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How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud
- aw3c2 17y agoHTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
- Judson 17y agoFor some reason, the link is here: http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-chargify-and-sendgrid-to-take-my-web-app-to-market-in-3-days/ http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-chargi...
- Tawheed 17y agoSorry about that guys, I was trying to write a little script to auto-post and it had a bug. Correct link: http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-chargify-and-sendgrid-to-take-my-web-app-to-market-in-3-days/ http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-chargi...
- boundlessdreamz 17y agoMaybe you can you put in a redirect using mod_rewrite
- Tawheed 17y agodone!
- xox 17y agoMaybe with a longer development time you could have built something that would incur lower overhead over the long term. Heroku and Chargify become quite expensive if your business grows to any significant degree. Instead, building directly on top of the Paypal API and deploying to a hosting provider that will not bankrupt you as you scale would be a more optimal approach -- you won't get your site up in 3 days but with higher margins you will likely have fewer regrets down the road.
- Retric 17y agoYou can always reduce overhead after you gain some traction.
- listic 17y agoThe principle is good. But is it really painless to change payment API and hosting platform?
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoThat is a "good pain to have" as it were, and the reduced friction gets you iterating more quickly.
- MicahWedemeyer 17y agoI call those "Maserati Problems", as in, "I'll think about how to deal with that as I drive around in my Maserati."
- zackattack 17y agoEric Ries calls it Technical Debt
- aaronblohowiak 17y agoTechnical Debt is different. Technical Debt slows future velocity for feature development / changing to fit customer needs. That you are "leaving money on the table" with these choices does not impede feature progress at all.
- zackattack 17y agoThanks. Can you please elaborate with an example? :)
- henryw 17y agonicely done! this post inspires me to take action and create some of the ideas i had, seeing that they can be done so quickly.
- peregrine 17y agoNice copy on your site. It appears you are a good marketer :).
- Tawheed 17y agoThanks, but I actually consider myself to be a TERRIBLE marketer. However, I've been doing a lot of reading and learning around this and even tried to distill what I've learned into principles around effective landing pages: http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/03/9-principles-behind-an-effective-landing-page/ http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/03/9-principles-behind-an-e... Your positive feedback is encouraging, thanks!
- hasanove 17y agoQuick feedback - it was quite hard to spot a price without registering. I usually go to "sign up" page to see all of the packages, yet in this case the only place to find a price is to scroll down the front page and find it buried there after a few screens of text.
- jamesshamenski 17y agoI really like it but outlook has templates and Gmail has canned responses. Email tracking is nice but it's commonly used by your customers and it's a flawed metric as images are not always displayed (and counted). It's a nice piece of work. Please update us after a month with how it's going.
- Tawheed 17y agoThe beauty of this is a) I get what I need for my primary business because Outlook and Gmail wasn't good enough and b) even if NO ONE else likes this, I've only lost 3 days, which I'm OK with. I'll do a reflection on this in about a month or so.
- ccc3 17y agoNice work! Since you're already letting people login with google, it might make it easier for people to pay if you accepted payment via google checkout.
- hello_moto 17y agoNot trying to be a jerk but your logo is quite similar to Socialwok.com
- Tawheed 17y agodude... my "logo" is two pieces of text because I was too lazy to create a real logo
- natrius 17y agoHe's talking about the BrainTrust.io logo in the sidebar. They do look quite similar, though it's not relevant to this thread at all.
- zackattack 17y agoEverything is derivative
- Timmee 17y agoAfter reading the blog post, I decided to hook up my little web app that I have been working on to use SendGrid. Although I had some trouble configuring it to work with Godaddy's Shared Hosting, I quickly took advantage of their email api. This is a pretty neat service and having 200 emails/day for me to use is great for testing. Thanks for the insights and highlighting this service :)
- bphogan 17y agoA lot of the comments here are kudos to the dev for his app - which is awesome. But what people are missing is how powerful services like Heroku can be for devs. I have students that I mentor building projects with Heroku and Rails, and it's amazing to see what they can do. Yes, prices go up when you need to scale out, but getting an idea out in front of people and seeing if people will use the product is so important. Spending weeks implementing a difficult payment gateway and setting up a scalable infrustructure only to find out that nobody cares about what you built is so costly compared to banging something out in a weekend. In 3 days you can prove it. I built http://rendera.heroku.com http://rendera.heroku.com in 1 day and launched it. People liked it enough to convince me to add all sorts of fun things to it. It still runs on the free plan, but if nobody liked it, I could have found that out and moved on to something else. To the OP, nice job!
- CamperBob 17y agoThat's pretty darned neat.
- 10ren 17y agoInspiring! A question: How much did it cost (in dollars, not sweat) to get these services started, and how much is it monthly? I'm surely off-base, but I feel like it "should" all be free for something getting started (ie with very little traffic), because it would be a great way for all these services to get many initial users, some of which will become paying. EDIT answers: Heroku: free for dev, $15/month for production (it seems?) http://heroku.com/pricing#blossom-1-0 http://heroku.com/pricing#blossom-1-0 Sendgrid: free for 200 emails/day http://sendgrid.com/pricing.html http://sendgrid.com/pricing.html Charify: free for 50 customers http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup/ http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup/
- silviasaint 17y agowell its a kind of good marketing http://www.squidoo.com/womensera http://www.squidoo.com/womensera