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Ask HN: Please review my new product Tour My App

23 points by kausikram ↗ HN
The pitch: A big challenge for web app developers is quickly engaging their users. Tour My App allows you to add guided in-application tours and messages to your web apps. You can use it to orient new users, highlight new or advanced features, guide users through specific tasks, show guided demos of your app, and more.

Link: http://tourmyapp.com

14 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 35.0 ms ] thread
Peroni
I like it, a lot.

Some notes:

* The actual site isn't great. The casual style logo and professional looking site appear to be at odds with each other.

* I'm not keen on the price model. It would make more sense (to me at least) to have a limited number of tours as opposed to tour runs. What happens when I reach my tour run limit? Does the functionality disappear? Do I get charged more?

I do like the product though.

siddharta
Thanks for the feedback!

Agreed on the logo, its a stop-gap logo for now. We are in the process of getting it professionally done.

Regards the pricing model, the reason we limit on tour runs is because most SaaS products need a bunch of tours. Maybe one for getting started, another couple for common tasks and so on. Even a tiny app in private beta might need 5-10 tours.

With tour runs, the intention is to segment on traffic: products in private beta or low traffic apps might be on the basic plan. Products that have some more sign ups and some early revenue might fit on the next plan, while higher traffic sites and some steady revenue might fit the third plan.

benhirashima
looks like a good idea. i could use something like this for native mobile apps.
kausikram
we have been thinking about extending the functionality to mobile apps but i guess its still a long way to go. However if you use phonegap, titanium or something similar, tourmyapp might still work for you :)
russtrpkovski
Can it guide users across different pages?
kausikram
yes it does guide user across different pages.
tehwebguy
This could be very useful. Do you have any other templates or themes for the guide itself available to show off?
kausikram
what you see in the page is only one of the 25 predefined templates available. you can additionally customize the template to any color you want :) using our theme editor. Even more advanced customization is available through CSS :)
dchuk
Beautiful idea, something I've wanted to do actually for a long time, I think this can be killer. I want to chat with you guys, I am relaunching my product in a few weeks and can put some decent numbers through your system and would love to utilize the metrics you provide.

me [AT] dchuk.com

dchuk
First thing I've noticed: There's no tour when I first login...kind of a big deal for you guys to throw me into a tour as that is your product.
philipDS
Very cool idea. You might also want to check out ZURB Joyride (http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-p...) for more inspiration. A good looking jQuery tour plugin we are using on our product.
kausikram
Hey thanks for the hattip! Infact we created tourmyapp mainly because we found such plugins to be inadequate. We envisioned a solution that will make it easy for app developers to add the tour without any coding. Encoding the tour steps in the page in which it needs to be displayed, ties the tour to the build deploy cycle. We wanted to create a solution that would make creating tours and editing them easy so that the marketeer can go ahead and do it without having to depend on the developers. This also helps clean the developers off any additional workload and also helps ultimately keep the code base cleaner.