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Published my first proper product after working as a developer for 10 years
- hkanaktas 6y agoThe server is down, please have mercy lol
- hkanaktas 6y agoOkay, it's back on. I upgraded to a bigger box. Phew, this is exhilarating.
- wolco 6y agoGreat mvp. Good Luck. "All these employments and hourly works are means to make some money, but it doesn't worth much when you want to take a trip for a few days/weeks but your "boss" says no." When success hits you might have less time for travel compared to scheduling a vacation at work. The more important you are the more important your business is can create longer hours.
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks a lot! I'm aware that owning a business means much more work and I'm willing to put in the necessary effort. Maybe I will go nomadic, work in part of the day and travel in the remaining hours. Possibilities are endless.
- andi999 6y agoGood luck from me as well. Although I am not looking for a quotation solution, there would be 2 things which would concern me (if I were): - There is no example how a 'beautiful quotation' looks. - Pricing would be a concern. You say it is free, so why should it be of concern: if I change my business process now to use your interface and then I am locked in, I would really like to know how much I have to pay next year.
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks for checking it out! I was working on the preview button before my server crashed from the extreme traffic :D I will deploy it soon. About the pricing, we don't have set in stone amount right now but we will be nice to our early-adopters, I promise!
- lowdose 6y agoWrite a blog about the HN traffic hose!
- tarasmatsyk 6y agoGo-go-go man! An idea seems interesting, having a simple product just to store all quotes should be a cool thing for small businesses. What I would personally add: - Use GIF/carousel instead of an image on the landing page so I can use what exactly the product does - Add some kind of API (really basics) to integrate a product into other solutions
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks a lot for your feedback. It seriously means a lot to me that people take their time to check out something I built and say what they think about it. The landing page is literally 5 days old. I am constantly tweaking it with new ideas and I will definitely apply your feedback. I was thinking of a speed-up video to show various pages. API sounds so good. I was thinking of Zapier integration but why not both, right?
- toomuchtodo 6y agoI’d recommend both; folks who want to use the API natively can, but those who are going to use Zapier can rely on the integration. You’ll need the API endpoint regardless for the Zapier integration. I propose that having the ability to manage clients and quotes through an API would be a powerful feature. If you’re worried about rapid iteration and backwards compatibility, remember to version your API route(s), and use a sub domain so you can scale out the API easily in the future independently of other app components. Consider firing off web hooks for any events that your customers would want action taken on faster than polling your API could support. Congrats on the launch!!
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks! To be honest this isn't even a launch lol. I was just trying to find a few potential customers and ask for feedback. Now I have a lot of potential customers, and a lot of conversations to make.
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks a lot for the ideas, too. If you want to hear about the progress you can simply just register (we'll probably send a weekly mail) or follow me (@hkanaktas) or Dytto's account (@dyttoco) on Twitter.
- graposaymaname 6y agoGood job! I'm yet to check the product but the website itself looks beautiful. Clean and no-nonsense design. Loved it!
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks a lot! I look forward to your feedbacks on the product itself as well.
- tylerrobinson 6y agoIf I may provide some unsolicited feedback, if you are targeting the United States you may want to check the use of the word quotations in this context. I’ve not personally heard “quotation” used this way, so I wasn’t sure what the software is for. Maybe proposal or quote or RFP process would resonate more? (I googled “salesforce quotations” to check myself on this and indeed do not see any results using it that way) Could you explain on the marketing site what type of business this would be best for? Are there other workflow tracking features? For grammar, there are only a handful of things which don’t ring quite true for me as a native speaker, like “stop losing your time” which for its prominence on the page seemed worth mentioning. Others might think it sounds fine, but that felt awkward to me compared with “stop wasting time”, for example.
- hkanaktas 6y agoOh god. Please keep 'em coming. These are all great feedback. To be honest we, two cofounders, didn't spend days to decide on the words. We both are not native speakers. Google'd some keywords, took a look at dictionary websites and decided quotation was fine. We will do further research on that. Would "offer" work in this context? We are decided on targeting freelancers and businesses that sell services, like software or advertisement agencies. But to be fair anyone doing business negotiations via sending an offer to a client could possibly use the app. Right now the app is pretty basic as this is a product of 2-nights worth of time and we only went live this week. "Stop wasting time". Noted. Again, if you have any more feedback, I'd really appreciate it. You can also contact me on Twitter if you'd prefer. My username is hkanaktas.
- shinryuu 6y agoI'm from a european context and I'd say quote or quotation works fine: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/251563/get-a-quote-or-get-a-quotation https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/251563/get-a-quo...
- vulcan01 6y agoMust be a regional difference, I've never heard quotation from an American.
- markdown 6y agoLooks great. Congratulations. (Hopefully constructive) feedback: 1.) Why only four currencies? Now I can't use it. Netflix has helped normalize credit card usage all across the world, so your potential market is huge, but you've only targeted four countries. I don't get that. 2.) All price/currency fields have placeholders in the format 0.00. When I click on one of these fields, I expect it to go blank so that I can enter my own price. So I just click anywhere on that field and start typing. If I happen to have clicked after the decimal point, and try to type in 2000 (meaning $2000), the value I end up with is "0.200". This is unexpected behaviour for a form field, at least for me. 3.) In your quote entry form, you need to widen the tax % field. When I enter 0.09, the 9 is half cut off.
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks for taking your time and the compliments. It means a lot! 1- The app is like in alpha/beta stage right now. I planned to put currencies in the database but it was too much work for an MVP so I literally typed them into the template lol. Which currency do you need? I can add it manually now and be sure to have it in the database when I make the transition. 2- Agreed. Number inputs are funky. Tried to have custom Javascript for the minimal asset size but I didn't do well. I'll use some 3rd party plugin for those. 3- Noted. One question though. Why do you type 0.09 in a percentage field? Is it just a test or do you really have 0.09% (9 in ten thousand) tax rate?
- markdown 6y ago> Which currency do you need? Oh don't trouble yourself on my account. I have no urgent use for it, so will just wait for it to be done properly. And you're right about the percentage field. I didn't notice that 9% was correct for that field rather than 0.09.
- the-dude 6y agoWho are your competitors?
- hkanaktas 6y agoOkay, let's see. - Basically a lot of CRMs handle the offer/quote stuff. Some have partial support, some have more functionality then we do. - There is quoter[dot]com as a direct competitor. I'm not sure how well they do. My co-founder is more aware of this topic. - There are some old desktop softwares doing the same thing offline. I don't think users of these would convert much to online solutions. - And of course there are users that do everything manually. Keeping the records in an Excel file and exporting Word documents as PDFs to email to clients. Edit: sorry about the formatting. I'm exhausted.
- adamm255 6y agoCheck out https://www.waveapps.com/ https://www.waveapps.com/. I do my quoting through invoice free on there.
- tomarr 6y agoSome feedback: - found the image on landing page confusing, expected to be able to click the items in it - pricing 'free until we launch'. This would scare me off - if people are going to start using your platform they need some idea of pricing levels / tiered plans. No point joining up to something and using in action to find you are priced out
- hkanaktas 6y agoGonna replace the screenshot with a video. I'm a little overwhelmed by the attention right now haha. Fair. We'll update the pricing section with some numbers tomorrow.
- markdown 6y agoThere are two ads in the emails clients receive. One by you (Powered by Dytto), and one for something called Elastic Email. I clicked to find out what it was and Gmail gave me a scary message. This isn't a warning I'd ever want a potential client to get: https://i.imgur.com/ZGKWNav.png https://i.imgur.com/ZGKWNav.png
- hkanaktas 6y agoOh, damn. Thanks for the heads up. I don't know why Google thinks Elastic Email is suspicious. They have been in business for years. I'll take a look though.
- marcinee 6y agoHi, it seems that the link is showed as suspicious because it starts with HTTP:// instead of https:// https://. Google is very strict about it. I work for Elastic Email and I don't recall any problems from our side lately.
- indymike 6y agoNice! This is a great little idea. Keep iterating.
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks Mike! We will do our best and more.
- Closi 6y agoHey, just as a heads up I found a vuln that exposes all customer email addresses and contacts for all users. I'll responsibly disclose using the 'contact us' feature.
- hkanaktas 6y agoAh, don't even know how I missed that. Should be fixed now. I appreciate the heads up.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- herman_toothrot 6y agoI sent a message about an issue with a similar cause through the message function on your site.
- hkanaktas 6y agoJust saw it and deployed a fix. Thanks so much for helping out.
- dcl 6y agoIs your website colour palette inspired by Cividis?
- hkanaktas 6y agoNot sure what that is but if you're talking about the colors on the landing page, a designer friend of mine made the logo and chose the colors. I just used them. Don't know if he knows about Cividis. If you're talking about the colors in the app, they are the default color palette of Tailwind CSS. Most components are also exactly copied from Tailwind UI examples.
- imprettycool 6y agoGood luck, you're gonna need it
- hkanaktas 6y agoHeh, thanks! We need a lot of it and still gotta work hard. Fingers crossed.
- Aeolun 6y agoIt is amazing how many people seem to build an invoicing/quoting product. A ton of them are actually successful too. What is it about this niche that makes it a thing that everyone wants to start.
- wheelerwj 6y agoit has a huge market and every small business outside of food&beverage/hospitality has to solve this problem.
- Scaevus 6y agoJust a small feedback. Personally, the periods at the end of each heading on the homepage is a bit annoying for me.
- renewiltord 6y agoCongratulations on your launch. Not really feedback but I realized when I clicked through that I would have signed up if I could use one of the federated login services (Google most likely, GitHub maybe, Facebook probably wouldn't have helped) and I didn't want to go through the mail, password, confirm cycle so much I actually just hit back. I think you can still get someone's email for follow up if you use them.
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks for your comment. It's possible to sign up and start using it by simply entering your email. I do plan to add 3rd party logins though.
- edgarascom 6y agoImpossible to understand from the front page what is it.
- hkanaktas 6y agoAppreciate your feedback. We are constantly updating and improving it.
- sillycube 6y agoI created quotations with OpenOffice / Google Docs for the last 10 years. It doesn't matter whether the quotation is beautiful or not. Talking about branding, the portfolio of the company is more important. My company was providing design and development services. The quotation is just a document to confirm a deal from the customer. The content should fully cover the service scope, deliverables, the price & terms very clear. I just set up a template from OpenOffice writer & google docs and create a quotation from there.
- robbintt 6y agoWhen I make a quote on a large tablet, I can’t find it in the quotes list afterwards. There are also too many required fields in the customer form
- hkanaktas 6y agoThanks for your feedback. We will talk about the customer form and will adjust accordingly. Your latest addition should be displayed at the top of the list. Is it not? Also, were you redirect to quote details page after creating it?