mion

Congratulations on the work! I’ve been doing startups for +10 years but also worked in big companies. This is pretty interesting, how do we contact you?

One thing I really wish I had learned from a book is how to adapt the architecture to the current stage the company is in (something like this likely exists but IDK).

For instance, the “brittleness” of your systems must follow the “certainty” the company has on product-market fit. In other words, if the % of changing code is high then it should be cheap to change it. I could explain this in much more detail, and I have seen countless under-engineering and over-engineering issues in practice because people lack this mental model.

That's great feedback, we're working on it now! Thank you so much :)

I've taken that into consideration and hidden the post.

Do you still think it's OK if we post tutorials of things you can build with our platform?

We're just trying hard to iterate on our messaging and HN helps us a lot with that, and we're not spamming either. The upvotes mechanism serves that purpose, the post quickly goes down if the link does not resonate with the community.

I'll try to add different interesting content next time however.

You're absolutely right, we are working on providing some examples soon enough. We have two clients using it in production but their websites are behind a login wall, so I'd have to share screenshots.

What kinds of website would you be curious to see if we can handle?

Thanks a lot! We're really trying to make a tool for people to create JAMstack apps on, so we're basically just charging on per value on our abstractions and just enough to cover the cost for AWS.

If you're a coder and are willing to do an user testing interview, we'd love to chat and demo our features! You can see my email in my profile. Cheers

Awesome feedback, perfect. We're working on templates and onboarding! Currently we only do web apps (no mobile apps), we will adjust our copy based on your response. Thank you!

Absolutely, this is a great point. We were working with B2B clients previously so we could "get away with" not having proper onboarding/documentation.

We're working hard on this and we'll have something close to what you mentioned soon! Stay tuned :)

1) It is in fact possible but as noted previously, most people still wouldn't feel comfortable running their core business long-term on this kind of tool. However, no one worries about running their business on AWS and in fact our infrastructure is on top of them (like Heroku). So we need to grow a bit more before people are OK with that :)

2) Retool is tailored at internal tools, so you can't quite customize the UX as you'd want for something that is touching end users. Besides, it's quite expensive for the MVP use case because they price per user (we don't, our pricing page is coming soon).

Yes, they're fully responsive. We use Flexbox underneath and no absolute positioning (which is actually a limitation for now).

Thank you for the details! This is excellent, going straight into our backlog. :)

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback, this was flying under our radar. We just went with Google for simplicity because it was easier to implement and didn't realize lots of users would dislike it.

We have now implemented email & password and should add anonymous login soon!

We have implemented this today, you can now use email & password. Please give it another try!

Thank you so much!! :) What aspects of the design did you find more appealing?

We're noticing lots of people are disturbed by this and we're really sorry! We have implemented Email & Password auth since then, please give it another try :)

We're about to put it online, we will have a freemium tier with a cap on performance/data/etc. Then a basic plan for $6/mo with less cap, and so on. Pro = $84/mo

* all plans have unlimited editors * all plans have unlimited end users

You'd only pay more if your MVP is picking up traction in exchange for more performance, but your apps always run regardless.-

I'm one of the founders of Abstra, a hackable no-code tool focused on making MVPs quickly aimed at coders (not necessarily developers).

Could you please share some feedback? Anything is extremely valuable, thanks!

Hey everyone! Founder of Abstra here. We've just launched our Beta version and we are eager for any feedback.

If you have any criticism or comments regarding Abstra I'll be online here to answer ASAP. Any feedback is very valuable for us. Thanks!

Hey everyone, my team and I are working on this product that transforms Figma designs into HTML and CSS code automatically called "Responsive Magic": https://www.responsivemagic.com/?ref=hn

We're using a novel algorithm and lots of AI to achieve better results than similar tools.

We have just put a public Beta version online that you can try in a few seconds. It's a work in progress but you can get awesome results depending on your case.

Please give it a try and LMK if you have any feedback! Thanks!

I studied at PUC-Rio and I met Roberto Ierusalimschy (the main author of Lua) when he was teaching a course on semantics. I once asked him if I could send a PR about a feature I wanted in the language and he said something that I never forgot: "Yes, but I won't use your code. I love that people send me ideas, but I actually enjoy coding... so I will gladly take your suggestions, though I will write it myself."

He then explained this "dictatorial" behavior is what allowed him to keep the implementation simple and concise over the years. At the time he boasted about the source code being less than 8K LOC, though it has likely increased in recent versions. (I think it was around version 3.) I'd recommend taking a look at the source code, it's truly a C masterpiece.

I'm thinking of switching to Finance from CS. I'm all the way across the world but I think you may have some valuable advice. Can you -- or anyone here in similar position -- share your email?

I've once heard PG say that if you are an international startup, an important question is who will stay with the company back in your home country in your absence during the YC period. My founder and I would obviously both love to be there and we don't have a good answer for that. Any tips?

You can become better at this by doing it a lot. Every time a situation presents itself where you can try to convince someone of something, try to do it just for the heck of it. Most people evade these situations, but if you keep at it, it will improve.

Persuasion is independent of "shyness" (actually, being an introvert) but a lot of it has to do with natural talent, unfortunately [1]. You can definitely improve it, but some people are just born with a higher degree of "energy transitivity". For instance, their face have more muscles and they're wired in such a way that it is easier for them to control it, among other things.

[1] Malcom Gladwell wrote about this briefly in "The Tipping Point". You can learn more on this by looking up the book "Emotional Contagion" by Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo and Richard Rapson. There's also Howard Friedman, from the University of California, who created the Affective Communication Test, which aims to give an individual a measure of his personal carisma - this transmissive or "magical" ability you speak of: http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~friedman/act.html

PG's answer to my silly self-doubt question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5220936

It's kind of sad to see pg stepping down, but I'm sure sama will do a great job. Should we expect any fundamental changes in the way things get done at YC?

You're right, so I sought out and acquired a lot of information to make sure I'm doing anything too stupid.

I got my current mindset after reading many books, articles, pg essays, talking to people and so on. When you become obsessed with something you suck in all the information about the subject out there. I wish I could just show them a 'memory dump' of my brain.

It does take time! I can try that too, though I'm afraid they'll say they got lucky or something

I thought so, thanks man :)

I guess they don't, a more disciplined way of doing things could solve the problem. I see, thanks for the tip!