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Ask HN: Would it be valuable to you to receive 'Like' notifications by email?
A couple of years ago, I built a relatively straightforward web app that emails you every time your Facebook posts receive a "Like" (or any of the other reactjis).
The emails come at a maximum frequency of 5 minutes, which is overkill for a lot of people, but I've been using the app for more than two years and the frequency doesn't bother me. I could also make the maximum frequency configurable, with little effort.
Personally, I really enjoy getting notification emails not only for comments (which come directly from Facebook) but also for reactions (which come from my app).
At one point, I made a half-hearted effort to sell subscriptions to the app (at about $2/mo.) but had to abandon that project when something of higher priority came up.
Now that I've got more time available, I'm trying to decide whether it's a valuable enough service to a large enough number of people that it's worth it to give it a full-fledged effort as a subscription service; or whether I should just open-source it; or whether I should abandon the project entirely, except for my own personal use.
So, a few questions:
Would you find this service valuable?
If not, can you think of a market segment to whom this might appeal?
At which price do you think the app would generate the most revenue?
Do you know of any other existing services that do something similar?
- adtac 10y agoFor a second, I misunderstood your title and thought you wanted to implement `Likes` to email ("I like this email, let me go ahead and press this button"). Thank god it's not that.
- niftich 10y agoDoes your service only integrate with Facebook? The way you describe it, it doesn't seem to offer too much value-add over existing notifications, or simply logging in to Facebook and relying on their timeline and notification history to summarize what happened since you last logged in. However, if you were to make the frequency configurable for every signup, your users could set how often they wish to be notified -- so everyone could find their own sweet spot between 'right now' and 'when I next log in'. How do you envision the content of the email? A concatenation of all reaction events in the time window, or some sort of report or digest that has been processed to condense and categorize the information? I believe the latter is more valuable.
- niftich 10y agoAlso, there are power users, 'influencers', who are trying to cultivate an audience, often across multiple social networks, and they are looking for the ability to schedule posts ahead of time, and receive metrics and basic analytics on what sorts of impressions they reach. Products like this exist: search 'social media scheduling' or 'social media management'. I'm not convinced that your solution as your describe would be an effective competition to more full-featured tools, but at the right price point you may be able to attract customers who don't need all the features that those solutions provide.