Hacker News Reader

ollierattueon Ask HN: Silo, project management for software web app - What do you think?

Thanks for posting those links. Those two applications are purely bug trackers. Silo is designed for all stages of software development "Fix, Build, Maintain". Basecamp and Pivotal tracker treat these three activities in the same way. Silo functions differently for each and I believe this is the USP.

ollierattueon Ask HN: Silo, project management for software web app - What do you think?

Thanks, my post didn't link. Thought it auto-linked...

ollierattueon Ask HN: Silo, project management for software web app - What do you think?

That's great to hear that there are others out there who are dissatisfied with exiting project management tools.

It's interesting that you mentioned Pivotal trackers bad bug tracking support. One of the major issues I've experienced is that project management tools are great for new features but don't work so well for handling bugs. Silo is planned to have three main features 'Fix, Build, Maintain' which all work in slightly different ways. And your're right if you have to use a second tool then the benefit of the first is radically diminished.

You're also right in that the 'basecamp killer feature' isn't clear. Why am I going to switch to Silo? The marketing website needs to work a lot harder to convey the benefit. It is somewhat abstract at the moment. We need to really hammer out the product before we can really sell the killer features and benefits.

As for http://flashissue.com - I love the tagline 'Do you hate creating newsletters?', it instantly caught my attention and got me listening. However I couldn't then quickly work out what you were offering. My advice would be to move the in-app screenshot in place of the generic 'man and help' image which although catching doesn't tell me anything about Flash Issue. I'd also add more and clearer explanations to the screenshot as it's still tricky to work out what the product does.

Thanks for your time.

ollierattueon Ask HN: Silo, project management for software web app - What do you think?

Completely understandable. You're right, it is very abstract at the moment. My attempt was to define the problem and map out what a solution should look like. We are very early stage and work on v1 has only just started. I agree screenshots and examples need to be added. However I'm wondering features are best or whether sticking with 'benefits' is a better approach e.g. 10,000 mp3 vs Your whole music collection in your pocket. Thanks.

ollierattueon Ask HN: Client hosting billing web app

So I signup, add my bank account details, and then my clients can pay me via their credit cards, which they can put on record and do a recurring payment?

ollierattueon Ask HN: Client hosting billing web app

but with lots of clients and websites it becomes a faff to track the payments

-> how can it be difficult to track payments? either an invoice is paid or it isn't.

50 clients all making payments on a monthly basis. Reviewing your bank account for payments, marking invoices as paid (harder to differentiate if they are all the same amount). That's a faff. Setting up recurring billing via PayPal with auto-invoice marking as paid removes this.

It looks like Corduroy allows clients to pay for their invoices via credit card online. Is this correct? Can they setup a recurring payment via credit card?

Thanks,

ollierattueon Ask HN: Time to shelve that idea?

'9 Ways to Decrease Your Chance of Bootstrapping a Successful Company' - Number #1: Choosing a Market with Funded Competition

http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2011/11/02/9-ways-to-decrease-y...

Although yes it does validate the space and yes there can be room for more than one. Note 'decrease' not 'kill' :)

ollierattueon I launched my abandoned side project and got a paying customer within 24 hours

Hey jrsmith1279, thanks for your comment on Flaregun. It's great to get real feedback and validation.

Both your feature requests becomes important when you have hundreds of domains managed by Flaregun. I think being able to assign domains to clients is a really key feature going forward. I have added both to my todo list.

Give me a shout if you want to talk through anything else or run into any problems. I am really keen to open up a dialogue with my early adopters to help shape the product.

ollierattueon Ask HN: $4.99 VS $5 - Does odd number pricing work?

I have a theory (just a theory) that .99 pricing was introduced to prevent in house employee theft.

If an item costs $10 the till worker can pocket the money without recording the transaction. However if the product costs $9.99 the customer is due 1 cents change so the item has to be checked into the till and the purchase recorded, making an employee theft traceable as the tills will not add up at the end of the day :)

ollierattueon Ask HN: Flaregun - Manage domains and SSL certificates - Would you pay for this?

Thanks for all your input - new pricing plans up at http://getflaregun.com/plans

Plans feels more suitable now. Getting rid of the free account feels the right move. If anyone is interested they should be willing to 'gamble' $5. I can't see many free -> paid upgrades happening so it is probably easiest to cut it out (less support, coding etc).

If you click on signup there is a form to get a one time email when Flaregun launches (it is currently in development).

Cheers,

ollierattueon Ask HN: Flaregun - Manage domains and SSL certificates - Would you pay for this?

Thanks for this. Hadn't actually considered a quarterly charge. That's a good idea. Low monthly charges start to get difficult with per transaction standard fees (like paypal).

One more quick question. Are you acting as an individual i.e. freelancer, or agency? I don't think an agency would mind paying $12/month if they had a few hundred domains, so perhaps the domain limits are off and it would be better like this:

Professional - $5/month - 100 domains

Agency - $12/month - 500 domains

Max - $30/month - 2000 domains (can't see much demand for this plan)

I agree the free plan doesn't seem to make much sense. A better option would be to give a free trial period on the paid plans e.g. 7 days.

ollierattueon Ask HN: Flaregun - Manage domains and SSL certificates - Would you pay for this?

Hey, that's really great to hear you would pay. It's great idea validation. Would love you to answer a few quick questions:

- Could you suggest a monthly price you would be happy to pay?

- Would you be willing to pay a yearly (saving over the monthly cost) fee? If so what would you be happy paying?

Thanks for your time.

ollierattueon Ask HN: Flaregun - Manage domains and SSL certificates - Would you pay for this?

Hey Hopeless, thanks for taking the time to comment.

Your notification periods sound spot on. Early (1 month) to allow purchase order & client holidays + potentially clients wanting to let a domain lapse. The system could then do another whois lookup expiry check before sending out the 1 week left reminder.

I take your point about the monthly subscription model. Thinking of the monthly services I pay for I tend to log in pretty regularly. As you say Flaregun isn't really like this. You would dump your domains into it when you first sign up, then login every so often to add a new domain (10-30 seconds). So payment options are:

1. Keep it monthly and perhaps reduce price.

2. Charge a one off fee (local program) - it could even be some kind of spreadsheet addon. However I favour a webapp as it is the easiest incarnation to iterate and further develop. Also a local program would need to always be running to display / send the notifications.

3. Yearly subscription. Domains are yearly so this would kind of tie in. Getting into a customers head if you thought Flaregun solved a problem for you, you probably would be fairly loyal - i.e. it's not a try it, see if I like and if I get on with it I will keep it kind of product. You either want it or you don't. But I always feel an upfront yearly cost increases the barrier to subscription. I wonder if a yearly cost with a 100% money back guarantee if not satisfied, could be the answer.

Any other thoughts / ideas appreciated.

Cheers,

ollierattueon Ask HN: Flaregun - Manage domains and SSL certificates - Would you pay for this?

Hey, thanks for the detailed comment on how you handle this situation. It is so helpful to get such thoughtful feedback and has really got me thinking critically about this product.

Out of interest do you develop websites on behalf on your clients or is it just web/email hosting?

I am trying to figure out the core market for Flaregun. I think it is really targeted at web design agencies which handle a clients complete web presence.

The last company I worked at, a small web agency, was a reseller (Enom) and like you would buy domains on behalf of clients. However a lot of our clients wanted to buy the domains themselves so they had full ownership. So we had a situation where we owned and renewed 70 odd domains and then the rest (100+) were owned by 40 odd clients (some legacy) across as many registrars. Tracking all these domains was just not possible. Some were bound to slip.

"i tell them they're responsible for renewing them (which i use as a selling point for why they should transfer them to me)" - this is a completely reasonable policy which completely covers you. However perhaps this "I told you so" attitude wouldn't work in all situations. I guess it depends on the relationship with the client. If it is just hosting then yeah you can take that stance. However clients paid my old company to handle their web presence, sometimes on high traffic websites were downtime was not acceptable. In this instance their expectation was a little higher, and preventing potential problems like this was assumed to be a responsibility of the web agency.

Your thoughts on the free vs paid for plans are interesting. A few of my thoughts:

1. Perhaps it would make sense to get rid of the corporate plan (as you say anyone with this many domains would already have a well sorted billing / renewal system in place)

2. Make the agency plan unlimited (chances are they wouldn't have more than 500 est domains).

3. I see the professional account as a freelancer. Maybe 30 domains is too high in this case.

4. The free account could be removed and a 30 day free trial added to the paid accounts. I guess you either want this or not. The free account doesn't really serve as a sales device like it would on other apps. Also your use of Flaregun doesn't expand over time (like it does with a app like Basecamp). You start with x number of domains to manage, so you jump in at a price point (plan) which allows that number of domains.

I have been thinking about building billing (domain and hosting) into the product, but I guess most people already have an invoicing system setup and wouldn't want another systems. Integration with existing systems would be great but is time consuming and makes the web app a lot more complex.

Cheers,

ollierattueon Ask HN: Silo - SSL certificate safeguard web app - do I go ahead and build?

Hey hopeless, thanks for your thoughtful comment.

There isn't any solution to the pass phrase apache issue. If you forgot / lose it you need to:

a. Remember / find it

b. Buy a new certificate.

You can create private keys without pass phrases, but this is less secure.

It's interesting to hear that you think SSL certificate expiry is a common problem. As you say notification could be setup in Google Calendar, but we just tend to overlook things like this. However I wonder whether a for sale web app could be justified on this single simple feature...

As for trust, it is a real issue. Trust and security are two different things. The security could be fine, but if there is a belief (rightly or wrongly) that it isn't safe then there will be a problem selling a product or service.

From my understanding the certificate is sent from the server to the visitor's browser when they connect, so I don't see storing them in an online service as a security risk. However I need to research the security implications of storing the private key and pass phrase. Any advice or info here would be greatly appreciated.