10 ms·

I quit my high-paying job to follow my dream of launching a startup. Here it is.

342 points by gozman 15y ago

avallark 15y ago
Congratulations on starting out on your own. Takes courage.
quizbiz 15y ago
This is a concept that I had a lot of fun thinking about but never had the resources to make happen. Good luck. Can't wait to be a client. Looks very promising.
mikegreenberg 15y ago
Typo: Sign up today and see just how quick and easy it can __free__! No credit card required.
- bzalasky 15y ago
  Lol. I caught that too, had to read it twice to make sure I didn't miss a play on words though.
  - gozman 15y ago
    Thanks! I can't believe that slipped through!
    - Jem 15y ago
      If the Google SERPs for your site are up to date, you've also spelled WordPress wrong in the meta description (should be uppercase P). I know the WP guys are very passionate about their capital P: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dangit http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dang... :)
ifearthenight 15y ago
Would be interested to hear how you (and others) handle the transition from salaried work to startup life...
phzbOx 15y ago
Nice idea! I like how it's focused on wordpress and iphone (rather than turn any website to android/iphone/etc.) Care to share some implementations details with follow HN-ers? :) I.e. Do you have a "plugin-converter"? How do you transform the "normal screen width" to a "mobile feeling"?
- sumukh1 15y ago
  He's using a Native App. If you are looking for a free plugin to get a mobile feel you should use WPTouch.
brainless 15y ago
Very very nice concept. Would attract so many WP site owners who want to have an app. Please share some technical and transition stories. Also is the homepage a little slow, or just me?
- gozman 15y ago
  Our VPS that hosts the website seems to be on fire. However our app is up and running just fine - http://engine.theappifier.com http://engine.theappifier.com
  - jjoe 15y ago
    Do you need a beefier VPS? I can have it deployed fairly quickly. LMK (not looking for compensation for this).
BigCanOfTuna 15y ago
Nice idea. I'd be interested to know (and if you're willing to share with the community): 1. What was your job. 2. How much did you get paid. 3. How much savings(runway) do you have to support this product. Thanks!
- gozman 15y ago
  1. I was a software engineer that got an MBA and was doing management consulting. 2. Over 80k / year 3. My runway is private, but we financed ourselves by taking on short-term iOS/Wordpress dev/design consulting gigs to stay fed.
  - nakkiel 15y ago
    28, an MBA and 80k / year. I must be doing something very wrong.
    - mobiplayer 15y ago
      Me too. 29, no MBA and not even half of that :-)
      - tsunamifury 15y ago
        I'm 26 and I make 160k in financial services. Its enough for me and a girlfriend to afford a 600 sqft loft. 80k will get you 5 roommates and bedroom with a curtain. In San Francisco 250k to 300k/y is high paid. 100k-150k is making it, 80k would be in the low paid arena.
        suhail 15y ago
        Nah,you can get a nice 1bd in SF for $2100 a month and save $1k/mo
        brycecolquitt 15y ago
        "San Francisco ranks third of American cities in median household income with a 2007 value of $65,519." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Demographics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Demographics
dholowiski 15y ago
Cool! I will be using such a service several times this year. Honest question - what makes your service more special than the other services out there that claim to do the same thing? P.S. I do like the one time charge option... I haven't seen many that have that as an ooption.
- gozman 15y ago
  Thanks dholowiski! Here's a few ways that we stand out: * Our apps can be distributed on the app store like all other native iOS apps. You can even charge for these apps and we won't take a penny. * We support push notifications. You can send messages to users of an app as long as they have it installed on their phone. * All content is available offline, even when the phone is in airplane mode. * Our architechture opens up the possibility of more interesting native features (text-to-speech among other things) * You can preview your app on your phone and get a really good feel for how it will look and operate once deployed. * When your app is deployed, you can change its parameters and branding at any time. Changes are updated across your installed base instantly.
itmag 15y ago
Do you include the WP markup in your generated app? Or do you transform the markup into Objective-C code (so no HTML/CSS included in the app)? The latter would be much harder to implement I think.
lucian1900 15y ago
Interesting. This looks like a container similar to PhoneGap, but more specialised to some sort of feed from the WP website, perhaps RSS. Is there really that large a market for this sort of thing?
- gozman 15y ago
  It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content. We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.
  - john-n 15y ago
    Assuming this is one of the standard JSON plugins for wordpress, be cautious of what this may do to the main sites load. The default install can force calls to skip the total-caching plugin most sites use, as it wont use the cache on any request with parameters.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - jbail 15y ago
    As a mobile web developer, I feel compelled to mention that iPhones make it easy to bookmark a web page and put the page icon right on your home screen. Utilizing HTML5 manifests and local storage, you could also have offline access. Creating an interface as good looking and responsive as a native one is definitely doable as well. You don't get an app in the appstore, so that's one advantage you have over an HTML5-based approach...but I would much prefer just getting an awesome mobile web app experience when I view a site in my browser, as opposed to being prompted to download the app. When I'm browsing content, I like to stay in my web browser so I can browse other sites. Switching between a bunch of native apps just to get a decent ui is a poor user experience, IMO. All in all, the product looks really well done though. I don't mean to be disparaging with this comment. I just wanted to point out that it's totally possible to do everything you mention using mobile web techniques. What I've described here might be a direction you could take your product. You could offer both native and mobile web approaches, giving the choice to the Wordpress site owner. If you do want to explore that idea, drop me a note (info in my HN profile). That's a project I'd love to work on.
jeffcouturier 15y ago
I'm not sure I see the benefit of converting a website into a pseudo-app, then charging for that app. Users would effectively be paying for the wrapper when the same content is available without charge via a browser. I realize this happens all the time and there are a plethora of site shortcuts-as-apps in the app store, but the fact that they are abundant doesn't make the practice any better. I'm honestly curious about the use cases for this and what extra value this provides for the user over using the website in a browser.
- dangrossman 15y ago
  The site owner wouldn't have to charge for the app (unless I missed something). They just now have a native app for their website. Native app interaction speed and offline use are obvious advantages over using the blog in the mobile browser, so there's definitely value here. And the number of WordPress sites is so huge (over 70 million) that there's undoubtedly a market for this.
  - lcusack 15y ago
    Support for push notifications would be a huge plus as well.
    - bmelton 15y ago
      It does support push notifications.
      - lcusack 15y ago
        Should have clarified - I was trying to say that it having support for push notifications is a huge plus! :)
  - jeffcouturier 15y ago
    Unless the app auto-updates its content to be sure it is always in sync with the website, having native app speed and offline use grows increasingly less desirable the farther out you get from the date the app was created. For Wordpress sites one would expect new content daily. If Appifier pulls content and makes it all available offline that's great, until/unless the site being "appified" has new content. Will the app re-roll itself to incorporate that new content for offline and/or native access? If not then an appified site is useless the moment the app is generated. I’m not questioning whether there is a market for this. I’m questioning the purpose and value to the user if it’s really nothing more than a snapshot of a dynamic site or just a site shortcut.
davidkellis 15y ago
Why did you choose to form an LLC instead of a C-Corporation?
- brianobush 15y ago
  from my personal history, LLCs are just easy, but provide many of the same protections that a c-corp do but with less hassle. The only problem is growth and # of founders; it is harder to provide stock options and gets complicated during tax season when you have more than a couple founders.
timpeterson 15y ago
cool idea, looks nice, thanks for sharing
marknutter 15y ago
Kudos to you for following your dream, but I do have to say I'm fully against making it easier for people to move that which should stay on the web to native apps. We have web browsers for a reason.
- there 15y ago
  i don't think his intention is to move content, but rather just to make that content more easily accessible and visible to mobile users. the problem with mobile websites is that they have to compete with the app store. if an iphone user wants a train schedule, are they more likely to open up a browser and search google for "train schedule iphone" and scroll around clicking on random sites? or would they just open the app store, search for "train schedule" and easily see all available apps, ranked and reviewed, easily added to their home screen with a single click? i run such a mobile website for metra trains (http://metra.jcs.org/ http://metra.jcs.org/) but because i have no native app in the ios or android stores, it doesn't see much traffic. i've thought about developing an app that just embeds a browser and goes to the site, just so it can be listed in the app store. apple does in fact have a listing of mobile web apps at https://www.apple.com/webapps/ https://www.apple.com/webapps/ but i doubt most iphone owners even know it exists. it's also not very easy to use from mobile devices, strangely enough.
  - goldmab 15y ago
    When I want to look at the train schedule, I just touch the bookmark on my home screen, which takes me to the web page with the schedule.
    - mechanical_fish 15y ago
      And if every iPhone user understands bookmarks as well as you do, perhaps this service will fail. But I hear rumors that a lot of App Store apps get lots of downloads, even if they're nothing but links to existing web sites wrapped in an app shell. Many customers don't understand bookmarks.
- gozman 15y ago
delosfuegos 15y ago
Genius, I'd invest all my money into this idea. From a marketing perspective: 1. big market (a lot of wordpress sites run by small & medium businesses that would love an easy and cheap app) 2. practically sells itself (costs, ease of use, service) 3. if possible try to roll it out both ways (drupal and android) Questions: 1. What about more complex and altered WP sites? 2. What will your to-market strategy be? More specifically: target customer Again, a great idea and a very good feel for what the market needs. Congratulations!
billyto 15y ago
I guess WP is the first step, I'd love to see this also for Other blogging engines like blogger, posterous or tumblr.
paisible 15y ago
Go Montreal ! :) Slight issue though - I created an app, says everything went well, downloaded the sandbox, but nothing appears under "My projects". Does it take time to update ? Also, "Push composer" and "Analytics" in my admin panel link to "#". Are these just placeholder links to let users know that the functionality is coming ? Good job on shipping the product !
- mtw 15y ago
  go mtl!
larrys 15y ago
You need to move this site to a host that can handle the load today. I'm getting timeouts and finally got the home page to load. I can't get any of the other pages to load either.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ajjuliani 15y ago
  I can't even get on the site.
  - gozman 15y ago
    Sorry guys! We weren't expecting this kind of load. I'm doing everything I can to redirect traffic to http://engine.theappifier.com http://engine.theappifier.com
    - city41 15y ago
      HN has grown a good deal in the past year or so. It has quite a big "slashdot effect" now :)
      - wodow 15y ago
        Has anyone who's been hackernews'd done an analysis on the load numbers? Back in the day there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_references http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_refer...
        mountaineer 15y ago
        Rob "CmdTaco" did some analysis - http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/ http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/ John Sheehan mentioned numbers the other day too - https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480 https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480 Seems like the "Hacker News 10K" would be an approximate general number or its going to approach that soon.
joshmanders 15y ago
I can't get the site to load.
- gozman 15y ago
  Our VPS is on fire - we didn't expect this kind of traffic. However our app is on heroku and running fine : http://engine.theappifier.com http://engine.theappifier.com
bsenftner 15y ago
How do you handle the random WP plugn?
chris123 15y ago
Nice demo video, although I am not sold on the idea people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. But, hey, hat tip for testing the idea in real time :)
- glanch 15y ago
  Fortunately for OP, it doesn't matter if people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. It matters if business owners want to be able to tell people that their business has an iPhone app. And they do.
  - chris123 15y ago
    Good point! :)
  - chris123 15y ago
    Good point! :)
shad0wfax 15y ago
Congratulations! I am sure its a proud moment after taking the big step in life :). A nice concept as well (btw, the hackernews effect is slowing down/timing out your site). On a tangential note (maybe), are you also liking running the startup (a company)? I am sure developing the product would have been an awesome experience, but when it comes to manage and run the company it calls for something else. How are you liking that?
spicyxtreme 15y ago
great idea! who do you think the target market is for this? developers that create corporate websites?
arpit 15y ago
For those having trouble with the site, I ended up looking at Google's cached copy and then finding the walkthrough youtube video that you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/embed/QkwDDB0I5_g?autoplay=1 http://www.youtube.com/embed/QkwDDB0I5_g?autoplay=1
- city41 15y ago
  That video is really well done. The product looks slick too. I do wonder how much demand there is to read individual blogs on an iOS device? Would an RSS reader meet the demand better?
erkin_unlu 15y ago
nicely done! i wish i could do the same, must do the same ; )
agentgt 15y ago
At what point is it okay to post you have started a new website / business on hacker news? Here goes my karma. Since we are doing shameless plugs here are my two (and yes I quit very high paying jobs ... 1.5~2 times more than @gozman ...): http://snaphop.com http://snaphop.com http://evocatus.com http://evocatus.com
- gravitronic 15y ago
  Generally it seems the consensus is: - make it obvious you are posting your own material (using phrases like "Show HN" or "I" in the title) and not try to hide that fact - provide insight into "how" you've done it or how you are doing. - don't do it more than once. Follow those and HN will not downvote you to oblivion.
- lucaspiller 15y ago
  Good stuff, but I'm a bit confused by what SnapHop is. From the landing page it sounds like you are an agency, but you talk about a platform. What exactly (i.e. not marketing speak) does the platform let me do? Where can I see it in action?
  - agentgt 15y ago
    Signup an see! I'll upgrade your account also for free and give you SMS if you blog about us. Yes we need a better video somewhere. We kind of went the enterprise route as our competitor did (http://44doors.com http://44doors.com) where showing less unfortunately pays you more.
    - winterchil 15y ago
      For what it's worth "sign-up and see" is an awful response to a potential user being confused about what your service does. I think you should consider changing your landing page to make it explicit how you can help local businesses. That may mean removing some of the myriad of use cases you describe. My $0.02, obviously feel free to ignore.
  - agentgt 15y ago
tszming 15y ago
Why you are using JSON API instead of XMLRPC which is more popular and enabled by default for some providers such as wordpress.com? Disclaimer: I am doing similar thing and will launch soon..
- designium 15y ago
  I guess because the app was made using: rails c scaffold Post name:string ....... The rails scaffold default replies from controllers are html AND JSON.
- designium 15y ago
  I guess because the app was made using: rails c scaffold Post name:string ....... The rails scaffold default replies from controllers are html AND JSON.
jaipilot747 15y ago
Sites that hit the homepage on HN crash so often I dream of quitting my job to launch a startup whose sole service is to HN-proof your site </jest>
- gozman 15y ago
  Where do i sign up?
- iusable 15y ago
  +1
  - iusable 15y ago
    I love these people who are voting me down cause I am giving positive feedback on HN. LOL!
    - mike-cardwell 15y ago
      What feedback? All I see is "+1" ? There are upvote buttons for a reason.
      - iusable 15y ago
        Ah ok. Let the hate continue.
        mike-cardwell 15y ago
        I downvote people who respond "+1" for the same reason that I downvote people who respond "LOL OMG ME TWO!" To improve the signal:noise ratio. Downvoting you was and continues to be, the correct course of action to achieve this aim.
        iusable 15y ago
        I actually agree with you, once you bothered explaining.
runjake 15y ago
gozman, you are an inspiration.
deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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seenugadu 15y ago
Very nice idea. Couldn't stop admiring it. Congratulations!!!
gozman 15y ago
our site is back up now. visit us at http://theappifier.com http://theappifier.com
llambda 15y ago
First, congratulations! The site looks good and the product seems interesting and useful. Unfortunately, you're getting hit hard with HN traffic being number one on the front page currently and thus things are slow. However I was able to load the index page and watch the introductory video. One thing that bothers me is I clicked on your Terms of Service link and was prompted to login: you might want to consider making as much available to logged out users as possible and esp things like terms of service which I may want or even need to read before signing up. Otherwise, best of luck!
- gozman 15y ago
  Sorry about that. We redirected all of our traffic from our marketing vps to our appserver (heroku) to handle the load. Check back tomorrow for the terms or send us an email.
ryen 15y ago
Does converting a WP site to a native app really enable more "features" than, say, WP's own mobile styling or something similarly built with HTML5?
loceng 15y ago
Logo suggestion: The 'f' in the font you're using can very easily be mistaken for a T
alanmeaney 15y ago
Don't stress on missing your opportunity. Your 'How Hacker News crashed my site' post will get just as much traffic
- user24 15y ago
  so true.
robrenaud 15y ago
Do you have any ballpark numbers for wordpress hits day -> expected revenue from appifier?
chatreez 15y ago
The word "native" jumped out at me. I wonder, for the target users you are aiming, if it's enough to say "...an iPhone app...". To me, it's the same feeling as "to kill a running app". It's common for tech people to say but doesn't have personal touch.
magsafe 15y ago
Interesting idea, but can't get it to work. I created a test account and added 2 WordPress blogs to it: TechCrunch and the official Wordpress blog (http://wordpress.org/news/ http://wordpress.org/news/). Went through the steps, downloaded the sandbox app on my iPhone 4S and tried to preview them. App instantly crashes when loading both sites. Is it just that these blogs don't have the required JSON plugins (possible)? Or is it that they have too much content for Appifier to handle? Either way, an abrupt crash doesn't inspire confidence. Do you have any sample blogs we can try to test this with?
- gozman 15y ago
  Sorry Magsafe, you need to have JSON API installed. This is written on the site.
  - magsafe 15y ago
    My point was the app should never crash, for whatever reason. You need to handle failures gracefully.
    - JulianMiller520 15y ago
      (read as: this toaster didn't fail gracefully when i tossed it in the tub)
    - gozman 15y ago
      You're right. We didn't anticipate this kind of traffic. We're working on it. Thanks for letting us know. :)
- dangrossman 15y ago
  That plugin is a core part of their app. You have to download and install it. You can't just put in someone else's blog URL; they don't have the appifier plugin running. WordPress doesn't have a JSON API built in, that's something he created.
dan1234 15y ago
Have you run this past Apple with regards to their App Store approval policy? I'd be worried about clause 2.12: "2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"
- ntkachov 15y ago
  I think his business provides much more than just a url and a webview. The offline pages, organized layout and category browser is much more than what that clause is made to prevent. The unfortunate thing about having a business that is at the mercy another business (such as iphone apps) is that apple can at any point block anything coming from OP's site. But thank god for competition.
- unfletch 15y ago
  I think the "web sites bundled as apps" is speaking more of an app that consists only of a webkit view which loads some web site. A single-site browser app. There's a service called Tapatalk that does something very similar to what Appifier does, but for forums, and has a number of generated "native forum apps" in the App Store.
- BHSPitMonkey 15y ago
  I'd be more worried about the Sandbox app getting pulled. It basically presents as its own app environment, which is a huge no-no with Apple and I'm surprised it even was approved.
- epoxyhockey 15y ago
  This is a very legitimate concern. As an app developer who has had an app rejected 6 months ago on similar grounds (section 10.6), it is something that should be tested. Upon my app being rejected, I added things like push notifications and it still got rejected for the original reason. For your reference this was the complete description of the rejection: ======= 10.6 We found the user interface of your app is not of sufficient quality to be appropriate for the App Store. Apps that provide a poor user experience are not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines. Specifically, we noticed your app does not take advantage of the iOS platform. It would be appropriate to add iOS specific UI and functionality. Please evaluate whether you can make the necessary revisions to improve the user experience of your app. Alternatively, you may wish to consider building a web app using HTML5. HTML5 is the major new version of HTML and enables audio and video to play natively in the browser without requiring proprietary plug-ins. Using HTML5, web apps look and behave like native iPhone and iPad apps, and using HTML5's Offline Application Cache, your web apps work even when the device is offline. With web apps, you have flexibility to deliver as much or as little functionality as you desire. If you wish to build an HTML5 web app, you can do so and distribute it directly from your web site. It is not appropriate to resubmit an HTML5 web app to the App Store. To get started with iPhone or iPad web apps, please review Getting Started with iPhone Web Apps. For a description of the HTML elements and attributes you can use in Safari on iPhone, check out Safari HTML Reference: Introduction.
ahmadss 15y ago
Congrats on the launch. I have some feedback, but a random question for you first - did you work at Deloitte in their S&O practice? Now for the feedback - assuming your audience is a non-tech WordPress user, I'm suggesting that you do A|B testing on the use of "Native App". From experience talking to clients on the marketing team or communications team, most don't know the difference or meaning of "native app". To them, an app is an app is an app - native or not. The key question that these folks care about is "will my app have a custom icon that represents my brand", "can i submit to the app store", and "will my customer see this icon on their iPhone once they download it?". So, my hypothesis is that if you strip "native app" from your copy (all of your copy) and just focus "custom app", "custom icons", "app store submission", "WordPress to iPhone", your target audience won't miss a beat and won't blink at "native app". If you end up testing this out doing A/B tests or user research, I'd love to hear the results.
sidcool 15y ago
Wish you all the very best. Make sure you scale up today, as I am going to pitch for you wherever my reach is.
sidcool 15y ago
Bad signs, it's slowing down. It's taking more than 20 seconds for me to load. Scale it up, scale it up fast, buy more processing power from your host
underwater 15y ago
I don't want to knock your product, because I know site owners will love it, but does anyone actually like and use these simple apps that wrap a website?
- dangrossman 15y ago
  Yes. I do, for one. For a site you like to use every day, being able to just tap and swipe to get to everything is so much better than constantly pinch zooming, aiming for little links, waiting for the page to load, pinch zooming, aiming for little links, etc. of a website.
  - dwynings 15y ago
    of a website. Of a non-mobile optimized website.
giis 15y ago
nice work,pretty useful for bloggers,I believe.All the best for your startup.Btw,How long did it take to launch this startup after you left your previous job?
barce 15y ago
How is this app different one WPTouch which also turns your WordPress into something iPhone friendly: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ I know you turn the site into a native app, but WPTouch works just fine with HTML and CSS. Is there something I'm missing?
- eli 15y ago
  WPTouch doesn't put you in the app store, it just makes your site usable from a mobile browser.
  - sumukh1 15y ago
    You can wrap WPTouch into a native app with a little bit of work. The selling point for this service that there is little to no effort for anyone involved to get the native app submitted and with support for push notifications.
RoastBeats 15y ago
You should consider offering a free version that serves your ads. You'll get more people using it, and then you can monetize off the ads. If enough people are using the free version, you might discover it's an even bigger revenue generator than the paid version.
tehwalrus 15y ago
This is awesome, I know loads of people who will use this, including me if I ever have time! A couple of questions though: How does payment/subscription work? Is there a limit to the number of apps you can publish under the monthly plan, or is there a cost per app and then a monthly fee for the analytics and push? Is there a nice user interface for push? Where can I see a demo of it all in operation (the management of an app that's out there)? :)
Johnyma22 15y ago
I'm one of the team at PrimaryBlogger and we would be interested in using this :) Good work!
theDaveB 15y ago
Nice idea but you have some competition. Won't mention sites on here, played with a identical solution a few weeks ago. Also found somewhere that is doing a WP app for a one off charge of $17, you download source code, edit it, compile it and submit it to the app store. Dave
- count 15y ago
  Competition should generally be looked at as market validation. How many companies have competition and are doing fine?
  - anty 15y ago
    I had the exact same idea a year ago. Looked for competitors and found one very good looking that provided this service for free, with a great website. That's why I didn't develop it. I hope there's enough demand so that op has success, though.
    - designium 15y ago
      I was the CEO of a startup and I spoke to people who had the same idea that I had. They had the idea a year early but I was lunching the product. I don't think you should stop startup up a business because there are competitors. Competitors don't kill you. Most entrepreneurs kill their ideas themselves.
JulianMiller520 15y ago
very clever logo btw. I like the riff on the established convention.
gesman 15y ago
WPtouch == 90% bang for $0 bucks + 1 minute time investment. TheAppifier's nativization of blogs has its niche: - for blogs that has large, religious, passionate following. - for marketing departments who love to announce "immediate availability of mobile app". It does not add any "native" functionality though - just save people from typing URL in mobile browsers. True/false?
mcs 15y ago
Looks like you're coming into the same space that OnSwipe is in.
aaronblohowiak 15y ago
Cool idea, but this is just going to make the signal:noise ratio in the app store worse =(
- herval 15y ago
  I don't feel that a lot on the app store... the sorting by relevance seems to work well, at least in my experience. that said, I suffer it on the Android market, where everything I search returns a thousand different apps in random order (e.g. search for Skype retrieves a dozen apps - some times Skype itself is not even the first result)
jramphis 15y ago
Congratulations on the move to startup life! Great looking website and nice user experience for publishing. Posting the service on HN is one of those things I wish I had thought of a few months ago, I still have a lot to learn - thankfully a friend sent me this link since he knew what we were doing. TainoApp (http://gettainoapp.com http://gettainoapp.com) does all that (Wordpress to native iOS app), plus full platform support for Windows Phone 7, and Android (wrapping up Blackberry and MeeGo support as of this posting) you can see it at work here - http://goo.gl/nuZcm http://goo.gl/nuZcm. So far, it seems we're the only ones that can do Windows Phone 7 - hopefully someone in the community can point out other projects we haven't heard from that already does it, so that we can continue learning from others. We have the tech specs ready for implementing support for most of the CMSs out there (Tumblr, Posterous, and others including Tresite - heavily used in latinamerica), but decided to focus on Wordpress installs first since the install base was larger we were able to churn out an mvp faster since we were more familiar with the wp architecture. Our focus had been on engaging one on one with customers and quietly testing out different revenue models - but this kind of torrent of feedback would have been truly welcome. It wasn't until the start of the new year that we decided to test an introductory offer for the platform - aimed at the latinamerican market first (it's google translate friendly - http://goo.gl/Y5JZL http://goo.gl/Y5JZL). I felt we were missing a lot of the features I wanted, so I held back from doing a public push to get feedback - that was a big mistake. Seeing everyone's comments for Appifier has been an uplifting experience - so keep at it!!! One of the toughest things I've felt is being out there and being open to scrutiny by other startups. Maybe we can chat sometime and talk a bit more about some of the mistakes we've done along the way - drop me a line at jramphis at gettainoapp dot com. Best of luck!
- bosch 15y ago
  Don't you think you should've posted this in a seperate link? It seems like you're trying to hang off Appifier's coattails...
gdhillon 15y ago
Nicely done. does it only support blog type of web-sites are can you handle more of custom wordpress sites as well? For example can it handle membership type of sites where payment processing is required via CC or Paypal?
japanesejay 15y ago
What tools did you use to convert PHP to obj-c?
ryanb 15y ago
This is a neat idea. Best of luck! Looks great.
tobiasbischoff 15y ago
risky idea. sounds good but apple just hates template-apps.
sumukh1 15y ago
It's a cool idea with a few players in the field. Did a quick check on a WP Blog and the application sandbox keeps crashing. I only have two concerns. You are entirely at the mercy of Apple with this product. There isn't too much customization available so Apple may at some point decide to reject your customers apps. A lifetime membership might not help without the code for customization if you ever go offline. The second is the other players in here. I think people are going to want a lot more customization. Either way, you've selected a market with a lot of demand. WPTouch and http://www.wiziapp.com/ http://www.wiziapp.com/ are the main competitors I can think of. (WPTouch built into an app of course)
spung 15y ago
Nice site! Glad you made the jump to follow your dreams, good luck!
jusob 15y ago
http://mobilito.net/ http://mobilito.net/, the free website I launched this week (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3419941 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3419941), could help you to promote the app: show users how their website looks awful/unusable on mobiles currently.
svalley 15y ago
Your dream was to write software to reformat Wordpress generated HTML so it can fit on an iPhone screen?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
marcofucci 15y ago
Nice idea. With 10K people signing up for lifetime you get 499*10K = almost 5 million, not bad!

342 points by gozman 15y ago

Congratulations on starting out on your own. Takes courage.

This is a concept that I had a lot of fun thinking about but never had the resources to make happen. Good luck. Can't wait to be a client. Looks very promising.

mikegreenberg 15y ago

Typo: Sign up today and see just how quick and easy it can __free__! No credit card required.

bzalasky 15y ago
Lol. I caught that too, had to read it twice to make sure I didn't miss a play on words though.
- gozman 15y ago
  Thanks! I can't believe that slipped through!
  - Jem 15y ago
    If the Google SERPs for your site are up to date, you've also spelled WordPress wrong in the meta description (should be uppercase P). I know the WP guys are very passionate about their capital P: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dangit http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dang... :)

ifearthenight 15y ago

Would be interested to hear how you (and others) handle the transition from salaried work to startup life...

phzbOx 15y ago

Nice idea! I like how it's focused on wordpress and iphone (rather than turn any website to android/iphone/etc.) Care to share some implementations details with follow HN-ers? :) I.e. Do you have a "plugin-converter"? How do you transform the "normal screen width" to a "mobile feeling"?

sumukh1 15y ago
He's using a Native App. If you are looking for a free plugin to get a mobile feel you should use WPTouch.

brainless 15y ago

Very very nice concept. Would attract so many WP site owners who want to have an app. Please share some technical and transition stories. Also is the homepage a little slow, or just me?

gozman 15y ago
Our VPS that hosts the website seems to be on fire. However our app is up and running just fine - http://engine.theappifier.com http://engine.theappifier.com
- jjoe 15y ago
  Do you need a beefier VPS? I can have it deployed fairly quickly. LMK (not looking for compensation for this).

BigCanOfTuna 15y ago

Nice idea. I'd be interested to know (and if you're willing to share with the community): 1. What was your job. 2. How much did you get paid. 3. How much savings(runway) do you have to support this product. Thanks!

gozman 15y ago
1. I was a software engineer that got an MBA and was doing management consulting. 2. Over 80k / year 3. My runway is private, but we financed ourselves by taking on short-term iOS/Wordpress dev/design consulting gigs to stay fed.
- nakkiel 15y ago
  28, an MBA and 80k / year. I must be doing something very wrong.
  - mobiplayer 15y ago
    Me too. 29, no MBA and not even half of that :-)
    - tsunamifury 15y ago
      I'm 26 and I make 160k in financial services. Its enough for me and a girlfriend to afford a 600 sqft loft. 80k will get you 5 roommates and bedroom with a curtain. In San Francisco 250k to 300k/y is high paid. 100k-150k is making it, 80k would be in the low paid arena.
      - suhail 15y ago
        Nah,you can get a nice 1bd in SF for $2100 a month and save $1k/mo
      - brycecolquitt 15y ago
        "San Francisco ranks third of American cities in median household income with a 2007 value of $65,519." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Demographics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Demographics

dholowiski 15y ago

Cool! I will be using such a service several times this year. Honest question - what makes your service more special than the other services out there that claim to do the same thing? P.S. I do like the one time charge option... I haven't seen many that have that as an ooption.

gozman 15y ago
Thanks dholowiski! Here's a few ways that we stand out: * Our apps can be distributed on the app store like all other native iOS apps. You can even charge for these apps and we won't take a penny. * We support push notifications. You can send messages to users of an app as long as they have it installed on their phone. * All content is available offline, even when the phone is in airplane mode. * Our architechture opens up the possibility of more interesting native features (text-to-speech among other things) * You can preview your app on your phone and get a really good feel for how it will look and operate once deployed. * When your app is deployed, you can change its parameters and branding at any time. Changes are updated across your installed base instantly.

itmag 15y ago

Do you include the WP markup in your generated app? Or do you transform the markup into Objective-C code (so no HTML/CSS included in the app)? The latter would be much harder to implement I think.

lucian1900 15y ago

Interesting. This looks like a container similar to PhoneGap, but more specialised to some sort of feed from the WP website, perhaps RSS. Is there really that large a market for this sort of thing?

gozman 15y ago
It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content. We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.
- john-n 15y ago
  Assuming this is one of the standard JSON plugins for wordpress, be cautious of what this may do to the main sites load. The default install can force calls to skip the total-caching plugin most sites use, as it wont use the cache on any request with parameters.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- jbail 15y ago
  As a mobile web developer, I feel compelled to mention that iPhones make it easy to bookmark a web page and put the page icon right on your home screen. Utilizing HTML5 manifests and local storage, you could also have offline access. Creating an interface as good looking and responsive as a native one is definitely doable as well. You don't get an app in the appstore, so that's one advantage you have over an HTML5-based approach...but I would much prefer just getting an awesome mobile web app experience when I view a site in my browser, as opposed to being prompted to download the app. When I'm browsing content, I like to stay in my web browser so I can browse other sites. Switching between a bunch of native apps just to get a decent ui is a poor user experience, IMO. All in all, the product looks really well done though. I don't mean to be disparaging with this comment. I just wanted to point out that it's totally possible to do everything you mention using mobile web techniques. What I've described here might be a direction you could take your product. You could offer both native and mobile web approaches, giving the choice to the Wordpress site owner. If you do want to explore that idea, drop me a note (info in my HN profile). That's a project I'd love to work on.

jeffcouturier 15y ago

I'm not sure I see the benefit of converting a website into a pseudo-app, then charging for that app. Users would effectively be paying for the wrapper when the same content is available without charge via a browser. I realize this happens all the time and there are a plethora of site shortcuts-as-apps in the app store, but the fact that they are abundant doesn't make the practice any better. I'm honestly curious about the use cases for this and what extra value this provides for the user over using the website in a browser.

dangrossman 15y ago
The site owner wouldn't have to charge for the app (unless I missed something). They just now have a native app for their website. Native app interaction speed and offline use are obvious advantages over using the blog in the mobile browser, so there's definitely value here. And the number of WordPress sites is so huge (over 70 million) that there's undoubtedly a market for this.
- lcusack 15y ago
  Support for push notifications would be a huge plus as well.
  - bmelton 15y ago
    It does support push notifications.
    - lcusack 15y ago
      Should have clarified - I was trying to say that it having support for push notifications is a huge plus! :)
- jeffcouturier 15y ago
  Unless the app auto-updates its content to be sure it is always in sync with the website, having native app speed and offline use grows increasingly less desirable the farther out you get from the date the app was created. For Wordpress sites one would expect new content daily. If Appifier pulls content and makes it all available offline that's great, until/unless the site being "appified" has new content. Will the app re-roll itself to incorporate that new content for offline and/or native access? If not then an appified site is useless the moment the app is generated. I’m not questioning whether there is a market for this. I’m questioning the purpose and value to the user if it’s really nothing more than a snapshot of a dynamic site or just a site shortcut.

davidkellis 15y ago

Why did you choose to form an LLC instead of a C-Corporation?

brianobush 15y ago
from my personal history, LLCs are just easy, but provide many of the same protections that a c-corp do but with less hassle. The only problem is growth and # of founders; it is harder to provide stock options and gets complicated during tax season when you have more than a couple founders.

timpeterson 15y ago

cool idea, looks nice, thanks for sharing

marknutter 15y ago

Kudos to you for following your dream, but I do have to say I'm fully against making it easier for people to move that which should stay on the web to native apps. We have web browsers for a reason.

there 15y ago
i don't think his intention is to move content, but rather just to make that content more easily accessible and visible to mobile users. the problem with mobile websites is that they have to compete with the app store. if an iphone user wants a train schedule, are they more likely to open up a browser and search google for "train schedule iphone" and scroll around clicking on random sites? or would they just open the app store, search for "train schedule" and easily see all available apps, ranked and reviewed, easily added to their home screen with a single click? i run such a mobile website for metra trains (http://metra.jcs.org/ http://metra.jcs.org/) but because i have no native app in the ios or android stores, it doesn't see much traffic. i've thought about developing an app that just embeds a browser and goes to the site, just so it can be listed in the app store. apple does in fact have a listing of mobile web apps at https://www.apple.com/webapps/ https://www.apple.com/webapps/ but i doubt most iphone owners even know it exists. it's also not very easy to use from mobile devices, strangely enough.
- goldmab 15y ago
  When I want to look at the train schedule, I just touch the bookmark on my home screen, which takes me to the web page with the schedule.
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    And if every iPhone user understands bookmarks as well as you do, perhaps this service will fail. But I hear rumors that a lot of App Store apps get lots of downloads, even if they're nothing but links to existing web sites wrapped in an app shell. Many customers don't understand bookmarks.
gozman 15y ago

delosfuegos 15y ago

Genius, I'd invest all my money into this idea. From a marketing perspective: 1. big market (a lot of wordpress sites run by small & medium businesses that would love an easy and cheap app) 2. practically sells itself (costs, ease of use, service) 3. if possible try to roll it out both ways (drupal and android) Questions: 1. What about more complex and altered WP sites? 2. What will your to-market strategy be? More specifically: target customer Again, a great idea and a very good feel for what the market needs. Congratulations!

billyto 15y ago

I guess WP is the first step, I'd love to see this also for Other blogging engines like blogger, posterous or tumblr.

paisible 15y ago

Go Montreal ! :) Slight issue though - I created an app, says everything went well, downloaded the sandbox, but nothing appears under "My projects". Does it take time to update ? Also, "Push composer" and "Analytics" in my admin panel link to "#". Are these just placeholder links to let users know that the functionality is coming ? Good job on shipping the product !

mtw 15y ago
go mtl!

larrys 15y ago

You need to move this site to a host that can handle the load today. I'm getting timeouts and finally got the home page to load. I can't get any of the other pages to load either.

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
ajjuliani 15y ago
I can't even get on the site.
- gozman 15y ago
  Sorry guys! We weren't expecting this kind of load. I'm doing everything I can to redirect traffic to http://engine.theappifier.com http://engine.theappifier.com
  - city41 15y ago
    HN has grown a good deal in the past year or so. It has quite a big "slashdot effect" now :)
    - wodow 15y ago
      Has anyone who's been hackernews'd done an analysis on the load numbers? Back in the day there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_references http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_refer...
      - mountaineer 15y ago
        Rob "CmdTaco" did some analysis - http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/ http://cmdrtaco.net/2011/10/then-along-came-hacker-news/ John Sheehan mentioned numbers the other day too - https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480 https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480 Seems like the "Hacker News 10K" would be an approximate general number or its going to approach that soon.

joshmanders 15y ago

I can't get the site to load.

gozman 15y ago
Our VPS is on fire - we didn't expect this kind of traffic. However our app is on heroku and running fine : http://engine.theappifier.com http://engine.theappifier.com

bsenftner 15y ago

How do you handle the random WP plugn?

chris123 15y ago

Nice demo video, although I am not sold on the idea people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. But, hey, hat tip for testing the idea in real time :)

glanch 15y ago
Fortunately for OP, it doesn't matter if people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. It matters if business owners want to be able to tell people that their business has an iPhone app. And they do.
- chris123 15y ago
  Good point! :)
- chris123 15y ago
  Good point! :)

shad0wfax 15y ago

Congratulations! I am sure its a proud moment after taking the big step in life :). A nice concept as well (btw, the hackernews effect is slowing down/timing out your site). On a tangential note (maybe), are you also liking running the startup (a company)? I am sure developing the product would have been an awesome experience, but when it comes to manage and run the company it calls for something else. How are you liking that?

spicyxtreme 15y ago

great idea! who do you think the target market is for this? developers that create corporate websites?

arpit 15y ago

For those having trouble with the site, I ended up looking at Google's cached copy and then finding the walkthrough youtube video that you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/embed/QkwDDB0I5_g?autoplay=1 http://www.youtube.com/embed/QkwDDB0I5_g?autoplay=1

city41 15y ago
That video is really well done. The product looks slick too. I do wonder how much demand there is to read individual blogs on an iOS device? Would an RSS reader meet the demand better?

erkin_unlu 15y ago

nicely done! i wish i could do the same, must do the same ; )

agentgt 15y ago

At what point is it okay to post you have started a new website / business on hacker news? Here goes my karma. Since we are doing shameless plugs here are my two (and yes I quit very high paying jobs ... 1.5~2 times more than @gozman ...): http://snaphop.com http://snaphop.com http://evocatus.com http://evocatus.com

gravitronic 15y ago
Generally it seems the consensus is: - make it obvious you are posting your own material (using phrases like "Show HN" or "I" in the title) and not try to hide that fact - provide insight into "how" you've done it or how you are doing. - don't do it more than once. Follow those and HN will not downvote you to oblivion.
lucaspiller 15y ago
Good stuff, but I'm a bit confused by what SnapHop is. From the landing page it sounds like you are an agency, but you talk about a platform. What exactly (i.e. not marketing speak) does the platform let me do? Where can I see it in action?
- agentgt 15y ago
  Signup an see! I'll upgrade your account also for free and give you SMS if you blog about us. Yes we need a better video somewhere. We kind of went the enterprise route as our competitor did (http://44doors.com http://44doors.com) where showing less unfortunately pays you more.
  - winterchil 15y ago
    For what it's worth "sign-up and see" is an awful response to a potential user being confused about what your service does. I think you should consider changing your landing page to make it explicit how you can help local businesses. That may mean removing some of the myriad of use cases you describe. My $0.02, obviously feel free to ignore.
- agentgt 15y ago

tszming 15y ago

Why you are using JSON API instead of XMLRPC which is more popular and enabled by default for some providers such as wordpress.com? Disclaimer: I am doing similar thing and will launch soon..

designium 15y ago
I guess because the app was made using: rails c scaffold Post name:string ....... The rails scaffold default replies from controllers are html AND JSON.
designium 15y ago
I guess because the app was made using: rails c scaffold Post name:string ....... The rails scaffold default replies from controllers are html AND JSON.

jaipilot747 15y ago

Sites that hit the homepage on HN crash so often I dream of quitting my job to launch a startup whose sole service is to HN-proof your site </jest>

gozman 15y ago
Where do i sign up?
iusable 15y ago
+1
- iusable 15y ago
  I love these people who are voting me down cause I am giving positive feedback on HN. LOL!
  - mike-cardwell 15y ago
    What feedback? All I see is "+1" ? There are upvote buttons for a reason.
    - iusable 15y ago
      Ah ok. Let the hate continue.
      - mike-cardwell 15y ago
        I downvote people who respond "+1" for the same reason that I downvote people who respond "LOL OMG ME TWO!" To improve the signal:noise ratio. Downvoting you was and continues to be, the correct course of action to achieve this aim.
        iusable 15y ago
        I actually agree with you, once you bothered explaining.

runjake 15y ago

gozman, you are an inspiration.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

seenugadu 15y ago

Very nice idea. Couldn't stop admiring it. Congratulations!!!

gozman 15y ago

our site is back up now. visit us at http://theappifier.com http://theappifier.com

llambda 15y ago

First, congratulations! The site looks good and the product seems interesting and useful. Unfortunately, you're getting hit hard with HN traffic being number one on the front page currently and thus things are slow. However I was able to load the index page and watch the introductory video. One thing that bothers me is I clicked on your Terms of Service link and was prompted to login: you might want to consider making as much available to logged out users as possible and esp things like terms of service which I may want or even need to read before signing up. Otherwise, best of luck!

gozman 15y ago
Sorry about that. We redirected all of our traffic from our marketing vps to our appserver (heroku) to handle the load. Check back tomorrow for the terms or send us an email.

ryen 15y ago

Does converting a WP site to a native app really enable more "features" than, say, WP's own mobile styling or something similarly built with HTML5?

loceng 15y ago

Logo suggestion: The 'f' in the font you're using can very easily be mistaken for a T

alanmeaney 15y ago

Don't stress on missing your opportunity. Your 'How Hacker News crashed my site' post will get just as much traffic

user24 15y ago
so true.

robrenaud 15y ago

Do you have any ballpark numbers for wordpress hits day -> expected revenue from appifier?

chatreez 15y ago

The word "native" jumped out at me. I wonder, for the target users you are aiming, if it's enough to say "...an iPhone app...". To me, it's the same feeling as "to kill a running app". It's common for tech people to say but doesn't have personal touch.

magsafe 15y ago

Interesting idea, but can't get it to work. I created a test account and added 2 WordPress blogs to it: TechCrunch and the official Wordpress blog (http://wordpress.org/news/ http://wordpress.org/news/). Went through the steps, downloaded the sandbox app on my iPhone 4S and tried to preview them. App instantly crashes when loading both sites. Is it just that these blogs don't have the required JSON plugins (possible)? Or is it that they have too much content for Appifier to handle? Either way, an abrupt crash doesn't inspire confidence. Do you have any sample blogs we can try to test this with?

gozman 15y ago
Sorry Magsafe, you need to have JSON API installed. This is written on the site.
- magsafe 15y ago
  My point was the app should never crash, for whatever reason. You need to handle failures gracefully.
  - JulianMiller520 15y ago
    (read as: this toaster didn't fail gracefully when i tossed it in the tub)
  - gozman 15y ago
    You're right. We didn't anticipate this kind of traffic. We're working on it. Thanks for letting us know. :)
dangrossman 15y ago
That plugin is a core part of their app. You have to download and install it. You can't just put in someone else's blog URL; they don't have the appifier plugin running. WordPress doesn't have a JSON API built in, that's something he created.

dan1234 15y ago

Have you run this past Apple with regards to their App Store approval policy? I'd be worried about clause 2.12: "2.12 Apps that are not very useful, are simply web sites bundled as apps, or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected"

ntkachov 15y ago
I think his business provides much more than just a url and a webview. The offline pages, organized layout and category browser is much more than what that clause is made to prevent. The unfortunate thing about having a business that is at the mercy another business (such as iphone apps) is that apple can at any point block anything coming from OP's site. But thank god for competition.
unfletch 15y ago
I think the "web sites bundled as apps" is speaking more of an app that consists only of a webkit view which loads some web site. A single-site browser app. There's a service called Tapatalk that does something very similar to what Appifier does, but for forums, and has a number of generated "native forum apps" in the App Store.
BHSPitMonkey 15y ago
I'd be more worried about the Sandbox app getting pulled. It basically presents as its own app environment, which is a huge no-no with Apple and I'm surprised it even was approved.
epoxyhockey 15y ago
This is a very legitimate concern. As an app developer who has had an app rejected 6 months ago on similar grounds (section 10.6), it is something that should be tested. Upon my app being rejected, I added things like push notifications and it still got rejected for the original reason. For your reference this was the complete description of the rejection: ======= 10.6 We found the user interface of your app is not of sufficient quality to be appropriate for the App Store. Apps that provide a poor user experience are not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines. Specifically, we noticed your app does not take advantage of the iOS platform. It would be appropriate to add iOS specific UI and functionality. Please evaluate whether you can make the necessary revisions to improve the user experience of your app. Alternatively, you may wish to consider building a web app using HTML5. HTML5 is the major new version of HTML and enables audio and video to play natively in the browser without requiring proprietary plug-ins. Using HTML5, web apps look and behave like native iPhone and iPad apps, and using HTML5's Offline Application Cache, your web apps work even when the device is offline. With web apps, you have flexibility to deliver as much or as little functionality as you desire. If you wish to build an HTML5 web app, you can do so and distribute it directly from your web site. It is not appropriate to resubmit an HTML5 web app to the App Store. To get started with iPhone or iPad web apps, please review Getting Started with iPhone Web Apps. For a description of the HTML elements and attributes you can use in Safari on iPhone, check out Safari HTML Reference: Introduction.

ahmadss 15y ago

Congrats on the launch. I have some feedback, but a random question for you first - did you work at Deloitte in their S&O practice? Now for the feedback - assuming your audience is a non-tech WordPress user, I'm suggesting that you do A|B testing on the use of "Native App". From experience talking to clients on the marketing team or communications team, most don't know the difference or meaning of "native app". To them, an app is an app is an app - native or not. The key question that these folks care about is "will my app have a custom icon that represents my brand", "can i submit to the app store", and "will my customer see this icon on their iPhone once they download it?". So, my hypothesis is that if you strip "native app" from your copy (all of your copy) and just focus "custom app", "custom icons", "app store submission", "WordPress to iPhone", your target audience won't miss a beat and won't blink at "native app". If you end up testing this out doing A/B tests or user research, I'd love to hear the results.

sidcool 15y ago

Wish you all the very best. Make sure you scale up today, as I am going to pitch for you wherever my reach is.

sidcool 15y ago

Bad signs, it's slowing down. It's taking more than 20 seconds for me to load. Scale it up, scale it up fast, buy more processing power from your host

underwater 15y ago

I don't want to knock your product, because I know site owners will love it, but does anyone actually like and use these simple apps that wrap a website?

dangrossman 15y ago
Yes. I do, for one. For a site you like to use every day, being able to just tap and swipe to get to everything is so much better than constantly pinch zooming, aiming for little links, waiting for the page to load, pinch zooming, aiming for little links, etc. of a website.
- dwynings 15y ago
  of a website. Of a non-mobile optimized website.

giis 15y ago

nice work,pretty useful for bloggers,I believe.All the best for your startup.Btw,How long did it take to launch this startup after you left your previous job?

barce 15y ago

How is this app different one WPTouch which also turns your WordPress into something iPhone friendly: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/ I know you turn the site into a native app, but WPTouch works just fine with HTML and CSS. Is there something I'm missing?

eli 15y ago
WPTouch doesn't put you in the app store, it just makes your site usable from a mobile browser.
- sumukh1 15y ago
  You can wrap WPTouch into a native app with a little bit of work. The selling point for this service that there is little to no effort for anyone involved to get the native app submitted and with support for push notifications.

RoastBeats 15y ago

You should consider offering a free version that serves your ads. You'll get more people using it, and then you can monetize off the ads. If enough people are using the free version, you might discover it's an even bigger revenue generator than the paid version.

tehwalrus 15y ago

This is awesome, I know loads of people who will use this, including me if I ever have time! A couple of questions though: How does payment/subscription work? Is there a limit to the number of apps you can publish under the monthly plan, or is there a cost per app and then a monthly fee for the analytics and push? Is there a nice user interface for push? Where can I see a demo of it all in operation (the management of an app that's out there)? :)

Johnyma22 15y ago

I'm one of the team at PrimaryBlogger and we would be interested in using this :) Good work!

theDaveB 15y ago

Nice idea but you have some competition. Won't mention sites on here, played with a identical solution a few weeks ago. Also found somewhere that is doing a WP app for a one off charge of $17, you download source code, edit it, compile it and submit it to the app store. Dave

count 15y ago
Competition should generally be looked at as market validation. How many companies have competition and are doing fine?
- anty 15y ago
  I had the exact same idea a year ago. Looked for competitors and found one very good looking that provided this service for free, with a great website. That's why I didn't develop it. I hope there's enough demand so that op has success, though.
  - designium 15y ago
    I was the CEO of a startup and I spoke to people who had the same idea that I had. They had the idea a year early but I was lunching the product. I don't think you should stop startup up a business because there are competitors. Competitors don't kill you. Most entrepreneurs kill their ideas themselves.

JulianMiller520 15y ago

very clever logo btw. I like the riff on the established convention.

gesman 15y ago

WPtouch == 90% bang for $0 bucks + 1 minute time investment. TheAppifier's nativization of blogs has its niche: - for blogs that has large, religious, passionate following. - for marketing departments who love to announce "immediate availability of mobile app". It does not add any "native" functionality though - just save people from typing URL in mobile browsers. True/false?

mcs 15y ago

Looks like you're coming into the same space that OnSwipe is in.

aaronblohowiak 15y ago

Cool idea, but this is just going to make the signal:noise ratio in the app store worse =(

herval 15y ago
I don't feel that a lot on the app store... the sorting by relevance seems to work well, at least in my experience. that said, I suffer it on the Android market, where everything I search returns a thousand different apps in random order (e.g. search for Skype retrieves a dozen apps - some times Skype itself is not even the first result)

jramphis 15y ago

Congratulations on the move to startup life! Great looking website and nice user experience for publishing. Posting the service on HN is one of those things I wish I had thought of a few months ago, I still have a lot to learn - thankfully a friend sent me this link since he knew what we were doing. TainoApp (http://gettainoapp.com http://gettainoapp.com) does all that (Wordpress to native iOS app), plus full platform support for Windows Phone 7, and Android (wrapping up Blackberry and MeeGo support as of this posting) you can see it at work here - http://goo.gl/nuZcm http://goo.gl/nuZcm. So far, it seems we're the only ones that can do Windows Phone 7 - hopefully someone in the community can point out other projects we haven't heard from that already does it, so that we can continue learning from others. We have the tech specs ready for implementing support for most of the CMSs out there (Tumblr, Posterous, and others including Tresite - heavily used in latinamerica), but decided to focus on Wordpress installs first since the install base was larger we were able to churn out an mvp faster since we were more familiar with the wp architecture. Our focus had been on engaging one on one with customers and quietly testing out different revenue models - but this kind of torrent of feedback would have been truly welcome. It wasn't until the start of the new year that we decided to test an introductory offer for the platform - aimed at the latinamerican market first (it's google translate friendly - http://goo.gl/Y5JZL http://goo.gl/Y5JZL). I felt we were missing a lot of the features I wanted, so I held back from doing a public push to get feedback - that was a big mistake. Seeing everyone's comments for Appifier has been an uplifting experience - so keep at it!!! One of the toughest things I've felt is being out there and being open to scrutiny by other startups. Maybe we can chat sometime and talk a bit more about some of the mistakes we've done along the way - drop me a line at jramphis at gettainoapp dot com. Best of luck!

bosch 15y ago
Don't you think you should've posted this in a seperate link? It seems like you're trying to hang off Appifier's coattails...

gdhillon 15y ago

Nicely done. does it only support blog type of web-sites are can you handle more of custom wordpress sites as well? For example can it handle membership type of sites where payment processing is required via CC or Paypal?

japanesejay 15y ago

What tools did you use to convert PHP to obj-c?

ryanb 15y ago

This is a neat idea. Best of luck! Looks great.

tobiasbischoff 15y ago

risky idea. sounds good but apple just hates template-apps.

sumukh1 15y ago

It's a cool idea with a few players in the field. Did a quick check on a WP Blog and the application sandbox keeps crashing. I only have two concerns. You are entirely at the mercy of Apple with this product. There isn't too much customization available so Apple may at some point decide to reject your customers apps. A lifetime membership might not help without the code for customization if you ever go offline. The second is the other players in here. I think people are going to want a lot more customization. Either way, you've selected a market with a lot of demand. WPTouch and http://www.wiziapp.com/ http://www.wiziapp.com/ are the main competitors I can think of. (WPTouch built into an app of course)

spung 15y ago

Nice site! Glad you made the jump to follow your dreams, good luck!

jusob 15y ago

http://mobilito.net/ http://mobilito.net/, the free website I launched this week (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3419941 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3419941), could help you to promote the app: show users how their website looks awful/unusable on mobiles currently.

svalley 15y ago

Your dream was to write software to reformat Wordpress generated HTML so it can fit on an iPhone screen?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

marcofucci 15y ago

Nice idea. With 10K people signing up for lifetime you get 499*10K = almost 5 million, not bad!