Ask HN: Review my startup, IORAD - create instructions for your app | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Review my startup, IORAD - create instructions for your app

iorad.com

67 pointssunpatel37 comments

Wow this is beautiful, guys! I'm definitely using this to create some demos and tutorials for my startup's product.

So far, the only feedback I can think of is that perhaps you should think of a better name, just to make it easy to recommend to people. I don't know how to even say Iorad (I'm guessing it's an anagram of radio).

How much are you charging for this?

Hey thanks. The name is pronounced i-o-rad....like biorad minus the b:)

Once out of beta, we will do freemium. Maybe charge between $20-$40/month to download doc, ppt, web version and customize logo.

PDF instruction and hosted course (with iorad logo) will be free

Here's the problem with that: most people will use this (I assume) only once or twice, to, say, create instructions for their web app (like commented above), and would be happy to pay 20/40/60$ for the software, but there's no reason for them to buy a subscription. Unless you're aiming at an audience that creates instructions multiple times a month?

To add to this line of thought, charging per video made would be the way to go. You could limit the free version not only with the downloading and branding options, but also with the length the of the video (eg. max length of free video 30 seconds).

You obviously haven't heard of e-learning industry. These kind of tools are used very regularly by e-learning professionals, and instructors. Sometimes everyday. (How do I know this? I was doing e-learning for a few years.) But this tool faces a stiff competition from established and more sophisticated tools like Adobe Captivate, Camtasia, http://www.sameshow.com/

Yes camtasia is a brilliant tool....but we are concentrating on the printable portion...not screencasts.

Captivate is great for power users but we are looking for domain guys that want to create robust instructions without copy/pasting screenshots.

You should charge for each demo created. A very, very prominent "these cheapskates didn't pay for iorad" logo will dissuade most people from avoiding the charge.

Be careful about pushing too hard in this direction. Non-paying users aren't getting a totally free ride (more below), and you don't want to give them a bad feeling about using your service.

Since the cost of hosting a non-paying user is actually pretty small (particularly because these aren't videos -- they're screenshots), if you have a non-paying user who embeds their useful walkthrough in a very visible location... well, that's pretty damned valuable free advertising. They've more than "paid" for the service, and you really want them to have a good feeling from the transaction, not shame them -- if they feel good about using the walkthroughs, they'll use them more, and not only evangelize but also find themselves needing the paid features... and be happy to pay for them, not forced against their will.

Actual freeloaders (people who are only using the free service in low-traffic places, or only internally) cost you almost nothing to host, so it's not smart to obsess about them.

The trick instead is to draw the right line between free and premium, and also work out how to structure pricing to account for many different kinds of uses.

I get the name, but don't you think something that is easily digestible by people would be less of a risk? It can't be a good thing if you have to explain how to pronounce it to people. Don't handicap yourself with a risky name.

You need to have an indicator that I have reached the end. I clicked on the right arrow about 10 times =/

This sounds and looks like a great idea, I can imagine using it to show individual users how to do something in response to a support ticket, and then having it as an online reference to send to others with the same questions.

One question I had that the site didn't answer: can you only record from windows computers? Or OS/X and Linux too? It looks a bit like an air application, so if you can do it on any platform that's worth shouting about somewhere too.

Having signed up I can see the UI but the Capture button is simply greyed out with no explanation in Firefox on Linux...

We have not tested on Linux. If the capture button is greyed out, it means the applet hasnt loaded. Hopefully in the near future we add linux support.

It's throwing a java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException for me :( (Linux Firefox, Fedora Core 11, Gnome, default install, Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100330 Fedora/3.5.9-1.fc11 Firefox/3.5.9)

This is excellent. I've been thinking about making demos like this for my application lately.

Some comments:

* The textboxes to create a project should clear the text when I click on them or have nothing in them. Having to clear them myself was frustrating.

* The workflow needs to drop you on the next step. After I created my project I wasn't sure why I wasn't already seeing options to get going.

* It wasn't easy to clear out slides from my project. I ended up just deleting it and starting over on every mistake.

* Sharing didn't seem to require a password when I entered one.

* It wasn't really clear how to create the nice demo you made or just make the demo play automatically. The slide concept is interesting but if it just auto-played that might be better.

* I wasn't really sure what the first option I was presented with meant after I clicked edit.

* The screen could probably stand to be taller.

A very nice start and a good recording product. Well done. Keep it up.

great feedback, much appreciated!

Looks like a pretty cool system. One nitpick on the landing page: put some text or something below the video so that people have something to see while the video is loading. It's disconcerting arriving at a page and seeing nothing but the loader and navigation at the top.

This looks very cool; I signed up for an account. It freaked me out a bit to notice that you're programmatically editing my Java configuration (to disable DirectDraw).

How serious is the bug that you're working around with that?

I'm glad I was watching the console and noticed that change, because I really do not want that changed on my system. My own website uses Java applets with some animation involved, and tweaking my Java config like that means that if my users have a problem with DirectDraw, I wouldn't be able to reproduce it (nor would notice it in testing). If I hadn't noticed the log comments I'm not sure I would have ever figured out that the config file had been secretly altered by a signed applet.

For sharing - add YouTube support!

You might as well offer both pricing models - there's nothing wrong with one-time payee users and subscription users co-existing.There's nothing wrong with that.

While the free users are using the product, don't show them premium features, show them that this dim icon can be unlocked with a premium account or whatever (see RescueTime's mouseovers). Of course you should charge more for adding their logos. This looks like something I would sell to the university crowd - trust me, there's plenty of need there from what I've seen!

For marketing, get some hotshot instructor to use your stuff. Hmm, you should pitch to Michael Hartl to use your product for RailsCasts!

I used to work as a quantitative analyst, and this would've been great for "Knowledge Transfer." Most of what analysts do (at least at my old employer) is create and manage reports. Teaching another analyst the various Excel/Matlab/Python processes that need to be run and what steps need to be performed is time consuming but really important. The bosses like people to document their tasks, but that usually involves making a quickly outdated Word doc w/ screenshots & text.

If I'd been able to record what I was doing as I did it, and add a little annotation, that would've saved a lot of time and effort.

Congratulations. I signed up for an account and played around a bit. I can certainly see myself using this pretty soon. As a couple of people mentioned, instruction creation is a pretty infrequent activity - so a pay per month pricing scheme may not work best. VerticalResponse.com comes to mind (not associated in any way; I don't even use them) - in a market where monthly fees are the norm, they have a pay as you go plan that's tied to distribution (numbers). On another minor point: maybe it's me, but the 'appliance' bit had me expecting a device; I was happy to see there was none.

UI wording nitpick: "publish" is a much friendlier word than "deploy" :)

Question: is this aimed at desktop apps (it looks like it)? In a world where everything is moving in the browser, do you think that's a good market?

it is a browser based app:-)

yes i liked publish as well...but we liked the "ds"...dash, design, develop & deploy....maybe we will change it based on usage

How about "distribute?"

love that one...thanks

Nice! There's a typo on the first slide though - "Interective Simulation", should be "Interactive" :)

You should try hard to market this to enterprise users - eg financial software houses and consultancies who knock out apps in Excel. Here you have a) the least intuitive software known to man and b) big budgets. This would be a huge step up from most of the business to business user guides I've seen.

EDIT: After another read, your site seems to be somewhat aimed at this market. But anyway, best of luck.

If you are aimed at the enterprise user, I think a less web 2.0 name might be better. It seems like some companies I have worked with will just pass based on that (which is a shame, but that is how it is).

Hi, I've tried this on my Mac with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, all recent versions, and the Capture button worked in neither. In another comment you mention that you don't have Linux support. Does that mean this is Windows only? If so, why doesn't your page say so? I must say this was a somewhat frustrating experience.

This looks neat and I would really love to use it. Is there a timeline for Mac or Linux support?

We haven't had a chance to fully test on the mac. But to get the capture dialog to work, try the following:

Enabling Accessibility API

1. Open System Preferences dialog

2. In opened dialog open "Universal Access" settings

3. In the "Universal Access" settings dialog check the "Enable access for assistive devices" option

And then restart the browser and iorad.com

Definitely let me know if this helped the issue and if you are experiencing anything else. You can contact me at spatel iorad.com.

I've sent you a mail but it bounced with a connection timeout. Any idea what might have gone wrong, or got another address?

Try agin spatel @ iorad.com Or my username at gmail

This is fantastic! I am definitely going to try this out. My employer sells enterprise software that, in its current iteration, is horrifically complex from a UX standpoint and we're forced to take a gazillion number of screenshots for training materials. This seems like it will definitely save time.

Any plans for screencasting down the line?

There are plenty of screencasting tools out there ie screentoaster.com that do an awesome job.

Our differentiator is in the printable user guide and making tutorials interactive vs watching a mouse move on the screen.

But you are exactly right about the use case, enterprise UX is very complex with tons of different types of "transactions", and copy/pasting screenshots is so painful, thats why everybody avoids it like the plague.

"Are u sure u want to delete the selected slide?"

If you're going for the enterprise market u might want to sed s/\ u\ /\ you\ /g that...

Very VERY nice! Gave it a spin for one of our internal webapps and it seems super slick.

Small things I noticed btw:

1. Susrut Mishra's Twitter link in your About page points to Satyajit Behera's Twitter page :)

2. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your ToS don't seem to have been defined yet? The link on your signup merely toggles the checkbox.

Looks good.

I would have liked to see some of your selling points and services displayed to me without having to click on the video/tutorial. That's really a minor though. I thought it was pretty good.

ummm wow! After 17 takes to get my demo 'perfected' I can't sign up for this fast enough. This is great.

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