This is a concept that I had a lot of fun thinking about but never had the resources to make happen. Good luck. Can't wait to be a client. Looks very promising.
Nice idea! I like how it's focused on wordpress and iphone (rather than turn any website to android/iphone/etc.) Care to share some implementations details with follow HN-ers? :) I.e. Do you have a "plugin-converter"? How do you transform the "normal screen width" to a "mobile feeling"?
1. I was a software engineer that got an MBA and was doing management consulting.
2. Over 80k / year
3. My runway is private, but we financed ourselves by taking on short-term iOS/Wordpress dev/design consulting gigs to stay fed.
It would be interesting to see more details in a blog post about your transition, such as whether you started working on this before quitting your job, how long since you quit your job, what the makeup of your team is, how you met your team, etc. This looks really cool by the way, good job on launching!
Thanks. Did you change your standard of living to to follow your dream? If so, to what extent? Are you now eating raman? Also, do you have any dependents (wife, children)? Oh, and how old are you?
Sorry, I know you are really interested in sharing your product but many of us want to know what people are willing to give up to chase their dreams.
I did change my standard of living somewhat - I didn't travel this year as I usually do, cut out most useless expenses and took public transit whenever I could. We need surprisingly little to live when you think about it. At the same time, I made sure to take on small paid projects to keep fed.
I don't have any dependants, but I am married and contribute to the household financially. That hasn't stopped, I just had to take it into account when planning my runway.
I'm 28. At this point it's an experiement, If I can turn this into a business I will, if not, I'll dive back into the salaried way of life. It's a great way to live, but I just had to give my dream a shot.
Totally love your suggestion. I myself am on my own Startup for over 4 years now.
Once I realized that Startups should be treated like marathons, I myself started running. I run about 5km, five or six days a week. To me running has had a big contribution in staying healthy and coping with stress.
Completely agree, it'd make for a very informative read. You quit your job, worked hard, and now have something impressive to show that many people seem to want to purchase. I'd say you're on the right track!
I'm in a similar situation (quit high-paying job, following startup dream).
May I ask how you broke into dev/design consulting? I'll have to go that way too, and soon. But I'm still a bit mystified about where one finds consulting gigs... Places like ODesk/Elancer?
+1 - best fastest way to find freelance jobs?
edit - not sure why this was downvoted 4 times - but to elaborate on my question - what were the most rewarding gigs - in terms of ease of getting hired & finding them, most money, learning stuff that was relevant, expanding network, bbb
the best way is to expand your network and go to networking events. go to mobile meetups, tech meetups, business meetups, etc. From there you will notice a lot more opportunities will arise. This is also assuming you are good at something. Wether it's development / design or making pancakes. You have to be good at something before someone else will bring you on as a consultant / freelance.
Networking by and large will be your best bet. An odesk may get you some short-term work, but it won't necessarily be all that high paying. With a decent rep on odesk or elance you might get some good gigs, but those will probably develop in to non-odesk relationships with clients ("going direct").
I don't know many people who use odesk who pay more then $20-$25/hour, and it's typically for smaller type stuff. There are people who get "I want a full copy of XYZ for $500" and a number of people who bid on that, but there's "real" projects in there too sometimes. I just have a hard time looking at elance/odesk sites as something that 'real' companies use for 'real' (read: valuable) projects.
I didn't cover "pricing" in my post since it all varies based on your situation, your location, your skills, and the project itself. (crappy project/crappy client = ++rates).
I know a few YC founders that pay $70/hr - $80/hr for really great Rails devs, iOS devs, and front-end engineers that are not local to SF/PA (mid-west devs or southeast devs). I think the price for an experienced Rails freelancer in a big metro is around $100/hr - $125/hr.
On the design side, I have friends in DC, SF, and Chicago that are top notch visual designers and have worked on big "brand" sites, and depending on how busy they are, they'll charge anywhere from $75/hr - $80/hr. An art director I know will not go below $150/hr bc it's not worth his time to do more work outside of his day job.
But there are price inefficiencies everywhere, and if someone fresh out of college doesn't really understand how good of a designer they are or the going rates for freelancers, then you can find someone who's good for your MVP for $25/hr.
All of the above assumes you are pricing projects on a straight hourly rate (legalese = "Time & Material Rates").
Be warned that most small business owners will want firm-fixed pricing (ie - "I want a fully redesigned site for $a,000"). In that case, you'll need to figure how long it will take for you to complete the project, add a 10% - 15% buffer for client changes/indecision, and then settle on a firm-price of $x,000.
It takes patience. I left a finance to learn to code a couple of years ago, but only got smart about networking last spring. I'm just now beginning to bring in some freelance / consulting jobs. You just have to keep at it -- and deliver on time, on budget, on spec.
I don't know how the author of this post found consulting gigs, but the way my friends did it and the way I did (before going back to a design/dev agency) was by first and foremost deciding on a the type consulting service we're going to offer and then partnering with other freelancers on projects. Another friend did two "free" gigs to build a portfolio and have references to send prospective clients to, and that got the ball rolling.
If dev, then will you be providing back-end dev? Front-end dev? What language/framework? Any CMS preference? Or blogging tool preference?
If design, are you helping out with everything from UX/strategy to branding/visual design, or are you just taking black and white wireframes (UX design) and turning them into fully baked/designed photoshop files?
If marketing/SEO, then what sub services are you offering? Social media management? Blogging/ghost writing? Pay-per-click management? SEO backlinks?
Two things to remember. 1) Most small business owners aren't going to roll the dice if they are your first client unless you can sell like the best of them. 2) Your reputation is your source for new business/referral business, if you are poor in one or multiple areas (let's just say design and marketing) but are an expert in one area (let's just say back-end Rails dev + front-end HTML/CSS/jQuery), then focus on providing services/consulting where you are the strongest.
The quickest way to start is to either to free work/discounted work for a family/friend or find a designer that doesn't do what you do and figure out way to partner/work together. If they get a client, partner up to do dev component. You could also find a marketing/seo freelancer and help them setup custom Facebook tabs for their clients.
Once you have your initial client or two, then put up a site and list it at sortfolio and other relevant directories. From there, blog often about topics that you are familiar with, topics that are relevant to the community you are trying to help, and make sure you are relevant. Go to meetups, attend local events, be part of the community, and don't be shy. If you are shy, you are not going to be heard. If you aren't heard, you aren't going to be considered for business opportunities.
I've got a 90m^2 flat next to the beach, a car, a girlfriend who has no income since November, a cute dog :-) and money in the bank. All paid with my less than 40k€/year income. Of course this is not The Valley, this is Barcelona.
I didn't know that living there was so expensive, I'm sorry for you :-(
I'd love to hear about your experience as a tech person getting your MBA.
Also, great idea and website. Oddly enough I just heard a presentation yesterday about MobileIgniter, who amongst several other things, does something similar. They did the TechStars iOS app, which does exactly the same thing - pull blog entries from WordPress. Nice work!
Depending on where you live that can be considered to be in the higher scale as far as pay grades go - and obviously in other places it might be lower or average. You can't only go by what people are paid where you live.
Cool! I will be using such a service several times this year. Honest question - what makes your service more special than the other services out there that claim to do the same thing?
P.S. I do like the one time charge option... I haven't seen many that have that as an ooption.
Here's a few ways that we stand out:
* Our apps can be distributed on the app store like all other native iOS apps. You can even charge for these apps and we won't take a penny.
* We support push notifications. You can send messages to users of an app as long as they have it installed on their phone.
* All content is available offline, even when the phone is in airplane mode.
* Our architechture opens up the possibility of more interesting native features (text-to-speech among other things)
* You can preview your app on your phone and get a really good feel for how it will look and operate once deployed.
* When your app is deployed, you can change its parameters and branding at any time. Changes are updated across your installed base instantly.
Do you include the WP markup in your generated app? Or do you transform the markup into Objective-C code (so no HTML/CSS included in the app)? The latter would be much harder to implement I think.
It's not a container at all. We leverage a plugin that provides a JSON representation of the Wordpress site content.
We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.
Assuming this is one of the standard JSON plugins for wordpress, be cautious of what this may do to the main sites load. The default install can force calls to skip the total-caching plugin most sites use, as it wont use the cache on any request with parameters.
As a mobile web developer, I feel compelled to mention that iPhones make it easy to bookmark a web page and put the page icon right on your home screen. Utilizing HTML5 manifests and local storage, you could also have offline access. Creating an interface as good looking and responsive as a native one is definitely doable as well.
You don't get an app in the appstore, so that's one advantage you have over an HTML5-based approach...but I would much prefer just getting an awesome mobile web app experience when I view a site in my browser, as opposed to being prompted to download the app.
When I'm browsing content, I like to stay in my web browser so I can browse other sites. Switching between a bunch of native apps just to get a decent ui is a poor user experience, IMO.
All in all, the product looks really well done though. I don't mean to be disparaging with this comment. I just wanted to point out that it's totally possible to do everything you mention using mobile web techniques.
What I've described here might be a direction you could take your product. You could offer both native and mobile web approaches, giving the choice to the Wordpress site owner.
If you do want to explore that idea, drop me a note (info in my HN profile). That's a project I'd love to work on.
I'm not sure I see the benefit of converting a website into a pseudo-app, then charging for that app. Users would effectively be paying for the wrapper when the same content is available without charge via a browser. I realize this happens all the time and there are a plethora of site shortcuts-as-apps in the app store, but the fact that they are abundant doesn't make the practice any better.
I'm honestly curious about the use cases for this and what extra value this provides for the user over using the website in a browser.
The site owner wouldn't have to charge for the app (unless I missed something). They just now have a native app for their website. Native app interaction speed and offline use are obvious advantages over using the blog in the mobile browser, so there's definitely value here. And the number of WordPress sites is so huge (over 70 million) that there's undoubtedly a market for this.
Unless the app auto-updates its content to be sure it is always in sync with the website, having native app speed and offline use grows increasingly less desirable the farther out you get from the date the app was created. For Wordpress sites one would expect new content daily. If Appifier pulls content and makes it all available offline that's great, until/unless the site being "appified" has new content. Will the app re-roll itself to incorporate that new content for offline and/or native access? If not then an appified site is useless the moment the app is generated.
I’m not questioning whether there is a market for this. I’m questioning the purpose and value to the user if it’s really nothing more than a snapshot of a dynamic site or just a site shortcut.
I don't disagree with your premise, but I do think there's a fair number of people who push wordpress as a CMS rather than a 'blog' as such. Given that, many WP sites are rather static anyway.
I agree on the 'auto update' aspect, but if you only update your CMS once every 2-4 months, it may not be that big a loss if there's no auto update right now.
I saw a demo of mulberry.toura.com and that was a question that came up - auto-updating. Apparently the iTunes store is a bit iffy about updating the apps if the functionality has changed too much, but if it's just content, it should be OK.
You should check out the site when its back up, obviously the app auto updates when new content is published.
It works because you have to install a plugin in your WP blog, which presumably has WP publish/edit hooks etc which notifies an Appifier service, which then pushes to the apps, making sure all content is up to date and available offline. It's a pretty popular, if not the only, design for content surfacing apps.
It is actually not obvious. Now the site is back up I can't find anything that explains how updates are handled, or how offline works. For all I can tell the plugin might just be to build the app... I hope you are right as that is more useful. Some explanation would be good...
If you put a "Pay me a dollar just because you like my site" feature on your wordpress site you will probably not get many dollars. But since people are already comfortable paying small amounts of money via itunes and the app store it seems like a nice additional revenue channel, and probably leads to more site traffic, especially from the core fans.
As for the extra value to the user, no idea, maybe they can make it easier to submit comments? No ads maybe?
I work for a company that has a revenue stream making apps like this for big brands. The apps themselves are free though and development costs are covered by our client's marketing budget. Most of them are basically the same though, take content from A and reformat it into B.
from my personal history, LLCs are just easy, but provide many of the same protections that a c-corp do but with less hassle. The only problem is growth and # of founders; it is harder to provide stock options and gets complicated during tax season when you have more than a couple founders.
Kudos to you for following your dream, but I do have to say I'm fully against making it easier for people to move that which should stay on the web to native apps. We have web browsers for a reason.
it was strange to me too at first, but we built it in response to the fact that we kept on getting asked about getting onto the "app store" by small business owners who were going digital and building Wordpress sites. Everyone wants an app nowadays - so we're filling a niche.
In the end, browsers are great but mobile safari doesn't yet let you have access to everything you can get in Cocoa. We want to open those features up to anyone with a Wordpress site.
Mike, not the OP but which features are you opening up? This question is not attacking you, i'm just genuinely curious. I'm in the WordPress business (http://thewp.co) and would love to offer this to my clients!
I feel like everyone with content on the Internet wants an app. My old co-founder wasted about 3 months worth of time talking with an Obj-C dev and drawing screens because he was obsessed with having an iPhone app. His proof that we needed it? Every time someone saw our icon on his iPhone (which just launched our site in Safari) they'd ask if we actually had an app. These people wouldn't even use our site in the first place, I'm not sure what made him think they'd use an iPhone app instead, yet he was dead set on getting one into the app store.
i don't think his intention is to move content, but rather just to make that content more easily accessible and visible to mobile users.
the problem with mobile websites is that they have to compete with the app store. if an iphone user wants a train schedule, are they more likely to open up a browser and search google for "train schedule iphone" and scroll around clicking on random sites? or would they just open the app store, search for "train schedule" and easily see all available apps, ranked and reviewed, easily added to their home screen with a single click?
i run such a mobile website for metra trains (http://metra.jcs.org/) but because i have no native app in the ios or android stores, it doesn't see much traffic. i've thought about developing an app that just embeds a browser and goes to the site, just so it can be listed in the app store.
apple does in fact have a listing of mobile web apps at https://www.apple.com/webapps/ but i doubt most iphone owners even know it exists. it's also not very easy to use from mobile devices, strangely enough.
And if every iPhone user understands bookmarks as well as you do, perhaps this service will fail.
But I hear rumors that a lot of App Store apps get lots of downloads, even if they're nothing but links to existing web sites wrapped in an app shell. Many customers don't understand bookmarks.
I think it's genius. WP site owners don't care about channel redundancy, they just want a push button method of putting their content into as many channels as possible. Catering to the "Look Ma, I made a mobile app!" crowd is a big market.
Supply and demand. As long as there is a demand for native apps then it doesn't really matter where we think things "should stay." I think this is a great step toward making Wordpress sites more accessible via mobile devices. Good work!
Genius, I'd invest all my money into this idea. From a marketing perspective:
1. big market (a lot of wordpress sites run by small & medium businesses that would love an easy and cheap app)
2. practically sells itself (costs, ease of use, service)
3. if possible try to roll it out both ways (drupal and android)
Questions:
1. What about more complex and altered WP sites?
2. What will your to-market strategy be? More specifically: target customer
Again, a great idea and a very good feel for what the market needs. Congratulations!
Go Montreal ! :)
Slight issue though - I created an app, says everything went well, downloaded the sandbox, but nothing appears under "My projects". Does it take time to update ? Also, "Push composer" and "Analytics" in my admin panel link to "#". Are these just placeholder links to let users know that the functionality is coming ? Good job on shipping the product !
You need to move this site to a host that can handle the load today. I'm getting timeouts and finally got the home page to load. I can't get any of the other pages to load either.
I never got 10K from Hacker News alone, but on my blog I got 10K from HN combined with Reddit, with the links being submitted at aprox. the same time, for 3 articles I wrote.
My website is static, with no MySQL or PHP to speak of (by means of Jekyll), right now hosted on an AWS micro instance, served by Nginx. Prior to this it was hosted on Heroku's free plan, with offloading of static assets to GAE. For free and it didn't even blink.
Seeing how people are talking about caching, load-balancing, clusters, beefy servers and so on, just makes me think how extremely awful and bloated Wordpress is.
I don't think it's fair to conclude that wordpress is awful and bloated based on it performing worse than your setup. Static files and a cdn and no dynamic script are the ultimate optimization. Wordpress compares unfavourably because anything involving dynamic features would compare unfavourably.
I got about 12k people through to my blog post "Thanks Louis C.K now here's my dad" post the other day, and then about 4,000 of them clicked through to nickdooley.com (which is on the same server).
I had already increased my MaxClients setting to 120 a few weeks previously when I got about the same number through to "Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti code" post but I forgot that with people downloading those mp3 files, the connections would get held open for much longer so I had to put MaxClients up again to 220 and restart apache at one point (which I'm sure kicked a bunch of people off, some of whom would have abandoned trying to load the site at that point).
With MaxClients set at 220 the site was able to serve pages quickly and reliably the rest of the day as well as allowing roughly 5500 people to download my Dad's music files.
I'm running the site on Apache 2.x on a CentOS VM with php 5.2.x. We don't serve static assets with nginx so it's all coming out of the same apache instance so I have 2GB of RAM on that VM (yes I know I really need to get around to sorting that out).
We have a crappy cache in Decal CMS (which we make and which runs all our sites) right now which still serves pages from PHP but does so from cached content.
At some point we're going to move to using Varnish in front of nginx for static assets so that the only requests that get through to apache are to generate the pages after a site publish and requests where a cookie is present (ie. when someone is actually editing their site) but for now we're able to manage with just the shitty hack we've got in place to served cached documents.
Setting your max clients to 220 on that setup is a terrible idea. You will probably cause the machine to start swapping as there is insufficient memory for each PHP process. It will grind to a slow halt. You should calculate your MaxClients based on the amount of load the machine can actually handle, not the amount you wish it could handle :-)
A conservative estimate of 20MB per PHP process would already put the requirements for 220 of them at over 4GB (twice what you have) and that's not allowing anything for the OS and anything else running on the machine. Its not an exact science figuring out the appropriate MaxClients, but you should find out how much the rest of the machine needs, look up the average Apache process size (ps), divide the available memory by that and then reduce it a little. Use this as you starting point for figuring out the MaxClients. Keep an eye on the available free memory for a while (vmstat) and gradually up that limit until you reach a comfortable working level for the setting.
Yeah - what's weird is that it didn't start swapping. I haven't really looked into it, but maybe because so many of the processes were downloading those MP3 files they didn't take up as much memory (although that sounds wrong as I'm pretty sure as far as Apache is concerned, a process is a process regardless of what's being downloaded).
At any rate it worked fine and was maxed at one point so hell knows why. I increased it gradually and was looking at the free memory etc. but it never exhausted it - but ps ax | grep httpd showed circa 200 processes.
I've put it back down to something safer now ;) when I have some spare time I'm going to try and figure out if/why it didn't appear to run out of memory when it looked like it should have.
But then again when I have some spare time I really just want to set up a better hosting environment that doesn't rely so much on apache.
I told Trafton and company about this because I'm working on-site at WPEngine this week and this looked very relevant to their interests. They specifically want to rescue your site (gratis) so that they can use it as an example of "Wordpress hosting is hard to do right. You don't want it to blow up on launch day. We're very experienced with not blowing up on launch day."
i.e. He doesn't want to sell you on WPEngine, he wants to save your bacon and use the bacon-saving to sell other people on WPEngine ;)
Jason Cohen (their CEO) says "We'd handle the migration immediately and give him a year of free hosting to get a case study out of this."
You should add to your marketing more info about how you are good in handling traffic and most importantly why. In a way that will make sense with both tech and non tech types. (Non tech has no idea what aws is or a cdn is for example). I've looked at your site a few times (even right now) and that isn't the thing that stuck in my mind from your marketing. The takeaway for me was "expert at WP" not necessarily "expert handling of traffic and here's why". I'm not saying it's not mentioned. I just think that point has to be driven home better.
We're (literally) working on a website refresh right now, which hits that and other points. Sample factoid: One of the customers was on 20/20 recently and sustained 2,500 requests per second for 15 minutes.
Boring technical details: Varnish caching, automatic load balancing, redundant servers (beefy physical hardware to avoid poor disk performance on virtualized systems), "Death to KeepAlive", etc.
I would add an additional bullet to the home page adapting a key statement from that page where they said "sit back and be happy you're not having to do all this yourself."
Why our engine never stops
-----------------------------
(Hey, why are we so fast, secure and scalable?)
Sit back and be happy that you're not having to do all this yourself
Thanks for the suggestions. We're still in the process of updating things, but we'll make "Compelling for non-technical users who just want things to not break, comprehensive for technical people who want to understand we're not snow-jobbing them." a priority.
I just grep'd the log and saw that in the three hours since I posted the screen grab there were 1610 unique IP's. So obviously many more people were not able to reach the site.
Nice demo video, although I am not sold on the idea people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. But, hey, hat tip for testing the idea in real time :)
Fortunately for OP, it doesn't matter if people want or need to consume blogs natively on their phones. It matters if business owners want to be able to tell people that their business has an iPhone app. And they do.
Congratulations! I am sure its a proud moment after taking the big step in life :).
A nice concept as well (btw, the hackernews effect is slowing down/timing out your site).
On a tangential note (maybe), are you also liking running the startup (a company)? I am sure developing the product would have been an awesome experience, but when it comes to manage and run the company it calls for something else. How are you liking that?
For those having trouble with the site, I ended up looking at Google's cached copy and then finding the walkthrough youtube video that you can watch here: http://www.youtube.com/embed/QkwDDB0I5_g?autoplay=1
That video is really well done. The product looks slick too. I do wonder how much demand there is to read individual blogs on an iOS device? Would an RSS reader meet the demand better?
Good stuff, but I'm a bit confused by what SnapHop is. From the landing page it sounds like you are an agency, but you talk about a platform. What exactly (i.e. not marketing speak) does the platform let me do? Where can I see it in action?
Signup an see! I'll upgrade your account also for free and give you SMS if you blog about us. Yes we need a better video somewhere.
We kind of went the enterprise route as our competitor did (http://44doors.com) where showing less unfortunately pays you more.
For what it's worth "sign-up and see" is an awful response to a potential user being confused about what your service does.
I think you should consider changing your landing page to make it explicit how you can help local businesses. That may mean removing some of the myriad of use cases you describe.
Also as another explanation is that we don't think people need mobile versions of their websites or a mobile app.
We think business need mobile campaigns and that most content should be more campaign centric for business.
A campaign mobile landing page is different than an app in that your trying funnel users into a transaction (signup/buy/opt-in). If your users want an app you already got them.
I haven't been here long enough to know what the decorum is so hopefully somebody else will answer you, but you already did a couple of things I probably wouldn't do myself:
1) Plug your business in the comments section of another post (unless it's somehow related). You will likely not get as many people seeing it and also it's kind of rude considering it diverts attention from the OP.
2) Post 2 unrelated links at once. Again, the feedback you get will not be as focused, lowering the quality of the discussion that is generated.
As far as your sites it seems like you might be offering two interesting services, but the presentation is too cluttered and spammy looking in order for me for to follow through in navigating your sites. The design of both sites evokes associations to those ad-filled parked-domains making me immediately think "I probably don't want this". Simplify would be my suggestion.
1) Whoops. As my wife can tell you I'm often completely oblivious of my rudeness. Do you think I should delete the post? It was an honest question.
2) Yep your right. I blame my multi-tasking (programming while reading hacker news).
Your suggestion is extremely appreciated. The design is somewhat pinterest inspired which seems to attract people like my mom but infuriates programmers.
No no don't delete it. It was a valid question. I'm not an authority on these matters but that's just my opinion.
And yeah, like the other person who relied to you, I initially though Snaphop was some kind of marketing agency and Evocatus was a little too much all at once. Although with the right intro header it could work. Pinterest has this very prominently on the first page "Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love". That's all I need to know to start off with. Your intro header didn't jump out at me like that. Maybe it's the colours or it could also be the actual copy.
203 comments
[ 1.4 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadI know the WP guys are very passionate about their capital P: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/capital_P_dang...
:)
Please share some technical and transition stories. Also is the homepage a little slow, or just me?
1. What was your job.
2. How much did you get paid.
3. How much savings(runway) do you have to support this product.
Thanks!
EDIT: Correcting typos
Sorry, I know you are really interested in sharing your product but many of us want to know what people are willing to give up to chase their dreams.
Thanks again.
I don't have any dependants, but I am married and contribute to the household financially. That hasn't stopped, I just had to take it into account when planning my runway.
I'm 28. At this point it's an experiement, If I can turn this into a business I will, if not, I'll dive back into the salaried way of life. It's a great way to live, but I just had to give my dream a shot.
May I ask how you broke into dev/design consulting? I'll have to go that way too, and soon. But I'm still a bit mystified about where one finds consulting gigs... Places like ODesk/Elancer?
I don't know many people who use odesk who pay more then $20-$25/hour, and it's typically for smaller type stuff. There are people who get "I want a full copy of XYZ for $500" and a number of people who bid on that, but there's "real" projects in there too sometimes. I just have a hard time looking at elance/odesk sites as something that 'real' companies use for 'real' (read: valuable) projects.
I know a few YC founders that pay $70/hr - $80/hr for really great Rails devs, iOS devs, and front-end engineers that are not local to SF/PA (mid-west devs or southeast devs). I think the price for an experienced Rails freelancer in a big metro is around $100/hr - $125/hr.
On the design side, I have friends in DC, SF, and Chicago that are top notch visual designers and have worked on big "brand" sites, and depending on how busy they are, they'll charge anywhere from $75/hr - $80/hr. An art director I know will not go below $150/hr bc it's not worth his time to do more work outside of his day job.
But there are price inefficiencies everywhere, and if someone fresh out of college doesn't really understand how good of a designer they are or the going rates for freelancers, then you can find someone who's good for your MVP for $25/hr.
All of the above assumes you are pricing projects on a straight hourly rate (legalese = "Time & Material Rates").
Be warned that most small business owners will want firm-fixed pricing (ie - "I want a fully redesigned site for $a,000"). In that case, you'll need to figure how long it will take for you to complete the project, add a 10% - 15% buffer for client changes/indecision, and then settle on a firm-price of $x,000.
If dev, then will you be providing back-end dev? Front-end dev? What language/framework? Any CMS preference? Or blogging tool preference?
If design, are you helping out with everything from UX/strategy to branding/visual design, or are you just taking black and white wireframes (UX design) and turning them into fully baked/designed photoshop files?
If marketing/SEO, then what sub services are you offering? Social media management? Blogging/ghost writing? Pay-per-click management? SEO backlinks?
Two things to remember. 1) Most small business owners aren't going to roll the dice if they are your first client unless you can sell like the best of them. 2) Your reputation is your source for new business/referral business, if you are poor in one or multiple areas (let's just say design and marketing) but are an expert in one area (let's just say back-end Rails dev + front-end HTML/CSS/jQuery), then focus on providing services/consulting where you are the strongest.
The quickest way to start is to either to free work/discounted work for a family/friend or find a designer that doesn't do what you do and figure out way to partner/work together. If they get a client, partner up to do dev component. You could also find a marketing/seo freelancer and help them setup custom Facebook tabs for their clients.
Once you have your initial client or two, then put up a site and list it at sortfolio and other relevant directories. From there, blog often about topics that you are familiar with, topics that are relevant to the community you are trying to help, and make sure you are relevant. Go to meetups, attend local events, be part of the community, and don't be shy. If you are shy, you are not going to be heard. If you aren't heard, you aren't going to be considered for business opportunities.
80k will get you 5 roommates and bedroom with a curtain.
In San Francisco 250k to 300k/y is high paid. 100k-150k is making it, 80k would be in the low paid arena.
I didn't know that living there was so expensive, I'm sorry for you :-(
Also, great idea and website. Oddly enough I just heard a presentation yesterday about MobileIgniter, who amongst several other things, does something similar. They did the TechStars iOS app, which does exactly the same thing - pull blog entries from WordPress. Nice work!
If you are living in NYC, nah.
[1] http://www.globalrichlist.com/how.html
P.S. I do like the one time charge option... I haven't seen many that have that as an ooption.
Here's a few ways that we stand out: * Our apps can be distributed on the app store like all other native iOS apps. You can even charge for these apps and we won't take a penny. * We support push notifications. You can send messages to users of an app as long as they have it installed on their phone. * All content is available offline, even when the phone is in airplane mode. * Our architechture opens up the possibility of more interesting native features (text-to-speech among other things) * You can preview your app on your phone and get a really good feel for how it will look and operate once deployed. * When your app is deployed, you can change its parameters and branding at any time. Changes are updated across your installed base instantly.
This looks like a container similar to PhoneGap, but more specialised to some sort of feed from the WP website, perhaps RSS.
Is there really that large a market for this sort of thing?
We consume the JSON to display the Wordpress content within a fully native UI and give access to all the speed, features, and benefits that a fully native app has to offer over web or hybrid apps.
You don't get an app in the appstore, so that's one advantage you have over an HTML5-based approach...but I would much prefer just getting an awesome mobile web app experience when I view a site in my browser, as opposed to being prompted to download the app.
When I'm browsing content, I like to stay in my web browser so I can browse other sites. Switching between a bunch of native apps just to get a decent ui is a poor user experience, IMO.
All in all, the product looks really well done though. I don't mean to be disparaging with this comment. I just wanted to point out that it's totally possible to do everything you mention using mobile web techniques.
What I've described here might be a direction you could take your product. You could offer both native and mobile web approaches, giving the choice to the Wordpress site owner.
If you do want to explore that idea, drop me a note (info in my HN profile). That's a project I'd love to work on.
I'm honestly curious about the use cases for this and what extra value this provides for the user over using the website in a browser.
I’m not questioning whether there is a market for this. I’m questioning the purpose and value to the user if it’s really nothing more than a snapshot of a dynamic site or just a site shortcut.
I agree on the 'auto update' aspect, but if you only update your CMS once every 2-4 months, it may not be that big a loss if there's no auto update right now.
I saw a demo of mulberry.toura.com and that was a question that came up - auto-updating. Apparently the iTunes store is a bit iffy about updating the apps if the functionality has changed too much, but if it's just content, it should be OK.
It works because you have to install a plugin in your WP blog, which presumably has WP publish/edit hooks etc which notifies an Appifier service, which then pushes to the apps, making sure all content is up to date and available offline. It's a pretty popular, if not the only, design for content surfacing apps.
As for the extra value to the user, no idea, maybe they can make it easier to submit comments? No ads maybe?
it was strange to me too at first, but we built it in response to the fact that we kept on getting asked about getting onto the "app store" by small business owners who were going digital and building Wordpress sites. Everyone wants an app nowadays - so we're filling a niche.
In the end, browsers are great but mobile safari doesn't yet let you have access to everything you can get in Cocoa. We want to open those features up to anyone with a Wordpress site.
Mike
Ugh, that makes my stomach turn, but I know it's true. And I don't fault you for capitalizing on it, but man is it irritating.
Every merchant wants an app, but their customers couldn't care less. Not that it affects your business model in any way.
the problem with mobile websites is that they have to compete with the app store. if an iphone user wants a train schedule, are they more likely to open up a browser and search google for "train schedule iphone" and scroll around clicking on random sites? or would they just open the app store, search for "train schedule" and easily see all available apps, ranked and reviewed, easily added to their home screen with a single click?
i run such a mobile website for metra trains (http://metra.jcs.org/) but because i have no native app in the ios or android stores, it doesn't see much traffic. i've thought about developing an app that just embeds a browser and goes to the site, just so it can be listed in the app store.
apple does in fact have a listing of mobile web apps at https://www.apple.com/webapps/ but i doubt most iphone owners even know it exists. it's also not very easy to use from mobile devices, strangely enough.
But I hear rumors that a lot of App Store apps get lots of downloads, even if they're nothing but links to existing web sites wrapped in an app shell. Many customers don't understand bookmarks.
The real question - are these people willing to pay $500 to say "Look ma...."?
1. big market (a lot of wordpress sites run by small & medium businesses that would love an easy and cheap app) 2. practically sells itself (costs, ease of use, service) 3. if possible try to roll it out both ways (drupal and android)
Questions:
1. What about more complex and altered WP sites? 2. What will your to-market strategy be? More specifically: target customer
Again, a great idea and a very good feel for what the market needs. Congratulations!
Back in the day there was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect#Notes_and_refer...
John Sheehan mentioned numbers the other day too - https://twitter.com/#!/johnsheehan/status/156271988195860480
Seems like the "Hacker News 10K" would be an approximate general number or its going to approach that soon.
My website is static, with no MySQL or PHP to speak of (by means of Jekyll), right now hosted on an AWS micro instance, served by Nginx. Prior to this it was hosted on Heroku's free plan, with offloading of static assets to GAE. For free and it didn't even blink.
Seeing how people are talking about caching, load-balancing, clusters, beefy servers and so on, just makes me think how extremely awful and bloated Wordpress is.
I had already increased my MaxClients setting to 120 a few weeks previously when I got about the same number through to "Your templating engine sucks and everything you've ever written is spaghetti code" post but I forgot that with people downloading those mp3 files, the connections would get held open for much longer so I had to put MaxClients up again to 220 and restart apache at one point (which I'm sure kicked a bunch of people off, some of whom would have abandoned trying to load the site at that point).
With MaxClients set at 220 the site was able to serve pages quickly and reliably the rest of the day as well as allowing roughly 5500 people to download my Dad's music files.
I'm running the site on Apache 2.x on a CentOS VM with php 5.2.x. We don't serve static assets with nginx so it's all coming out of the same apache instance so I have 2GB of RAM on that VM (yes I know I really need to get around to sorting that out).
We have a crappy cache in Decal CMS (which we make and which runs all our sites) right now which still serves pages from PHP but does so from cached content.
At some point we're going to move to using Varnish in front of nginx for static assets so that the only requests that get through to apache are to generate the pages after a site publish and requests where a cookie is present (ie. when someone is actually editing their site) but for now we're able to manage with just the shitty hack we've got in place to served cached documents.
A conservative estimate of 20MB per PHP process would already put the requirements for 220 of them at over 4GB (twice what you have) and that's not allowing anything for the OS and anything else running on the machine. Its not an exact science figuring out the appropriate MaxClients, but you should find out how much the rest of the machine needs, look up the average Apache process size (ps), divide the available memory by that and then reduce it a little. Use this as you starting point for figuring out the MaxClients. Keep an eye on the available free memory for a while (vmstat) and gradually up that limit until you reach a comfortable working level for the setting.
At any rate it worked fine and was maxed at one point so hell knows why. I increased it gradually and was looking at the free memory etc. but it never exhausted it - but ps ax | grep httpd showed circa 200 processes.
I've put it back down to something safer now ;) when I have some spare time I'm going to try and figure out if/why it didn't appear to run out of memory when it looked like it should have.
But then again when I have some spare time I really just want to set up a better hosting environment that doesn't rely so much on apache.
http://www.klonix.org/jan2012/appifier.com-20120111-104926a-...
i.e. He doesn't want to sell you on WPEngine, he wants to save your bacon and use the bacon-saving to sell other people on WPEngine ;)
Jason Cohen (their CEO) says "We'd handle the migration immediately and give him a year of free hosting to get a case study out of this."
Boring technical details: Varnish caching, automatic load balancing, redundant servers (beefy physical hardware to avoid poor disk performance on virtualized systems), "Death to KeepAlive", etc.
(Ooh, it is live now: http://wpengine.com/our-infrastructure/ )
I would add an additional bullet to the home page adapting a key statement from that page where they said "sit back and be happy you're not having to do all this yourself."
Why our engine never stops
-----------------------------
(Hey, why are we so fast, secure and scalable?)
Sit back and be happy that you're not having to do all this yourself
Linked to the "our-infrastructure page".
These guys? Can't say it sounds very promising.
A nice concept as well (btw, the hackernews effect is slowing down/timing out your site).
On a tangential note (maybe), are you also liking running the startup (a company)? I am sure developing the product would have been an awesome experience, but when it comes to manage and run the company it calls for something else. How are you liking that?
Here goes my karma. Since we are doing shameless plugs here are my two (and yes I quit very high paying jobs ... 1.5~2 times more than @gozman ...):
http://snaphop.com
http://evocatus.com
- make it obvious you are posting your own material (using phrases like "Show HN" or "I" in the title) and not try to hide that fact
- provide insight into "how" you've done it or how you are doing.
- don't do it more than once.
Follow those and HN will not downvote you to oblivion.
I think you should consider changing your landing page to make it explicit how you can help local businesses. That may mean removing some of the myriad of use cases you describe.
My $0.02, obviously feel free to ignore.
We think business need mobile campaigns and that most content should be more campaign centric for business.
A campaign mobile landing page is different than an app in that your trying funnel users into a transaction (signup/buy/opt-in). If your users want an app you already got them.
1) Plug your business in the comments section of another post (unless it's somehow related). You will likely not get as many people seeing it and also it's kind of rude considering it diverts attention from the OP.
2) Post 2 unrelated links at once. Again, the feedback you get will not be as focused, lowering the quality of the discussion that is generated.
As far as your sites it seems like you might be offering two interesting services, but the presentation is too cluttered and spammy looking in order for me for to follow through in navigating your sites. The design of both sites evokes associations to those ad-filled parked-domains making me immediately think "I probably don't want this". Simplify would be my suggestion.
2) Yep your right. I blame my multi-tasking (programming while reading hacker news).
Your suggestion is extremely appreciated. The design is somewhat pinterest inspired which seems to attract people like my mom but infuriates programmers.
And yeah, like the other person who relied to you, I initially though Snaphop was some kind of marketing agency and Evocatus was a little too much all at once. Although with the right intro header it could work. Pinterest has this very prominently on the first page "Pinterest is an online pinboard. Organize and share things you love". That's all I need to know to start off with. Your intro header didn't jump out at me like that. Maybe it's the colours or it could also be the actual copy.