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Hey! I watched the full video and clicked around your site a bit. I think this is fantastic. It's just anecdotal, but I've met quite a few people who are far mo
by thaumaturgy 13y ago
Hey! I watched the full video and clicked around your site a bit. I think this is fantastic. It's just anecdotal, but I've met quite a few people who are far more comfortable in HTML/CSS than they are in any backend work, so although this doesn't count as market validation, I don't think you're targeting too small of a segment.
In fact, I had someone pick my brain just a few days ago because they want to build a professional-looking site for a friend, and they're comfortable with HTML and CSS, but they don't understand how Wordpress works.
I did find a few things that I think needs some work though.
You're presenting a commandline interface. I love commandline. I much prefer a sensible CLI to even the best graphical interfaces. But your target market? I'm not sure they'll like that nearly as much. If they were comfortable with CLI, they'd be probably be comfortable enough to find their way around a server. Is there any way you can manage testing & deployment without the CLI?
On your site, you advertise the virtues of a static site as being fast. But, in the video, images are loading slowly on your demo page. It really stood out to me. You might consider having the page's images already in your browser cache when you load the demo page.
And the video -- the video is really a bit rough. You're clicking around way too fast in the video. I had trouble keeping up with what you were doing. The page template you're using in the video isn't sexy at all, so that makes it less attractive to designers. Having some kind of default page template along the lines of what you'd find for Wordpress would probably be good.
The video was also too specific. You went into some detail on embedding podcasts or Soundcloud stuff, but didn't really explain any of the rest of the interface. In your intro video, I don't necessarily need to know step-by-step how to embed a podcast, I maybe only need to know that it's possible. At the end of the video, I still felt like I had no idea what Webhook could do, which sucks because although I'm not your target market, I probably know 6 people who are. Along the same lines, there were a number of typos and miscapitalized things in the video, and some of the dialog was a bit hokey (like when you remembered that you actually had to go into chat to invite a participant). This adds to the "rushed" feeling in the video.
And the thing is, it looks like you've got a really polished product! Then you have the video, which makes it feel a lot less professional.
Also, it seems like you could tap a secondary market, by hosting a template shop on your site and taking a cut from sales of the templates. Just because someone's comfortable with HTML & CSS doesn't necessarily mean that they want to start from scratch. With the explosion in popularity of things like Bootstrap, I think there's pretty good evidence that people are avoiding that as much as possible.
- ewharton 13y agofully agree on market size and that the target customer would prefer GUI over CLI
- snide 13y agoThank you for the comment. The good news is I feel the same way about the CLI and the video. The video is temporary as we work towards a proper launch. For now there's a few dozen guinea pigs helping us polish the functionality. The CLI will take a little longer as our small three-man team is stretched a bit. Maybe in a few months. Also agree about the theming. The nice part at least is that theming in theory is very easy. Themes are just git repos that are downloaded and installed through the browser and unpacked via a websocket. I think you're right though that we need a few solid, well-designed themes there in the beginning though. It'll likely be my primary concern over the next month now that the product is finishing up. Although opening a store might be a good way to go, I'm thinking we'll likely just try and partner with one of the many buy-a-theme sites out there and simply let them continue serving that niche. Part of the fun of startups though. Trying to octopus your way through a launch, building every little bit. Again, thanks for the comment.
- notduncansmith 13y agoYou might find this helpful with creating a GUI: http://appjs.com/ http://appjs.com/ With Webhook being Node (I'm guessing based on the distribution via npm?), you'll feel right at home. As a Node guy myself, I found it immensely valuable when I was building a toy desktop app. Great job with this by the way. I started on a similar project a few months ago (fell by the wayside), and it makes me really happy to see someone execute it, especially this well. Keep it up!