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Show HN: Random midnight sunday request: critique our staging site

3 points by themgt 14y ago

earless1 14y ago
http://pogoweb-staging.a.pogoapp.com/team http://pogoweb-staging.a.pogoapp.com/team is broken
- themgt 14y ago
  Heh, sorry about that. Worked only when logged-in. Fixed :)
mneumegen 14y ago
I think you need to work on your content a bit. You main title is your best chance of drawing someone in. At the moment it's "Web app platform". Try A/B test it with something a little more exciting and add benefit of the platform i.e. why would I use this over Heroku?
- themgt 14y ago
  Thanks for the feedback! We're going to work on that. We've got some architectural advantages vs. Heroku that we think will become more apparent once we get some new features in place, but right now the main benefits vs. Heroku are WebSockets, the ability to persist data to local storage (for running databases/etc), and much simpler/cheaper billing for the beta. We're trying to come up with a way to summarize this in a bumper sticker slogan :)
  - mneumegen 14y ago
    Awesome! Sounds like you're on the right track.
csense 14y ago
The app library looks like a killer feature of this site. If I wanted to fool with my own application stack, I could just buy from a VPS provider or EC2 instance, and have total control. But a lot of people probably just want their website to have a blog, or forums, or chat, or bug tracking, or Git hosting, or other stuff, without having to worry about keeping their Ruby gems up-to-date, installing a database and maintaining a database user, installing and securing Redis, maintaining a separate user account for the application, maintaining secure permissions on application files, and the like. And they're willing to pay to make it happen. This is a place where a startup like you can make money by adding value, since there aren't a ton of big providers offering commodity services at rock-bottom prices. I'd suggest including more apps in the library, and featuring this more prominently on the front page.
- themgt 14y ago
  Thanks, we agree! There's a lot of work that still needs to go into building the app library into what we're really envisioning it will be. We don't want to talk up more than we've got working, but I can say we're absolutely planning on expanding that aspect of the service over the coming months :)

3 points by themgt 14y ago

earless1 14y ago

http://pogoweb-staging.a.pogoapp.com/team http://pogoweb-staging.a.pogoapp.com/team is broken

themgt 14y ago
Heh, sorry about that. Worked only when logged-in. Fixed :)

mneumegen 14y ago

I think you need to work on your content a bit. You main title is your best chance of drawing someone in. At the moment it's "Web app platform". Try A/B test it with something a little more exciting and add benefit of the platform i.e. why would I use this over Heroku?

themgt 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback! We're going to work on that. We've got some architectural advantages vs. Heroku that we think will become more apparent once we get some new features in place, but right now the main benefits vs. Heroku are WebSockets, the ability to persist data to local storage (for running databases/etc), and much simpler/cheaper billing for the beta. We're trying to come up with a way to summarize this in a bumper sticker slogan :)
- mneumegen 14y ago
  Awesome! Sounds like you're on the right track.

csense 14y ago

The app library looks like a killer feature of this site. If I wanted to fool with my own application stack, I could just buy from a VPS provider or EC2 instance, and have total control. But a lot of people probably just want their website to have a blog, or forums, or chat, or bug tracking, or Git hosting, or other stuff, without having to worry about keeping their Ruby gems up-to-date, installing a database and maintaining a database user, installing and securing Redis, maintaining a separate user account for the application, maintaining secure permissions on application files, and the like. And they're willing to pay to make it happen. This is a place where a startup like you can make money by adding value, since there aren't a ton of big providers offering commodity services at rock-bottom prices. I'd suggest including more apps in the library, and featuring this more prominently on the front page.

themgt 14y ago
Thanks, we agree! There's a lot of work that still needs to go into building the app library into what we're really envisioning it will be. We don't want to talk up more than we've got working, but I can say we're absolutely planning on expanding that aspect of the service over the coming months :)