HN Explorer

Ask HN: Feedback on my startup for devs

6 points by gabszanto ↗ HN
The landing page is here: https://www.slugbay.com

Is it clear from the Landing Page what you can get from our product?

We aim to fix 3 key issues we found when looking for resources.

1. Find an exhaustive list of available and up-to-date resources quickly (think Google Search but only for Developers); 2. Help devs pick the right resource among many options with the help of the community; 3. Easily collect these resources and build a personal library (current tools to curate content are not designed for devs - i.e, select bits of code, keep the syntax highlighting, etc.)

What do you think? Plse share your thoughts.

11 comments

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[dead] jadda
Let's Skype.

Johan 

onion2k
The search functionality sounds interesting if, somehow, it actually finds things that Google doesn't, but there's no way I'd sign up to something (regardless of price; even if it's free) to try out a search feature. Google is good enough. I don't need to give out my email address to search for things, so I won't.
gabszanto
Thanks for your feedback. How do know if the results/resources you get from Google are good or fit with what you are looking for?
relkor
Usually because I continue googling until I find something that is helpful. Its a tautology, however if you could demonstrate/tell more about how your system is faster than googling I would be interested.
herbst
I understand what you are doing, but i am not sure why i would use something like this. We (developers) spent years to perfectionize our google foo and have platforms we are used to where talk to other developers and exchange resources.

From your intro i see no benefit for myself, just that i should pay for something that already works near to perfect.

You may want to work on that factor, maybe show some more of your features so i can see a real benefit?

gabszanto
Hey, thanks for your feedback. I'm interested to know what sites/sources do you currently use to exchange resources?
herbst
Hacker News :), Reddit, a few Slacks and IRC.

Next to various newsletters, but these are not exactly exchange.

gabszanto
Thx! Same here ;)

I have multiple sources I've curated over the years... but I don't keep track of all of them. That's why we created SlugBay. I want to rely on it to help me find good resources and store them whenever I need them.

IMO - Finding resources is somewhat easy (it just takes time) but finding the right resource is way more challenging.

The Search Engine is just an entry point. First, we're building a database with dozens of curated sources like HN, dev blogs, aggregators, repos, newsletters, etc.

Then, we build a community to help us curate those (already) hand-picked resources. The invite-only process is just to help us choose the right developers. We need to have enough relevant content before opening the floodgates.

In the long run, we want devs be confident they can find and pick the right resources for them on SlugBay.

allendoerfer
There are companies that do each of these steps better than you can possibly do it. Search for a smaller problem within a tight community, so you can take it over and expand from there.

E.g. if you want to do something about resources or packages, fix a problem that npm has, take the whole community, do the same with pypi and so on.

J_Darnley
> Please activate javascript

No that does not make it at all clear what I could get from your product.

A dedicated search engine for devs sounds good. Sometimes a keyword might be so common that you don't get good results from a generic one (I'm thinking of "make"). I doubt I would register though because I'm not very interested in the other features.