Ask HN: Offers to help with webapp

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=209049

by jo • 18 years ago

9 8 18 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm a solo founder, built a web app over the last 12 months, targeted at a niche market of about 50,000. It has received enthusiastic feedback from users. I'd rather not disclose the URL at the moment because there is a monopoly that I'm trying to sneak up on.

Something that keeps coming up: People offering to donate and/or help with the software. How should I handle these emails?

webwright• 18 years ago

You have enthusiastic users and you think you're going to sneak up on an incumbent? (suggest reading: http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2008/06/the_spooky_econ.h... )

I'd add a donate (or tipjoy!) button. Or a bounty page where people can buy their favorite feature request to the top of the list.

If people want to help, maybe you could release an API? Or open-source your software?

j2d2• 18 years ago

I back the api idea. If anything, this helps you seperate logic in the app which will probably allow growing a dev team more efficiently. More importantly, though, is if customers actually do extend your app via an API you be empowering creativity outside your vision while still in your control. Letting users change the scope of your site is about as close to mapping your site to their needs as you can reasonably get.

jo3• 18 years ago

The API idea is excellent, thank you.

jo3• 18 years ago

I've had 2 ideas already taken by the big guy who can implement stuff quick (but sloppily). I'm not doing anything that earth shattering. Their user base is hard to chip away at when they match me step for step.

abstractbill• 18 years ago

From what he's told me, axod has had a similar experience with users offering to help with mibbit, and he's managed to put some of these offers to good use. Care to say more axod?

axod• 18 years ago

For Mibbit there's been a few ways people have helped:

1. Testing - people love finding bugs and telling you about them. You get some crazy fanatical users that can't wait to try your new release on 17 different browsers and email you with any issues.

2. Documentation - wiki. A great way to have people help each other, and to grow the project.

3. Helping other users - if it's applicable have a help chatroom where you hang out, in which new users can come. With Mibbit there's now a core group of users that hang out in the help channel helping new users.

4. Integration with other things - For mibbit, people have created joomla plugins, mediawiki extensions, and even submitted a bug report to firefox that Mibbit should be the default handler for irc://.

5. Adding to a feature wish list (I'd recommend using a wiki and seeing if someone is willing to maintain it and keep it tidy and organised). Although I know there is a good webapp for voting up/down feature requests (Forget the name though).

5. Obviously word of mouth/recommendation/blogging about it.

6. Internationalization - People seem all too willing to translate a UI into other languages.

For me personally at the moment, I'm not interested in people helping with the software for a variety of reasons, but the above ways people do help are excellent, as they all assist in growth - worth far more than them donating some $.

Of course I'm sure once things get larger the dynamics change, but for an early stage I'd recommend those sorts of things.

jo3• 18 years ago

Thanks for taking the time to share. I don't really want to give up ownership of any code either, and hadn't considered some of your other ideas.

tptacek• 18 years ago

I don't care what else you do, but you should find out more about each of them, and take the information down. You will be surprised how valuable that list will be down the road, and how hard the list is to develop on your own.

Ask HN: Offers to help with webapp

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