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This looks well done. Congratulations on building a cool product! A word of caution on this as a business, though: this is going to be brutal. You're selling a

by shimon 14y ago

This looks well done. Congratulations on building a cool product! A word of caution on this as a business, though: this is going to be brutal. You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build. You can save them time -- but not a huge amount of time, especially compared to the prepackaged user registration apps that already exist for common web frameworks. And the customers that grow really big will have strategic reasons to want to move off of your service, in addition to any cost-saving reasons. Maybe over time you can grow into something like http://www.gigya.com/ http://www.gigya.com/ , which powers registration & social/gamification components for mainly content sites. But to do that you'll need to find a market of people who aren't developers, for whom your thing is a real enabler, not just a time saver. TL;DR: Unless you're building something technically complex enough that everyone realizes they can't come close to replicating it, don't build stuff for developers. We're stingy and we think we can do anything ourselves in a weekend.

nollidge 14y ago
> You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build. This is true, but nobody ever does. Seems like most of the "Show HN" links we see here require Twitter and/or Facebook for login and offer nothing else. An OAuth provider that's JUST an OAuth provider is pretty welcome to me.
- pedalpete 14y ago
  I think most sites rely on Facebook/Twitter logins, not because it is easier than adding in their own system, but because users don't want to have ANOTHER login in, and it allows for easy shareabliity.
  - nostromo 14y ago
    The vast majority (over 70%) of user accounts at my previous company were email and pass, even though Facebook was offered for each new account.
- smhinsey 14y ago
  ClickPass is effectively this, although they were OpenID. I don't think it worked out too well for them but it was several years ago, so they may've been too far ahead of the curve. HN used to use them as a sign in provider.
nostromo 14y ago
Thanks shimon for the congrats and the feedback! I come from a SaaS background and agree with everything you've said. We do have a roadmap that we believe will overcome this challenge however. In the interest of launching early and often, we decided our MVP was to focus on being a white-labeled OAuth provider. But we do want a way for people to tip their toe in the water quickly and easily.
codegeek 14y ago
"You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build." As people are realizing that lot of these websites do not follow good security when it comes to user storage, slowly the trend might be to use standard third party systems. Agreed that most users do not know what bcrypt means. But most users do care if their passwords get hacked becuase it was easy to do so (clear text storage etc.).So yes, you can build a user system easily but can you make it trustworthy, secure ? So again, I think this idea probably sounds a little crazy in 2012 but you never know 5 years down the road.
petercooper 14y ago
You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build. Despite being chummy with the founders, I basically said something similar about http://pusher.com/ http://pusher.com/ when it came out. D'oh.. and it's going like gangbusters. I was similarly pessimistic about Heroku too (managing a VPS is eassssy!) but.. no longer. People want to outsource boring infrastructure no matter how trivial it is to implement.
- samstr 14y ago
  I could not build Pusher.
- bradgessler 14y ago
  This only works up to a point. I evaluated http://pusher.com http://pusher.com for Poll Everywhere, but decided against it because I didn't want a "tax man" between me and my customers. I'd argue that most of the folks that use Pusher don't do so in a way that's mission critical to their application (there are a few exceptions). If they did, they would scale up to a certain point where they'd want to get off of Pusher and on to a self-hosted push server. That's precisely where Pusher fell off the horse for me, so our company created an open source streaming service, http://firehose.io/ http://firehose.io/. That said, would anybody be interested in a hosted version of Firehose? The "end-game" of a hosted service would always be to run the open source version of this service on your very own servers, and stop paying the middleman tax.
eranation 14y ago
I agree, but this can be a great tool for MVPs, POCs and anything you want to build fast (unless you just copy paste your previous startup's code base and change the logo, but you need to have done it before to copy, or spend money to build it, even a weekend saved is worth sometimes...)
Swizec 14y ago
As a developer, I would rather be solving my problem and writing the cool code than writing the auth system for the bazillionth time. Also, something about schlep work and basing businesses on it that PG once said in an essay or another.
- kernel_sanders 14y ago
  This. Its not about whether you can build it, of course you can. Its about choosing to build things that solve your core problem. Time is money, and your money is best spent on the original aspects of your idea that do not already exist.
mechanical_fish 14y ago
You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build… You say this as if it were a bad thing. I like outsourcing things that, in an emergency, I can easily replace. What I hate is buying a service that has no competition (so I can't easily switch to a different vendor) and that would take hundreds of hours to duplicate (so I can't easily switch to my own implementation.)

by shimon 14y ago

nollidge 14y ago

> You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build. This is true, but nobody ever does. Seems like most of the "Show HN" links we see here require Twitter and/or Facebook for login and offer nothing else. An OAuth provider that's JUST an OAuth provider is pretty welcome to me.

pedalpete 14y ago
I think most sites rely on Facebook/Twitter logins, not because it is easier than adding in their own system, but because users don't want to have ANOTHER login in, and it allows for easy shareabliity.
- nostromo 14y ago
  The vast majority (over 70%) of user accounts at my previous company were email and pass, even though Facebook was offered for each new account.
smhinsey 14y ago
ClickPass is effectively this, although they were OpenID. I don't think it worked out too well for them but it was several years ago, so they may've been too far ahead of the curve. HN used to use them as a sign in provider.

nostromo 14y ago

Thanks shimon for the congrats and the feedback! I come from a SaaS background and agree with everything you've said. We do have a roadmap that we believe will overcome this challenge however. In the interest of launching early and often, we decided our MVP was to focus on being a white-labeled OAuth provider. But we do want a way for people to tip their toe in the water quickly and easily.

codegeek 14y ago

"You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build." As people are realizing that lot of these websites do not follow good security when it comes to user storage, slowly the trend might be to use standard third party systems. Agreed that most users do not know what bcrypt means. But most users do care if their passwords get hacked becuase it was easy to do so (clear text storage etc.).So yes, you can build a user system easily but can you make it trustworthy, secure ? So again, I think this idea probably sounds a little crazy in 2012 but you never know 5 years down the road.

petercooper 14y ago

You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build. Despite being chummy with the founders, I basically said something similar about http://pusher.com/ http://pusher.com/ when it came out. D'oh.. and it's going like gangbusters. I was similarly pessimistic about Heroku too (managing a VPS is eassssy!) but.. no longer. People want to outsource boring infrastructure no matter how trivial it is to implement.

samstr 14y ago
I could not build Pusher.
bradgessler 14y ago
This only works up to a point. I evaluated http://pusher.com http://pusher.com for Poll Everywhere, but decided against it because I didn't want a "tax man" between me and my customers. I'd argue that most of the folks that use Pusher don't do so in a way that's mission critical to their application (there are a few exceptions). If they did, they would scale up to a certain point where they'd want to get off of Pusher and on to a self-hosted push server. That's precisely where Pusher fell off the horse for me, so our company created an open source streaming service, http://firehose.io/ http://firehose.io/. That said, would anybody be interested in a hosted version of Firehose? The "end-game" of a hosted service would always be to run the open source version of this service on your very own servers, and stop paying the middleman tax.

eranation 14y ago

I agree, but this can be a great tool for MVPs, POCs and anything you want to build fast (unless you just copy paste your previous startup's code base and change the logo, but you need to have done it before to copy, or spend money to build it, even a weekend saved is worth sometimes...)

Swizec 14y ago

As a developer, I would rather be solving my problem and writing the cool code than writing the auth system for the bazillionth time. Also, something about schlep work and basing businesses on it that PG once said in an essay or another.

kernel_sanders 14y ago
This. Its not about whether you can build it, of course you can. Its about choosing to build things that solve your core problem. Time is money, and your money is best spent on the original aspects of your idea that do not already exist.

mechanical_fish 14y ago

You're selling a service that every competent web developer can build… You say this as if it were a bad thing. I like outsourcing things that, in an emergency, I can easily replace. What I hate is buying a service that has no competition (so I can't easily switch to a different vendor) and that would take hundreds of hours to duplicate (so I can't easily switch to my own implementation.)