Rate my startup: taurus.io | Hacker News Reader

Rate my startup: taurus.io

8 pointsebzlo12 comments

Hey HN!

While working on a separate project, my cofounder and I found maintaining and adding "product tour tooltips" to be a bit of a pain. I figured we could always put together an interface to manage them, but the time to build it never seemed like a worthwhile trade off. As our product grew, we realized having a tool from the beginning could have saved us some time.

So, we'd like to present Taurus (approaching closed beta), billed as a way to set up a product tour for your web application in 15 minutes.

Link: http://taurus.io/

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Looks intriguing for what I can see. My comments so far are that I'm left wondering the following:

- How is the product tour presented to my end users, is it something I host or you host? - How well will it work with the somewhat crazy HTML/CSS I may have on my product? - Is $3 too cheap for something like this as it's somewhat specialist, i.e. I have to be a web site owner to use it?

Would I use it, not sure really. I don't have any live projects yet that would warrant a product tour.

But it's nice to see work in this area. My only other comment is the homepage colours aren't quite a vibrant as I would have liked - personal opinion.

Thanks! It's sort of an mvp homepage, but we'll definitely update the scheme when it's ready to go.

To answer your questions:

- Yes, this is something we host. We host the tooltip data and positioning and who has seen it.

- Hopefully your own CSS won't override the styles we create. This is going to need testing, obviously and making sure styles persist is going to be one of the goals of beta.

- I don't know if $3 is too cheap, there will be multiple tiers, but for now we just have one that will fit most people.

I am confused. The site headlines "Set up a product tour" - but then it looks like a set of fancy tool tips and jQuery UI covers a lot of that ground.

Really that's what this is. We basically offload the logic that would additionally go with creating a product tour (who has seen this tooltip, where does this tooltip go, what triggers when someone clicks next, etc).

It's something we built internally for a separate project, but figured others might want to use.

clickable: http://taurus.io/

Thanks!

FYI your site is returning 500 "We're sorry, but something went wrong."

Ah thanks, just fixed! Looks like something weird got pushed live.

A tour of the product using the product would be great :)

Done! http://taurus.io

The site is quite attractive, and the product looks compelling. I can think of at least two places where I'd use it off the bat (and the pricing is right as well).

I'm guessing that since the beta isn't ready yet, that's why you don't currently have a demo, but I'd rather like to see a demo or have a trial period before purchasing.

Definitely. Working on that now. In fact, we're going to have a trial period when beta launches (or just make the whole thing free during beta).

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