frits1993

Haha no the confirmation mails are sent straight away ;)

"tardamail.com is too new, temporarily blacklisted" is what I see in the mail-logs.

Seems like something I can't do much about at the moment, and should correct itself in a while. It seems to get past most spam-filters though.

I'll consider implementing an email-confirmation backup, thanks!

I double checked, and the confirmation links are sent to the sender as you would expect. Please check again and make sure you use the correct fields. If it happens more often, I'll consider swapping the fields, even though this order seems to make most sense looking at several email clients.

Cool, I did not know that. Are there any other thinkable use cases of keeping messages in a hold queue for a longer period of time, for this option to exist?

Done!

Good point, I will push an update with email verification and a favicon in the next hour.

Instant messaging has become the standard. The messages I send my good friends have become shorter, and are often based on my expectations of their reply. With TardaMail, I wanted to recreate the letter-writing experience, digitally. Taking more time to write someone without expecting an instant reply can be very valuable, especially in these times of isolation.

Looks cool, probably uses similar techniques indeed!

The use case of my API is not quite as you describe, but I get the confusion. Instead, my case needs the platforms at which you register to implement the new method of confirmation. That means you can't just use this for every existing software.

It goes like this:

- You register at platform A with your own real email address

- Platform A asks you to confirm your email address, but instead of sending you an email, it shows you an email address to which you can send an email.

- You send an email using your own real email address.

- Platform A receives an event from my API that they received an email at the given email address from the email address they expected, so email address confirmed.

What you see at the provided URL is simply a demo of what could be part of any registration form.

Manual account activation because the "please click this link to confirm your email address" email somehow does not end up in my user's inbox, is one of the most frequent support requests I get.

I built an API (private for now) which offers a solution to these scenarios, and may work as an alternative to passive email validation.

Instead of receiving an email, users are asked to send an email to a unique email address to confirm their email address (this - by the way - also filters out temporary receive-only email addresses)

A proof of concept can be found here: https://confirm-email.progresso-ict.nl. I can imagine the API to be used for account creation, password recovery, signing up for newsletters, etc.

Even though, with a clickable mailto address, the amount of steps are equal or similar to receiving a confirmation email, my girlfriend tells me the method is cumbersome.

So, what does the HN community think? Other questions I still have to investigate are mainly security-related. Emails are spam-filtered by Amazon SES, yet have to test for spoofing.

IPTV subscriptions are an alternative to regular cable tv subscriptions. It's linear tv streamed over the internet instead of it being delivered to you by your cable provider.

It's used for many reasons, but I personally got a subscription at an IPTV provider to be able to offer my French girlfriend to keep watching her French TV channels while living in the Netherlands.

That said, my service does not offer IPTV, simply an editor to users who already have their own IPTV subscription.

Awesome, great pointers. Thanks for that!

Thanks. It all runs on a Laravel codebase, and the SaaS part is handled by Laravel Spark. UI of the landing page is a template I bought, the dashboard is own tinkering.

That's the cool thing, it got its first users without any promotion what so ever. I had used it myself for a couple of months, and only after 2 months I logged into the database and saw these 7 users who simply found it (maybe by URL). They not only registered but were actually using it in the same was as I did.

After that, did post it on some forums, and on the IPTV subreddit, which did give it a boost.

But I have not been posting it anywhere for the last few months now, it seems that the steady flow of new users just keeps pretty constant no and the most active users are the ones who just find it through Google.

Interesting, will definitely reconsider. Thanks!

I've definitely considered it, and I use some custom plans for users who exceed the limits of the Pro Plus plan, but I think current prices are alright.

Also, keep in mind that these prices apply on yearly plans, and most paid users use monthly pricing, where prices range from $2 to $8.

Cheap indeed it is, but I guess that matches the target audience. IPTV is relatively cheap, and the service my tool offers is really a bonus and not a must.

More importantly, I don't think I would pay more than I am currently charging my users, so I think it's just fair. Also, I prefer a whole lot of small payments than a couple of big ones, and for now that seems to be going in the right direction.

It's an IPTV playlist management tool: m3u-editor.com

Posted it on HN a while back as well, but interestingly it is one of my least successful HN posts.

Sure.

Last year June, I built a small online tool for me and my girlfriend to manage our IPTV playlist. I bought a domain name and put it online because our IPTV player needed to access it through a URL. A couple of months later, and 7 users found the tool and were actually using it (keep in mind that that's pretty impressive for a tool as not-user-focused as it was back then).

So I then decided to spend more time refining it. Building more features, introducing paid plans, and making sure everything worked as user-friendly as possible.

It basically all started growing organically from there. This month so far I have a Stripe balance of €620 (roughly 687USD) after fees, which is my 5th full month of running with pricing plans.

As you can imagine, I'm super excited to see if it can keep growing like this!

The playlist we got from our IPTV provider half a year ago, contained way too many channels for our Raspberry Pi Kodi box to be happy, and way more than we needed. So in May, I built a v0.1 of what is m3u-editor.com today.

Turns out there are more like me, who had found and started using my software. Last month, I gave it a complete rebuild and made the dashboard as user friendly as possible. With hundreds of new weekly users, I figured this might interest the HN community as well.

Wow, no offence taken. Thanks for having a look.

“if our servers are down, you will be too”: I can definitely see how you interpreted that. Luckily that's not the case, though. If our servers are down, all license validation passes. The "very bad scenario" with slow service is in the case of a invalid copy which may need a couple of seconds before it is detected as invalid. I am definitely going to change the copy, seems a lot of work to be done there.

Interesting (and comforting) to see the different points of views, where some would target indie developers (just as I did) and others would target massive enterprises. Good to see this isn't a black and white kind of problem.

It was something I built for myself in the first place (and I do still actively use it). Showed it to one of my dev-friends, he said it looked cool so I thought: "why not work a little bit more on it and share it with the world?".

Great feedback, thanks for that!

I definitely think that you're right about that, that the HN community is not the target audience but more of a board of critics taking a look. That's why after launch, I spent time (and money) into finding out what the target audience actually was and where to find them. I thought the brand strategist had a pretty good idea of the market, but no target users found so far.

What exactly do you mean with "going out to acquire users manually"?

Project: https://qeys.io

You got me interested in the hack as well. Obviously, it will most likely not be a hack we can all copy, but I'm curious to what methods got you to finding out about it.

Posted on all of the better known and even the less known platforms. Some of them did indeed drive some traffic, but somehow none of them even lead to trial users.

Definitely, monkeynotes had a similar suggestion so with your comment on top of that, this is definitely on my to do list.

Yes you can definitely do that. The /validate endpoint accepts the parameters application (for the application uuid) and the key (for licence key). You can program your way around that, but the one line solution then does not hold up.

Thanks you for the interesting feedback. Pricing is something I find to be the most difficult part of offering a service. It surprised me that no-one else had mentioned anything about pricing so far, so I started to think that I found the "oh this looks reasonable" sweet spot. I'll see where everything is when this HN storm settles down and reconsider.

Oh wow I had no idea. I simply bought the template from Themeforest, thinking everything would be in order. Anyway, the font has been changed, well spotted!