bubbamack

Your comments are on point and ones we've discussed internally. Big thanks for sharing them because it's super helpful to hear others pushback and express those same concerns.

Marketers already use different channels for different purposes - email, text, social - so we know introducing a new type of channel will definitely be a heavy lift.

However, we believe personalization at the expense of privacy has been out of hand and want to see control put back in the hands of users. My co-founder and I pioneered and have patents on tracking and personalization and feel we helped give birth to these problems. The Notifier is an idea we had to push the pendulum back towards user control. We'll give it a shot and see if the market feels the same way.

Apps like telegram and signal have similar capabilities but those apps just aren't on the radar of the audiences we are targeting.

For example, one of our use cases is youth sports where we've personally experienced problems with messages getting lost in group chats; parents not wanting their phone number/email or name on communication threads; coaches managing phone number lists for parents and athletes, etc. They view telegram and signal as something you use when you have something to hide - so they stick with options they don't like, text or whatsapp, because they don't have an alternative.

The idea is to give user's control of the messaging and marketers better options. SMS is good for individualized messages like you would get from loyalty programs. Our focus is on broadcasting messages to a group - we don't target an individual user by design.

We built this to solve problems we've dealt with personally: - getting a ton of spam and scam text messages - text messages from coaches that got lost in a group chat - difficulty in unsubscribing from some community texts - etc

We got frustrated that anyone can send anything to us as long as they have our email or phone number and wanted a platform that made broadcasting a message more effective by letting users control who can reach them.

If you run a website or SaaS product, reaching your users on their phones usually means SMS or building a mobile app just so you can send push notifications.

We built The Notifier as a better option.

Our developer API lets your web app broadcast important alerts to users through The Notifier app. Users join your alert group and your app broadcasts alerts that arrive as push notifications on their phones.

The API is available to all accounts, including our free Developer accounts. Give it a try and experience how The Notifier is more effective, while maintaining the privacy you expect for yourself.

Hi HN, I'm Harold, founder of The Notifier.

We built this to solve a few of problems I run into:

- I get so many scam texts that now I hate getting any promo texts even from businesses and orgs I like

- A lot of events, conferences and orgs want me to dowload their app mainly so they can send notifications to my phone, like a last minute update. I don't mind the notifications but I do mind downloading their app when all the info I need is already on their website.

- Sometimes you just want to broadcast message - one way with no replies. When my sons played sports, sometimes the coach would text gym changes to the players and parents in a group chat, their message would get lost in the group chat chaos and players would show up late. Or worse, the coach would send an email which hardly anyone checks regularly - especially the players.

The Notifier is 2 things:

1. A SaaS platform that lets you broadcast alerts/messages to groups of people.

2. A personal alert app: no signup, no phone number, no PII. You can create personal alerts/reminders or join a group anonymously. And you can pause, resume, or leave a group with one tap.

The demo page has two live groups running on the same infrastructure our customers use, so you can get an idea of how these one-way, broadcast alerts work:

GitHub Incidents: alerts when GitHub's status page reports an incident. Indie Hackers Case Studies: alerts when Indie Hackers publishes a new case study

The Show HN title says GitHub Incidents but this isn't a GitHub-specific tool. It a general delivery layer. The GitHub Incidents is the type of alert a community organization can send to residents, or a conference can send to attendees, for last-minute updates. The IH Case Studies is the type of alert an online store can use to announce an upcoming drop, or a company can use to pre-register customers for an upcoming product launch.

Currently, our platform lets you manually send alerts. We had some devs ask about API access, mostly folks who wanted an alternative to A2P SMS without collecting phone numbers, and we are currently working on that - so these GitHub and IH alerts are meant to show how our service can be used in a product or website.

Happy to answer anything.

I run into the same thing with Cursor. After updates I sometimes see models reset to Auto after an update. I'm not sure it that is intentional or bad coding on their part.

Nope.

I made that same mistake a long time ago. Fortunately after many years I slowly stopped getting texts and emails - probably cuz it was a just a small donation.

Unfortunately I still constantly bombarded by one of the parties - because a long time ago I was registered as one - even though I changed it to no party affiliation a years ago. Once you're on those types of list you are f'd.

Back in 2023 I wanted to create a corp dashboard - simple auth and rbac, charts, summaries, etc - and wanted it done with sveltekit. Me and the other dev planned on working over the weekend to have a simple prototype to demo on Monday and planned on a week or so to get the whole thing done.

I was shocked when it built a usable version in one shot and instead of having a prototype to demo, we basically had the whole thing done in a few hours.

A lot of developers focus on the build part because that's what they know best. Selling and marketing a new product is really hard and takes way more time than you think - unless you get lucky.

If you believe your SaaS can actually make money then you should continue but I would focus on outreach. Things like articles and online posts are fine to establish your credentials and make a potential customer comfortable paying but they aren't good for getting sales. I'm not sure I would spend time on SEO unless you already have a ton of experience with it - personally I think the combo of chatGPT and Google search getting worse made people use search engines less.

If I were you I would prioritize finding gig that pays and use your free time to market your SaaS.

It says its only open to business and enterprise accounts and I'm not sure I would trust this for anything meaningful for a business, especially since they are hosting the site.

Would folks here want to have dashboard or similar internal sites with internal data hosted on OpenAI?

Would you be comfortable with non-techs having the ability to spin up sites?

I see problems on the business side and it seems better as a consumer-focused Wix or Squarespace alternative for portfolios and those type of personal sites.

"What if I made the apple magic mouse into a car?"

It would've been cool if it was a sporty version of a Toyota Prius but it is not cool as a Ferrari. It's hard to believe a "car person" designed that thing. I saw somewhere that Ferrari gave LoveFrom the initial design but who knows since I doubt anyone is going to take responsibility for something that is universally panned.

I think tech meetups still happen all the time and covid mainly caused them to occur in online and differently. Now you seem them on youtube, streaming, discord, etc. They're different from the pre-covid days but they still exist imo.

It really depends on what you are building. I remember asking a Jr Dev to put up a simple static website of just a few pages and they were getting lost in react. Being an OG dev, I had to show them how to get it done faster and in a more lightweight manner with plain HTML, javascript and CSS. It was a simple site but the dev didn't know better cuz everything was done in react at the code camp they went to.

Conversely, I had Claude build a webapp for internal purposes to help translate some content we were creating. It was done in HTML, JS and tailwind with no framework. After a while, I could see that the jank it kept adding would be a problem so I had Claude refactor it using sveltekit.

I think companies are starting to realize that big AI companies were partially subsidizing the costs and that it is more expensive than they realized. They will probably start to monitor token usage.

I use AI for a lot of coding and it takes effort and experience to reduce some of the excess cruft it likes to add.

Sounds like they have an established culture that works for them and you are feeling like you might not be a good fit. The Manager had a 1:1 with you to make sure you stay in your lane and it sounds like they just want someone who will do their assigned tickets. You'll need to decide if it's the role, environment and culture you want.