Ask HN: How would you market PageKite, my "run web servers anywhere" service?

9 points by HerraBRE ↗ HN
Hello HN!

Me and a couple of friends have been working for a few months on our startup: http://pagekite.net/

PageKite is a software & service solution for making servers (primarily web servers, but it does SSH and other protocols too) on personal and mobile devices visible to the wider Internet. It is in many ways similar to Opera Unite, but it's far more powerful (IMO), it's open source and it's not tied to a browser.

We're bootstrapping and have reached "MVP" in that the software and the service both work, but the UI is still so primitive that it's really only useful to techies. We're working on that. :-)

But now that we have a product, we'd like to find some paying customers!

Got any advice for us? How would you monetize this service and market it? We have some ideas of course, it would be really great to get some outside input as well.

Thanks!

5 comments

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My guess would be to start by offering a free trial to all visitors. Next on my list would be to identify the top 50 sites that you think most directly reach your target audience and work out some sort of arrangement whereby they offer their members/visitors some sort of discount or deal for using your service.

Thanks,

Bryan http://onsidekick.com

Thanks for the comment!

We actually already do offer free trials, but identifying and reaching out to partners is something we have yet to make progress on.

Very nice. It took me about five minutes from reading the post to having a web server on my computer for the whole world to see.

Really glad you threw this out here! I could really see myself using it for prototypes and quick projects that don't warrant an actual server.

I think I'm going to add your script to my path or set it up as a bash alias so I can really make use of it.

Hey, really glad you like it! Sorry I missed you on IRC (timezones, etc.), stop by again sometime.