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Comment by marcomassaro | Hacker News Reader

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marcomassaro·

I'd say you definitely need a stronger value proposition. I have no idea why I would need this for my app.

Communicate to visitors how it will help their website (e.g. increased ranking, indexing, etc.)

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Thanks, will try to make it clearer.

I think the value proposition is this:

1) You can configure it in minutes, whereas it may take a competent developer several hours to set this up on your own servers (possibly $100s in wages = several years subscription).

2) One less worry.

3) If your servers are bogged down, google still gets served the pages quickly (point 2).

4) Bonus metrics.

But what does it do? #2 and #4 don't tell me anything.

You have to solve a customers pain point. What is the problem you're solving?

2 is just a generalization of 1 and 3. To expand on 4, currently I display how many crawler requests were made and the average response time. If I were to further invest, I'd split these metrics by path requested and have it available over any time interval.

Do you have any ideas on what other pain points I could solve with this idea?

But what does it do. Those are features..what is the end benefit a person gets from using your service?

Understood - so I should clearly state that crawlers can't usually see AJAX content and that this will allow them to see and index it, leading to more search engine traffic. I was cautious of spelling out the obvious, I didn't want to insult anyone's intelligence :D

There we go! Its not an insult..some hackers might not even know enough about SEO to understand your service..and even so, I don't think your market is just hackers. I'm a designer and am planning to build a SPA so I'd probably refer one of my developers to your service.

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