Starting a new PaaS, looking for feedback | Hacker News Reader

Starting a new PaaS, looking for feedback

1 pointmarkuphive4 comments

Hi, all. I started a new PaaS based on my past experiences as a web developer: https://www.markuphive.com/

The two pain points I address with this is

1. The complexity of setting up support for these languages (less, jade, etc.) such as Grunt configuration or a build process.

2. My employer at the time did not want me to dedicate time maintaining a web stack for clients. LAMP was the bread and butter so there was no need to venture off into other tech.

My target audience are freelancers and web dev agencies. This should be simple enough to help them get on board with more modern web technologies and addressing that "we're not a hosting service" concern.

Naturally HN readers are likely to have the chops to do this themselves. But would still like to hear your feedback.

If you were to use this, how much would you pay? What about for a non-CMS plan?

I really don't understand what your service does. Nor do I understand what it is offering that I can't do already with a simple few-line Makefile.

We're developers. Saying "it does X" means much less than "it does X by Y". How exactly does your app do what it does? That will explain what your service actually does.

It's true, devs can implement a build process. I'm not targeting devs, but web shops who do not want to run a server for their client sites to use $NON_LAMP_TECH. Think of it as nodejs or rails hosting.

A "how it works" page and snippet on the landing page would be something to consider.

"Think of it as node.js or rails hosting"... so is that what it actually is, or is that a metaphor. If the latter, then I think the idea is still to complicated because I don't understand it. Not that anything I don't understand is complicated, but you should be able to communicate what your service is/does without too much trouble and it doesn't seem that's the case here.

It is a metaphor: we can all put up a node or rails site ourselves in a VPS but these companies are serving a different market.

I will certainly focus on making it easier to understand. Thanks.

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