Show HN: WebMenu, a platform to discover new web apps | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: WebMenu, a platform to discover new web apps

webmenu.org

56 pointsrooshdi20 comments

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Looks great! We're doing almost exactly the same thing at https://starthq.com

Some initial observations:

- you have a much better UI for the directory

- we have more data on the apps, which we pull in automatically via API integrations

- our launcher has a few more features, including new tab replacement extensions for most browsers

- you seem to be targeting consumers, while we're focusing on business users

- you're further along with the app admin & app promotion side of things, we're just getting that going and aren't planning on having that as our main source of revenue

Can we collaborate somehow?

For example, we already have an RSS feed of all the new apps being added to our directory. You could use that to populate yours.

I would be happy to share all our app data with you via a REST API as well if we got something in return, such as a small link in the footer.

You can reach me here in comments, via Twitter (handle in profile) or by signing up and using the feedback form.

You have an awesome service as well, and I would definitely enjoy possibly collaborating. Right now, I'm focused on featuring smaller Saas and consumer applications that need help presenting their service to new users in an easily understandable format. I really want this service to provide users with high quality information about applications through descriptions, screenshots, and reviews. I would love to talk a bit more privately. You may email me at contact(at)webmenu.org if you want to get in touch or get featured.

Great! Mail sent.

Hello all, As a bootstrapper myself, I've noticed getting exposure for new web services is hard. The major media outlets usually don't care and focus on gossip more than products. I've built a simple platform to help connect web applications with the users looking for them. I hope I can help you find new users and get reviews. Any feedback to improve the service is appreciated.

This is a beautiful undertaking. Webmenu looks nice and clean, good job!

Since it's about helping upstarts and new web-apps you might wanna consider presenting more details about the apps you take up. Like information about what the app does, friction you felt, coolness etc. Just throwing in the logo/icon and the name of the app will not cut it.

In effect a critique which could either be your own or sourced via the community you intend to build will make this offering more compelling.

Most definitely you might want to keep away from presenting logos of Linkedin, Google Docs or even Trello i.e. of big, rising or successful companies. It starts looking like a hypocrisy if you do that, but obviously monetization is one concern in this spot.

Overall, it would be great to have a new web-app review destination which focuses solely on the product/founders and is zero on gossip.

Thank you for the feedback. I definitely want to focus more on independent web applications and smaller startups or bootstraps, although users are allowed to upload and add popular web apps they are fans of as well. I'm going to try my best to evolve the service based on the community and see where it goes. I may have to provide personal reviews for each application to help users get more information to draw from.

Very nice! Not sure if you're familiar but there is a solid competitor in this space: http://www.getapp.com/

Yep! They're awesome too! Would love to have them on the WebMenu. They're a great Saas directory for business. We feature business apps too, although we're open to a wider range of consumer apps as well.

Just added BitBalloon (https://webmenu.org/apps/bitballoon), some comments on the process:

Really would be nice if I didn't have to manually crop & resize the screenshots before uploading. Just resizing and cropping them centered would have done a fine job in my case. Though you would probably want to disallow images that are too small so you don't get scaling artifacts.

When you get a validation error for a screenshot, the form forgets the URL, so you have to retype that every time.

Would also be nice with a tagging widget when entering tags. Currently there's no indication of existing tags.

Apart from that everything looks great! Good luck!

Yea, I'm going to have to optimize the uploading process a bit. Thanks for the feedback. Your page looks very nice and will be featured soon!

I think this is a great idea Rooshdi and I wish you the best of luck. I think creating a market place is hard because you need both buyers and sellers. As far as I can tell, you found 12 apps of each type and listed them here. I can see the clear value for sellers. What do you think the value is for buyers?

I think there's value in providing a quick, clean overview and recommendation of applications to potential buyers before they pursue further. WebMenu could potentially be sort of like a mall, where buyers walkthrough and get a glimpse of what apps are selling through their window screens, so to speak, before they enter the store.

A lot of your assets are not retina compatible. Specifically your logo image: https://d2avfbmbvwlo8q.cloudfront.net/assets/logo-fd9cab1e82...

Yep, I definitely need to optimize a few of my assets. Hard to tell on my non-retina display, but I hope to optimize eventually.

Very nice, hopefully this platform will get more attention!

I hope so! I really want to help developers get the attention their apps deserve!

I love these types of services! I dont yet have my own but love discovering them. I guess i'm your target audience?

Yep! I enjoy them too! Never know what surprise you'll find around the corner. Should be a fun.

awesome service!

Nicely done! Love the UI, its so clean and intuitive.

Looking forward to publish my apps there.

Awesome! Would love to feature yours too:

https://webmenu.org/promote

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