dclaysmith

I recently soft-launched AhDocs (https://www.ahdocs.com). It is an AI-enabled document management system + PAdES compliant e-signature software (PAdES-B-LTA).

It organizes documents around stakeholder (customers, vendors, employees) and extracts insights per document and allows you to "chat" with the documents individually, per-stakeholder, per-stakeholder type, or across your business.

It has a lightweight form builder, supports templates, allows you to upload your documents from your phone's camera, allows you to email-in documents.

Now is the hard-part--trying to get from 0 to 1. I feel like there are a lot of ways I could niche down the product and focus my marketing but I'm a bit rudderless at the moment.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them!

Thunder Client is great (https://www.thunderclient.com/)

- Really nice having it integrated into the IDE - Happy with their release cadence - Support/dev has gotten back to me quickly - Does most of the important stuff from Postman imho

The iPaaS landscape was a bit more sparse back in 2015 when we started. And we hoped the breadth of integrations was always going a differentiating factor for us--something we wanted to have full control over.

Ultimately I think it was the right choice. There are enough minor but value-adding modifications we've needed to make over the years that I doubt an iPaaS could provide.

I'm eager to try this (there seems to be an issue with the VSCode marketplace so I haven't been able to install it yet).

Two people on my team use paid versions of postman and I feel like it is a bit expensive (the per user pricing would add up quickly). Do you have/are you planning on releasing a 'team' version w/ shared endpoints?

(Hopefully I can answer some of these questions myself when the Marketplace is back up).

I'm a big fan of what Sarah & Andrew have done at Canny and how they have done it.

This article (humbly) omits the role that having a really great product plays in recruiting. Canny is well designed and built and delivers instant ROI. To a degree, job applicants can sense what working at a place will be like, based on the care the existing team puts into what they are building.

I'm currently the only Customer Success Manager for our bootstrapped Customer Success Management startup Akita --https://www.akitaapp.com (in addition to being CEO/Head of Product Development).

I felt like it was the best way to get continuous feedback from customers and dog food our product.

It has really helped us improve our product but is now going from something that "doesn't scale" to something that "prevents scaling". I hope to hire my replacement pretty soon!

At this point we are targeting other SaaS businesses who already know what Customer Success is, why it's important and what their goals are. They are definitely the "low-hanging fruit".

We don't really have the resources to go after/educate other businesses about the benefits (but there are many). In time we'll broaden our marketing a bit and try and bring Customer Success to the masses.

Hi Hacker News! OP here. We recently launched our new Customer Success Management application. It's been a really long road but we are starting to see a bit of traction and some happy customers. Happy to answer any questions or give you a demo!

I bootstrapped and launched my Customer Success Management app Akita - https://www.akitaapp.com

It's been a LONG road but we've finally got happy customers and revenue.

US Expat living in Dublin... Here's an article that just came out about some cool startups in Ireland.

http://www.geektime.com/2013/09/29/10-hot-irish-startups-to-...

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5820590

I recently stepped down from my fulltime position of 6 years. I picked up a job fairly quickly and have work lined up through the end of the year. I would recommend:

* Go to (and speak at) meetups involving technologies you work with. It's a great way to showcase your skills.

* Be charitable with your time. Be willing to meet people for coffee and provide free advice. These sort of meetings often directly or indirectly turn into work.

* Leave your company in good terms--they might use you as a contractor after you leave.

I would definitely recommend saving up 4-6 months of living expenses before quitting. It gives you some flexibility in setting your rate and selecting jobs.

If you append .json to the URL of a Board you can download it as json. Not really an answer to your question but...

Thanks. Yeah, I really really wanted to avoid popups and modals etc, but it introduces new problems.

Double clicking on the background will close all of the cards.

Cool. I hadn't really considered going this route--was always trying to use a combination of: # of collaborators, # of projects, # users per organization, etc and none of them really felt right. Will give the increased admin features some thought.

Task Messenger looks slick.

Thanks! I wanted to avoid optimizing. When I started working on it (before Trello came out) I wanted something really general purpose with no forced workflow, etc. I could customize it but that's not what I really wanted to build so I've resisted.

It uses backbone.js models/views, Jquery UI, and some Twitter Bootstrap JS.

I developed a similar product over the last few years (http://www.thetaboard.com) and have been waiting to see how the FogCreek guys were going to monetize Trello. I had resigned to leaving my product as free in the face of such a free, strong market leader. Now that Trello has established a price/feature point, I'm tempted to to crank out some features and see if I can't monetize it.

Trello have been pretty transparent that they would eventually offer some sort of premium package in the future but they kept adding so many free features that it was getting harder to imagine what kind of features they could actually charge for. The features they are charging here are nice but they aren't real game changers and I thought they had already offered some of them (data export, Google integration).

All that being said, I think Trello is a great product and I'm sure they'll pay for more than a few nights at the pub with this new revenue stream!

There seem to be a couple of these services popping up. This one (http://www.findexp.com/) services the Braves games at Turner Field in Atlanta. I can't really see more than one of these businesses taking off and I would think Ticketmaster would get involved if it proves lucrative (either by integrating it into their own app or acquiring one of these companies).

Looks a lot like my app: http://www.thetaboard.com

But with some more bells and whistles and a predefined PM workflow.

(In fairness, we both look like Pivotal and Trello to a lesser degree so it doesn't bother me)

Given the noticeable similarities, I'd love to hear how you get on with signups and revenue. ThetaBoard is currently free (It's hard to compete with Trello's price!) but I would certainly love to make a living with it. I've just found it very difficult to "market" something that is designed to appeal to such a broad market.

Good luck with the launch.

Thanks!

Launched just under a year ago.

The comments issue was a tough decision. In the end, I wanted to keep everything on the card itself and do my best to reduce or eliminate/reduce modal windows and drop down menus (I have some but they are few and far between).

I'm actually a fan of Trello myself and use it for some projects--I'm sure Trello will be around for a long time. I am actually ramping up work on ThetaBoard this year (it's been nights and weekends for the couple years) so there is no danger of it going away any time soon. And I'll work on my terms & conditions!

Clone? No. Similar? Sure.

When Trello came out I had been working on ThetaBoard for a while. Both products draw heavily from some Kanban tools that have been around for years.

If Trello had been out earlier I might not have started my project. That being said, I'd argue that the UX/UI and aesthetics of the two apps are different. I'm going to be making some improvements this year that will differentiate a bit more. As long as people keep using it, I keep plugging away at it.

I used this library to build the product tour for my app ( http://www.thetaboard.com). Was really easy to customize the color scheme and behavior--I think it took 2 hours to integrate it.

Adding a product tour really improved my "demo" to "sign up" conversion rate. Probably the single biggest conversion rate "win" I've had.

I think there is little risk of Trello being discontinued/FogCreek going out of business. They do a lot of hiring and have had a pretty vocal customer segment pleading for them to charge for it. I don't really understand why they haven't tho I'm sure Joel Spolsky has a plan.

Disclaimer: I wish he was charging--I have a similar project I've been working on over nights and weekends. It is very hard to compete with free and difficult to position/market a product you have created to appeal to everyone. That being said--I love working on my project so it'll be around for a long time... Link: http://www.thetaboard.com

Clickable http://www.mocktailsapp.in

They were also the first (or one of the first) to (nearly) eliminate the approval process. You could go from registration form to accepting payments in hours rather than the old process of getting merchant service account and then payment gateway.

Braintree, which was the "pro-developer" option has only recently followed suit and begun offering this "instant underwriting".

http://pandodaily.com/2012/10/01/a-new-twist-in-the-three-wa...

Thanks! Glad you like it. Yeah, I've got some features I would like to add but am holding back b/c they would result in increased operating costs. I'll need to make a decision in the next 6 months or so.

I write the odd blog post but have not done any focused marketing. I've gotten a few write ups here and there that provide a trickle of traffic that converts into signups pretty well.

My goal with ThetaBoard is to keep it very simple and flexible. I think I've achieved that (which is good) but it makes marketing more difficult--it's hard to market "unspecific". And having Trello as a free 800lb gorilla doesn't help.

I have a full time job so it's not a huge priority for me right now--I'm just focused on building out new features people request (that make sense). It's growing on its own at a pace that keeps me interested.