chptung

For the past few months, my co-founder and I have been working on our side project, Threadbase, which allows non-developers to make their own Hacker News, Product Hunt, or any Reddit-style community (e.g upvotes with threaded comments) in minutes without writing any code.

We came up with the idea after building our own upvote communities and friends of ours asked if they could make a similar community without the need to program. We thought this could be an interesting technical project to figure out. Plus, since people were asking for it, we already had our alpha group.

We started the project using Rails for the front and backend, but eventually moved the majority of the SaaS elements (e.g. a dashboard to make changes/manage users, modifying the look of a community with a theme, etc.) to React and used Rails as our backend because this provided a much better user experience.

Our most recent challenge was figuring out how to implement the #1 product request from our customers: communities on a custom domain. Originally, we began the project on AWS, but after looking around, we found that Heroku provided a much easier custom domain implementation process for the end user. So, we migrated the entire project from AWS to Heroku, and now, if you add a custom domain to your community, we just give you the auto-generated heroku dns link and community owners can paste that in their CNAME or Alias to finish the setup. This is much easier than the path we almost went down with AWS.

My co-founder and I are now making a small amount of MRR from our paid tiers, but the learning experience has been really enjoyable.

A few things you can do on Threadbase: - Make a community in just a few clicks without writing any code (e.g. support.threadbase.io) - Customize the look and feel with pre-built themes. We named the first three communities--Cleveland, San Francisco,and Brooklyn--after the cities that were important to our stories. - Drop in your own Google Analytics ID to get data on your community. - If you'd like to further customize the color of your community, turn off ads, or put your own Google AdSense pixel in to make money from your community, you can sign up for our Basic tier. - If you want to create a private community (i.e require registration) or add your own custom domain, you can upgrade to Plus.

TL;DR - I just finished developing my first Shopify app--Shoppy, a free app that gives you updates about orders sent directly to Slack and you can even upgrade to Elite and get daily, weekly, or monthly order summaries to make reporting easier. Get the free beta app here: https://shoppy.emerald.io. Since this is my first app, any feedback you have is appreciated!

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Long version:

Hi everyone -

I've been using Shopify for 2 years as a marketer and ecommerce manager, and I've sold >$500k worth of product in 2018. But, we use Slack, and I've always wanted a Shopify app that sent order notifications for new, refunded, and fulfilled orders to Slack but I also wanted this app to include discount codes used, tags, and UTM tracking for the order so I know what's working and what's not. I tried every app I could find, and nothing had this level of tracking in their Slack notifications.

So, I decided to learn to code and make an app myself.

Shoppy connects your Shopify store with Slack so you can receive important order notifications and summaries sent straight to Slack, reducing the amount of time you spend pulling order data and giving you more time to focus on growing your store. And, because I wanted to solve my own problem, Shoppy is the only app that includes discount codes used, tags, and Google Analytics/UTM associated with our orders. You can also receive daily, weekly, and monthly summaries that include order counts and revenue for that date range, and I'm working on automating these summaries for a future update.

For those curious, the app is built with Rails, hosted on Heroku, and heavily uses the Shopify api gem. It was surprisingly easy to get started, and all the payments are handled by Shopify so I didn't need to bring in a third party payment processor like Stripe.

I just submitted the app to Shopify for review, but I'm looking for beta users to try Shoppy out and provide feedback. I've also included 7-day trials for the Premium and Elite tiers so you can try them out completely for free and you can cancel any time.

If you're interested, here's a link to install the app: https://shoppy.emerald.io

And, if you have any questions/feedback about Shoppy or if I can help answer any marketing or ecommerce questions about your Shopify store, please comment below!

Thanks!

Yeah this is what we're trying to figure out too, but we haven't thought about some of these options. Some of our users brought up that they'd like downvoting added in which helps with moderation, but after that, we could work on allowing an admin to decide the weight of an up or downvote.

Thanks for the feedback!

Got it. Thanks for the feedback!

Hi there - Out of curiosity, what kind of add-ons would you want a forum-as-a-service? Right now, we're working with our users to understand what solutions they need in a no-code product.

Would love to learn more about what you're thinking to see if we could find a solution.

Totally fair feedback. Our hope was to use the post as a way to explain how our upvote-community-as-a-service actually works using the Hacker News theme as a template.

Hi there!

I'm one of the co-founders of Threadbase, and this question comes up a lot. Discourse is a very good forum software, but it lacks the upvote mechanics from communities like Reddit, Hacker News, or Product Hunt that makes for really sticky communities. We've seen that upvoting allows posters to feel good about "winning" for the day and votes allow lurkers to feel like their contribution is changing the community in the way they want.

As for how Threadbase is different than a subreddit, Reddit is a great content discovery platform that mostly monetizes through ads. Threadbase is made for community owners who want to own their communities. By own, we mean they can customize the look and feel with different pre-built templates, put the community on their domain (no more /r/politics but instead politics.com), and they can either remove ads entirely from their communities or show their own ads with a Google Adsense pixel to monetize their community. We also have more ideas to allow community owners to make more from their communities (e.g. private/registration-only communities, marketplace to sell custom themes, etc.)

Our hope is that communities owners can turn their community side hustles into their full time job.

Hope that answers your question but if you have any other questions, let me know!