A DigitalOcean like support community for your website in 3 minutes
Hi, Soufian from Haash here, i've always found DigitalOcean support community https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions smart and fascinating. A clever way to deliver support and manage knowledge. One of the reasons they came from nothing and became rapidly popular.
Haash is basically getting the same community support hosted space in few seconds. Just signup, create, tweak it to match your website feel and start using it.
Wow no, it's not just the colors. Putting their front page and yours side by side the similarities are unmistakeable (nav position and style, button styles, use of centered line drawing on landing page, some of the copy). Whether it was intentional or not, I would change some things up to avoid confusing people and any legal implications that might have.
Sooo... basically they used Bootstrap like every other site?
The thing that's throwing you is the hand-drawn picture of a computer, like Dropbox has. Other than that, it looks like every other site that uses Bootstrap.
I'm sad you were down voted because I felt this was a Dropbox project, too. Especially with the graphic element. It DOES feel a little too familiar. If multiple people's opinions are to be rejected, well...
Would this be a viable replacement for a support / community forum? I'm a DO customer but never have questions so I'm not sure what their support setup looks like.
Yes it meant to be a better replacement for classic forums that are generally noisy and hard to deal with. Haash works more like Stackoverflow when it comes to questions and stays very simple with tutorials crowdsourcing too.
For using it as a customer support, generally DO encourages you to publish your question on the community instead of going with private chat and support tickets as when the question and answer go public everyone else can benefit from it and most importantly find it in milliseconds when searching on Google.
another reason is that your need for creating docs out of repetitive support queries massively drops as the Q&A is your docs.
Small piece of feedback but I would increase the contrast of your fonts to make it a bit easier to read (it's far from the worst I've seen but if you compare it to the DO community you link to, theirs is easier to read).
Just nitpicking a little. It's not the contrast that needs adjustment. The font color is almost black which should give sufficient contrast on a white background.
The font width is very thin however, and it would make it more legible to increase the font width in the body text.
Isn't the good thing about community support the people who help rather than the tool that's used to run it? You can't build a community of helpful, interested people in 3 minutes.
Seems like a great service to help guide users into helping one another (at least more so than just having a separate support email and maybe a knowledge base).
All the communities have to deal with that at some point, but that doesn't prevent good value from happening. One thing we did at Haash is letting members know of existing questions while they're typing a new one.
How do you get marijuana from haash? I know the word "hash" in marijuana terms, but I associate the word more with hashing a password (or maybe hash browns) than with drugs.
I like the name. At least I remembered it easily enough that I was able to give the name to a coworker 1hr later. To me it sounds related to hashing passwords and to the DigitalOcean inspiration, which is enough to remember it. People will remember it, it's short, the domain name is available, the only drawback is the collision with Ha-ash the music band, and not being at the top of Google when searching for "haash". But that will change, right ;) ?
Yeah we hope so. FYI, the origin of the name go back to our early days with ruby, A hash table (hash map) is actually a data structure used to implement an associative array (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table). Basically a collection of data in our case product information.
Oups! sorry about that. Alongside with the support community, we have a FAQs module. The two makes a smart help center (FAQs and community). You ended up on the main help center landing page where there are two pricing schemes . One if you use only FAQs $5/mo and the other if you use both (FAQs and community) starting at $29/mo.
The UI of your site needs to be a little reworked. I don't want to click on every single FAQ question and get taken to another site, for example. Also, being able to only login with FB or Twitter is not acceptable. There absolutely need to be free accounts, as well as Google Account Logins.
A nice idea, needs some remodel and some smoothing out edges.
I like it. In fact I have a project in mind for which I might use it next year.
I think your pricing model might need a bit of work though. I think you're offering too much in the free tier (particularly given that I can run a free community with unlimited entries but have to pay $94/month for 50000 on the other plan), and pricing per registered community user might be worth looking into.
Other than that I'll definitely come back in the new year when I'm ready to give it a try.
Can you send me an email after you add it? My email is in my profile.
I don't do social media at all. I don't even have a facebook or twitter account. This looks useful (something I would pay for), but I need to take a closer look at it.
Many people would not be permitted to attach their social accounts. My workplace requires that we associate our accounts strictly through things they will be able to access after employees leave (IE a company email address).
For those frustrated that there's no email signup, please fill in this form https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI . We'll notify you once we add it very soon. Thank you!
This is epic. As a former-digitaloceaner I know how much work went into building the community (the community director at DigitalOcean is incredibly good at her job) and how well it as served the business. If you have the ability and time to build a community around your product, I highly recommend it, brand evangelists are something you simply cannot buy.
I love the branding on this product, very light and fun, also friendly and catchy. It reminds me of dropbox. Great work, maybe when you make some money you can get a good logo to go with it. Good stuff!
Tried to read the terms and conditions.. got an error [0]
Whilst you are there, the terms and conditions aren't obviously clickable.
Also, would love to be able to sign up with email, but only get Facebook / Twitter auth options. Ironically the tab is titled "Log in with email | Haash"
That aside, I can see this being useful, really like the setup.
One thing you may consider is having private or invite only communities. Almost all the offerings out there are for public communities, which leaves in house self help an untapped market.
Yes that's a good way to go to. Although you might hack Haash right now to not show questions and answers to the public, we might consider a sophisticated version of that.
Is there a 'whitelabel' capability with this service? Ie, could I point community.mysite.com at your servers with a cname record? Does anyone else care about this?
Really looking forward to trying this out, but definitely need this first. Seems fine for users, but would rather not force my support team to log in with their social accounts.
Social accounts are fine for consumer products but many people justifiably don't want to use them for business products. Keeping them separate is a key part of business hygiene.
For me, it's not about the privacy issues. It's that accounts tied to my personal social networks are much harder to transfer/remove/control.
We've put up this form https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI for those who exclusively want to sign up with email. We'll add email sign up very soon and let you know. Thank you!
100 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadHaash is basically getting the same community support hosted space in few seconds. Just signup, create, tweak it to match your website feel and start using it.
Would be happy to answer any questions
The thing that's throwing you is the hand-drawn picture of a computer, like Dropbox has. Other than that, it looks like every other site that uses Bootstrap.
For using it as a customer support, generally DO encourages you to publish your question on the community instead of going with private chat and support tickets as when the question and answer go public everyone else can benefit from it and most importantly find it in milliseconds when searching on Google.
another reason is that your need for creating docs out of repetitive support queries massively drops as the Q&A is your docs.
Also, the home view eg. https://slack.haash.io/ feels quite wide and is hard to look across to see the 'Date' and 'Views' which are all the way to the right. When you click into a question eg. https://slack.haash.io/151/how-can-remove-files-that-deactiv... this width seems good and is easier to scan.
Overall I like the clean and simple approach. Very little noise to distract you which is nice.
Changing it from 300 weight Lato to 400 weight of the same font would also help.
The font width is very thin however, and it would make it more legible to increase the font width in the body text.
Seems like a great service to help guide users into helping one another (at least more so than just having a separate support email and maybe a knowledge base).
Q2A doesn't have: - instant search - Intercom integration - Single Sign-on
And other cool stuff we'll be shipping soon
A nice idea, needs some remodel and some smoothing out edges.
I think your pricing model might need a bit of work though. I think you're offering too much in the free tier (particularly given that I can run a free community with unlimited entries but have to pay $94/month for 50000 on the other plan), and pricing per registered community user might be worth looking into.
Other than that I'll definitely come back in the new year when I'm ready to give it a try.
Many people don't want to attach their social accounts to business functions.
I don't do social media at all. I don't even have a facebook or twitter account. This looks useful (something I would pay for), but I need to take a closer look at it.
"By signing up you indicate that you have read and agree to the Terms of the service"
Being a conscientious user, I click through to read what I'm agreeing to and find:
"You do not have permission to perform this operation"
IANAL but I'm pretty sure this won't be legally binding.
Whilst you are there, the terms and conditions aren't obviously clickable.
Also, would love to be able to sign up with email, but only get Facebook / Twitter auth options. Ironically the tab is titled "Log in with email | Haash"
That aside, I can see this being useful, really like the setup.
0: https://s12.postimg.org/z1cuq8lzh/Screenshot_2016_11_23_14_3...
email is in my profile if you want help troubleshooting.
Searching is a tad slow but I have seen slower. Maybe implementing ElasticSearch might be a nice idea. Would also result in better search results.
PS: For those afraid of any privacy issues, the permissions are very basic, we do only get your email, avatar and short bio.
For me, it's not about the privacy issues. It's that accounts tied to my personal social networks are much harder to transfer/remove/control.