com/, I think?

Yep, looks like it. Thanks for posting this. I was focused on the big players in the space, and I missed this one. It's interesting that it never came up while I was talking about it with others.

You're welcome. I'm not sure how well-known Meldium is -- I think the only reason I'm aware of it is that they're a YC company and I work for a YC company.

Clone? Wouldn't Competitor be a bit more fair? There are many.

Sorry, yes. I just meant to imply technological equivalence, not copying.

This looks like an interesting concept. How does it compare with LDAP/Active Directory/Google Apps integration?

I'm still trying to learn more about Active Directory everyday. Companies like Okta and OneLogin offer user provisioning (what Onboarder is doing) and they integrate with Active Directory.

Onboarder is definitely not that complex yet, but I'm still learning about this space. My goal was to make it simple. Connect with OAuth or give us an API key, and we're good to go.

If you plan on targeting mid-size companies and up to enterprise, you're going to need to have some sort of AD/LDAP integration.

The onboarding/offboarding process is generally initiated from there, and internal apps and services tend to use that as the canonical user store.

Good luck with your project, I hope it works out well for you!

Derek, The design and control flow looks very smooth for first version of the site. I have registered and will look to use it, here is a small suggestion, you can probably add something on dashboard to show as initially it shows nothing.

I think it's a good idea. You'd need to include more systems than you mention however. Our company uses a few of the ones you mentioned.

Nice work! This needs a lot more services, I think, but the concept is smart.

Thanks! Yes, I definitely agree. For the first version, I picked the ones I felt could generate the most interest. I've had people mention Google Apps, the Atlassian suite, Campfire, and many more.

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