4 ms·

Show HN: ReleasePage – Better release communication for your software

3 points by jivings 10y ago

Hi HN! I'm pleased to announce ReleasePage (https://releasepage.co https://releasepage.co). We built this app to solve a simple problem we encountered when working on large products; how do we provide a user-friendly list of changes available in each new release? GitHub helpfully provides us with 'GitHub Releases', allowing us to track software changes easily, however this is decidedly developer focussed and more than often the repositories are private and these details cannot be shared. ReleasePage allows you to create customised, beautiful webpages to show off your releases and easily share them with your users. It utilises your GitHub releases so that there is no need to duplicate information. We also offer several other conveniences, for instance it's common to have several repositories that make up an overall product (we have three core ones that make up our app). ReleasePage can combine your notes for each project into one release. You can see this in action on our own Release Page (http://releases.releasepage.co http://releases.releasepage.co). We hope that you like our product, and can't wait to hear any thoughts and feedback!

brudgers 10y ago
[random advice from the internet] The concern I have is with the pricing and how it positions the product with the sort of customers that the business probably needs to be sustainable. 1. The value of the product is anchored to zero dollars. 2. The high end of the product is <$600/year. That means that landing 100 really good customers is not enough to make the business work. And that also means that it is not worth the effort to sell to good customers and therefore it is not worth developing a product that those customers might buy. 3. Sure there's a $15 plan. Getting to $10k a month for something that might work as a lifestyle business means retaining about 700 customers which even with a low churn means more than a thousand sales a day...all while competing against the company's own free plan..and GitHub...and a developer just making their own site. 4. The free plan might provide leads, but it does not provide qualified leads in the sense that qualified leads are qualified because they are able and likely to pay. One traditional way that company's try to move unqualified leads attracted by a free tier to their paid version is by adding 'features' to the free version that deliberately make it suck over time. The temptation is always there even though it doesn't work very well even for The New York Times. My advice: be fearless with your pricing. The free tier is a way of avoiding the fact that most people (and possibly everyone) is going to say 'no'. The middle tier price is a 'recurring credit card charge that hopefully goes unnoticed'. The high tier doesn't signal a viable business to customers for whom the product meets an important business need and therefore suggests it is probably not worth betting the time and effort to incorporate the product into its workflow. If eighteen months from now Releasepage is abandoned your customers' customers will be clicking on a dead link and that will reflect badly on your customers. In the end, you want customers who are willing to spend money. Customers who are always looking to not spend money require tend to be more work and less patient due to their view of business as a short term zero sum game rather than long term set of mutually beneficial relationships. Finally, I'd recommend Patio11's blog and Kalzumeus Podcast Good luck.
- jivings 10y ago
  Hey, thanks for the advice! Pricing is not something we have a lot of experience with, so we'll definitely take all that you say on board. We still need to work out the perfect pricing structure, but as it stands, once we are out of beta we will not be providing a free plan. I agree with your sentiment; I don't think offering the product for free gives us any long term advantages, and risks negatively impacting paying customers. Thank you for the resources, and for a very valuable comment.
  - brudgers 10y ago
    1. I'm mostly regurgitating Patio11's mantras with my own experience of trying to sell my services on the basis of saving client's money on the cost of the services I provide. 2. When you exit beta and drop the free tier, you are almost certainly going to create ill-will. A lot of that will be by users who legitimately feel burned because they invested time and effort in your platform and helped debug the code. They will feel, not unreasonably, that their trust has been betrayed. 3. Beta should be validating the business too. If you can't really charge for what you're making, it is better to be realistic about that sooner rather than later. Having a free tier is often a way of pretending that people will pay. Facebook and Twitter and Google and StackOverflow and Github can be free because they build on network effects that happen in the real world. I don't see a similarity in your product. http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/26/get-to-no-as-fast-as-you-can/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/26/get-to-no-as-fast-as-you-c...
DTrejo 10y ago
You'll notice that many companies write an article for each new release with some feature front-and-center, then they share the article around and it's like they're launching (again). An example of people using their releases to drive signups. That seems like the main business outcome of telling people about a new feature/release.

3 points by jivings 10y ago

brudgers 10y ago

[random advice from the internet] The concern I have is with the pricing and how it positions the product with the sort of customers that the business probably needs to be sustainable. 1. The value of the product is anchored to zero dollars. 2. The high end of the product is <$600/year. That means that landing 100 really good customers is not enough to make the business work. And that also means that it is not worth the effort to sell to good customers and therefore it is not worth developing a product that those customers might buy. 3. Sure there's a $15 plan. Getting to $10k a month for something that might work as a lifestyle business means retaining about 700 customers which even with a low churn means more than a thousand sales a day...all while competing against the company's own free plan..and GitHub...and a developer just making their own site. 4. The free plan might provide leads, but it does not provide qualified leads in the sense that qualified leads are qualified because they are able and likely to pay. One traditional way that company's try to move unqualified leads attracted by a free tier to their paid version is by adding 'features' to the free version that deliberately make it suck over time. The temptation is always there even though it doesn't work very well even for The New York Times. My advice: be fearless with your pricing. The free tier is a way of avoiding the fact that most people (and possibly everyone) is going to say 'no'. The middle tier price is a 'recurring credit card charge that hopefully goes unnoticed'. The high tier doesn't signal a viable business to customers for whom the product meets an important business need and therefore suggests it is probably not worth betting the time and effort to incorporate the product into its workflow. If eighteen months from now Releasepage is abandoned your customers' customers will be clicking on a dead link and that will reflect badly on your customers. In the end, you want customers who are willing to spend money. Customers who are always looking to not spend money require tend to be more work and less patient due to their view of business as a short term zero sum game rather than long term set of mutually beneficial relationships. Finally, I'd recommend Patio11's blog and Kalzumeus Podcast Good luck.

jivings 10y ago
Hey, thanks for the advice! Pricing is not something we have a lot of experience with, so we'll definitely take all that you say on board. We still need to work out the perfect pricing structure, but as it stands, once we are out of beta we will not be providing a free plan. I agree with your sentiment; I don't think offering the product for free gives us any long term advantages, and risks negatively impacting paying customers. Thank you for the resources, and for a very valuable comment.
- brudgers 10y ago
  1. I'm mostly regurgitating Patio11's mantras with my own experience of trying to sell my services on the basis of saving client's money on the cost of the services I provide. 2. When you exit beta and drop the free tier, you are almost certainly going to create ill-will. A lot of that will be by users who legitimately feel burned because they invested time and effort in your platform and helped debug the code. They will feel, not unreasonably, that their trust has been betrayed. 3. Beta should be validating the business too. If you can't really charge for what you're making, it is better to be realistic about that sooner rather than later. Having a free tier is often a way of pretending that people will pay. Facebook and Twitter and Google and StackOverflow and Github can be free because they build on network effects that happen in the real world. I don't see a similarity in your product. http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/26/get-to-no-as-fast-as-you-can/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/26/get-to-no-as-fast-as-you-c...

DTrejo 10y ago

You'll notice that many companies write an article for each new release with some feature front-and-center, then they share the article around and it's like they're launching (again). An example of people using their releases to drive signups. That seems like the main business outcome of telling people about a new feature/release.