Sleeping. Closed for business. 10p to 6a

Stupid question: is your customer base all in your time zone?

I would never use a company that thinks I’m a child that needs a bedtime.

This also assumes everyone wakes up in the morning and has a normal schedule.

If I were your customer and coming up against a deadline like 11:59PM on December 31, or April 18, I would not be happy.

I think I understand and while I appreciate the sentiment, and certainly your customers will too... I'd add this as an option, even on by default. Maybe a dark and snoozey landing page during those times? But to completely hard-lock your website at certain times seems reckless and unnecessary, tyrannical and misguided.

There was a Canadian private health insurance company whose website was offline from 8 pm to 6 am... probably due to technology issues, or saving energy or whatever.

Whenever I needed to upload an invoice to get a refund the site was unavailable. Really frustrating user experience! Not like people have things they want to do in their day to day that don't involve having to use your site..

I really like this idea. I might put my router on one of those timer outlets.

Don't get me wrong, I think the sentiment is pretty good, and I think most people here would agree that getting enough sleep is vital. If you want to use your company blog or something to urge a good work/life balance and getting sufficient sleep, that's awesome.

But your approach seems a bit too paternalistic, like you know my schedule and are deciding what's best for me. Some people are going to be offput by that.

> snoozing our website at night

what does snoozing your website mean?

turn off all your webservers so all inbound requests time out? switch the theme to dark mode? keep the frontend and queues running so you can acknowledge and store customer orders but turn off the backends that process batch jobs?

There's another comment to this effect, but I do wonder if this is fair to customers with non-traditional schedules. Plenty of people work nights and early mornings, and they have not been well-served by brick-and-mortar banks and other financial institutions that are open from 9 to 5.

I appreciate what you're trying to do, but if your fintech startup caters to retail customers, I would urge you to make the snooze function dismissible if you haven't already. Maybe also store a record of the dismissal in localstorage or the like so that somebody who uses your site on the way home from their night shift at the hospital doesn't have to dismiss the snooze every time they use the site.

In my humble opinion that seems to be a very rude and aggressive way to do virtue signalling. I would feel extremely offended by having a website tell me to go back later just because I was supposed to be sleeping. I look forward to never ever have to do business with you.

Who are YOU to tell me I have to be in bed between 10pm and 6am? What do you know about me and my life? Do you even know in which time zone I'm operating?

There are a lot of things I can only do after 10pm due to work + kids.

While you claim to be taking a stand and not plugging your startup, it is at the top of your HN bio. This does seem like a good way to cause controversy and get people to seek out your website

Kinda silly, especially since you do it on the client side and the button says "wake us up," even though it might be 1pm wherever you are.

In general, to reduce the probability I will give you money, it makes sense to pop a modal on my screen the first time I visit your website.

A startup is not supposed to raise sleep awareness or to get away from the hustle culture. You are only responsible to generate cold hard cash and grow the business if necessary. Your startup will die otherwise.

Are you measuring the impact of this? I’d be curious to know what sort of impact this has on your business, either good or bad.

I like it. It’s quirky and memorable. As you say elsewhere, it’s based on the user time zone and you can “wake up“ the site if needed. Nice idea!