khadim

Agree with all your points. For new projects hn also helped in getting early adopters & of-course show hn (feedback).

maybe can add export option viz to pdf

we just want to get browser.extension to ensure flow creation and execution on all sites. Thats the message coming from browser, we dont need browsing data neither its part of our business model.

we are considering enterprise version, private flows as well as ads for monetization.

Uber is moving fast. Good to see them in Bangalore.

embed script is used in this app (http://app.searchenabler.com/)

you can see flows on that app here: - http://www.searchenabler.com/faqs/

many of the feedback which we got during private beta of whatfix are incorporated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6019078)

startup fake to build credibility. if found faking anyway they didn't do it right.

So should every startup fake their way to traction?

If someone had seen on time.

suggestion on alternative embed style sounds good. we will surely consider.

:) we hit upon whatfix due to pain we felt while working with users in our previous product.

we are trying to keep flow creation simple, so that anyone can create new flows within minutes. you can try creating flows for your product and use embed option to add them.

We collect lots of information about the element that we need to highlight (text, depth, siblings etc). When we fail to identify element accurately, we try to find best one with highest score and highlight. We mark flow as a failure and exit, when we hit score below minimum. This algorithm is most crucial one & i guess it will be evolving ever. By this mechanism, we are trying to overcome page changes to good extent.

Very few guides are in house and mostly are contributed by early adopters. we are expecting users to contribute.

We are based out of bangalore, india.

@tedmiston, we will try putting video on landing page directly & measure the improvement.

edit: we added video on landing page.

any user with more than 500 reputations can edit any guides, with more than 1000 reps can delete the guides. so such users can edit any other user's guides and help in keeping them upto date. User's can get reputations when other's run their flows or vote up.

Yes, we are trying to build content community which can curate and update. we have reputations like stackoverflow.

We have also implemented failure tracking mechanism to check when guides don't execute correctly. Failure tracking feature is pre-mature as of now, once tracking improves, we will mark it for community to improve the guides or discard them.

we want to provide interactive help inline to websites/webapps, unlike screencast or verbose howto's. Any guide in whatfix can be made interactive to get inline help by installing browser plugin and running the guide.

we want anyone to create interactive guides on any website, like Gmail, facebook, so to run over such sites, plugin is necessary. Same plugin is also used for creating guides, so encouraging plugins, will help in more contribution of guides.

On clicking 'Run', whatfix provide instructions inline to websites.

Here's 3 mins video: http://youtu.be/xm2ly9qTXkM

"whatfix is community website, where anyone can create, share & execute interactive guides on any website or web applications."

We think whatfix can be used to create howto's, some initial traction reflected as good tutorial builder, what can be best way? Any suggestions. Any comments/feedback on whatfix greatly appreciated!

If anyone is interested to try out private beta, you are most welcome, just add your email id to http://whatfix.com/ & you would get invite in couple of days.

Akash, simple and smart service.

I don't think any tier 1 Indian cities are facing such long power cuts. I am sure of Mumbai, Ahmadabad and Bangalore as i am connected to several friends in those metros. We are facing not more than 4-5 hours a week, that too only in summers.

Thanks Martin for inputs. We got connected to hardware expert in Bangalore, who would be visiting our premise and helping us sort out some of the stuff you mentioned. Sharing really helps. If would not have put together this article, we would not have got so many inputs neither would have got people voluntarily approaching us to help :)

Our assumptions is we can recover cost of equipment within warranty period (Most of the components have 3 yrs warranty) Also, most of data redundancy is handled at software level, I feel thats the best usage of FOSS like Hadoop/Cassandra. We can avoid expensive high end hardware and build system with commodity hardware components and rely more on cloud technology. You might still be right, but hope things work out.

We don't have sufficient control as we are in rental premise. Superlike your suggestion :)

There is no data transfer cap for ILLs. We use You & Tulip. 1Gb port i mentioned, as we need high speed communication across nodes. We use Cassandra, Hadoop so internal data transfer rate is very high. So for internal communication 100Mbps creates bottleneck, but definitely sufficient for external communication / bandwidth.

I commented from what i got from pricing page. Apart from basic server cost, there's always associated extension hardware/data/software cost which generally makes it much more expensive.

If you have more details on cloud setup using Hetzner and associated cost, we would be happy to explore.

Thanks Peter. We are getting good pointers. Will try to figure out some way to fix.

Ravish, we are based out of Bangalore and so far we never had 12 hours a day power outage. Max we have faced 4-5 hours of power outage for couple of occasions in summer. In general power outage is not more than an hour or two in a week, which is manageable with UPS & Generator combo.

From Hertzer pricing page, add 1Gbit port cost of 50$ a month, data transfer charges etc would make it much more expensive. Considering our usage, we felt private infra would be a better choice.

SMPS and UPS batteries. I think as pointed in other comment, we need to have temperature & humidity control.

Ya, we faced battery failure problems. We are using standard cooling via Air conditioners. I think we will face more problems as we scale in this aspect, need to work out.

We have Eaton online UPS, which as of now can provide 4 hours of power backup. We've also got 3KVA power generator which runs on fuel, used only in event when power failure is for longer durations and UPS batteries need to be re-charged. Pretty common here.

So far, for last 8 months, we have seen couple of SMPS failures and a motherboard. Also had issues with UPS batteries. We are learning and improving in component selections, which should further improve Failover is also managed at application layer by FOSS such as Cassandra, Hadoop, so user's have in general not faced much downtime. If we are not able to scale or manage, we will re-look and consider moving to public cloud.