Docked.com, an instant web presence for apps | Hacker News Reader

Docked.com, an instant web presence for apps

docked.com

11 pointsCantdog8 comments

Hey all,

One of the founders of Docked here.

We're building a hosted platform to help apps manage their web presence. To start we're including beautiful landing pages with a built in CMS, marketing campaign support (so you can track how users find your app through the web) and a unified dashboard that unifies your web funnel with all your app store data. Later, we'll support fully custom designs, but we'll still take care of the analytics, hosting, internationalization and more.

We're launching early this fall, and would love to hear from you if you're building/have built an app. How can we help?

There's also some goodies if you subscribe :)

Thanks,

Charlie

This is what App.net was originally doing before they pivoted to a status update service.

Their sites are still live for apps created before the pivot. http://app.net/toto

It provided lots of the stuff it looks like you're planning on doing. I'm excited to get something like this back. I loved App.net and was sad to here they were killing the original idea.

Thanks Randall,

I didn't know app.net's old sites were still up - thanks for the link.

We are planning on providing many of the same features. Our sites will look a little better though :)

Really curious about this. Building landing pages and such is the biggest pain the ass for me when I just want to build a fun app (usually a side project) and launch it. I hate the idea of every site looking the same, so I really hope you include a healthy amount of customization. It would be amazing to have a customizable page that I can deploy in less than an hour. My latest project involves customers that are absolutely _not_ in the tech world, so a page that everyone else has isn't even a bad thing because they wont notice.

Two other things I'm very curious about: pricing and domain names. Any hints or insight to pricing models? And will my apps have their own domain name or a subdomain like myapp.docked.com?

I'm looking forward to this, if you're looking for some testers or just feedback get at me on Twitter @_ryannystrom.

Hey,

Thanks for the feedback.

We're definitely working on giving as much control as possible with the CMS, we'll definitely reach out closer to launch and get your thoughts on whether it's enough.

Re Pricing and Domains: custom domains will be supported, you you can either use a subdomain or use your own custom domain. As for pricing, it will likely be based on page views (or some other measure of size). We're thinking of starting near $20.00 and ranging up to $100 a month.

Does that sound reasonable?

Is that $20/mo per app? I'm assuming if you had your own domain Docker will not be covering the DNS registry and such, effectively making it $30/mo to host a low-traffic app landing page. Honestly, I'm not sure that I would pay that much for my small apps (seeing as these are hobbies).

If it's $20/mo for, say, 5 apps, I'd be much more inclined.

Have you considered anything like a landing page builder that you can host yourself? Just a thought.

Take this all as conjecture. I hope you guys really make a sound product because this has been a serious frustration and pain point for me.

edit: Another feature that would be nice: quotes and links to reviews so you can show off any press or praise that the app has gotten.

Hey,

We'll definitely support multiple apps per 'publisher', I could see charging 20$/month for 5 apps, if they're all small enough - thanks for the thought.

A Custom domain should only cost ~10/year, so it shouldn't add that much overhead?

And finally, yes, we're planning on supporting quotes and reviews, thanks for asking!

Carry on! Really excited for your launch and/or beta.

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