
Ask YC: Feedback on our new service: messagepub.com - luccastera
http://messagepub.com/
======
qeorge
The service sounds interesting, although the pricing is way too high for me
(more on that later). I apologize if I sound harsh in my feedback, I'd be
equally harsh to one of my own projects too. That said:

1) The color you've chosen for "pub" (#FFF191) doesn't contrast with the white
background enough. I find it hard to read. The same problem arises in reverse
on the "Free Trial" badge.

2) "A dead-simple messaging API and web service" doesn't do it for me. I still
have no idea what your product is.

Spell it out for me:

"Get your app talking to Twitter, AIM, and Google Talk in 5 minutes."

3) The goal of the homepage is to tell me what your product is before losing
my attention. The best way to do that is getting me to watch a video. Make
your video the center of attention on the homepage and optimize for getting
people to watch it.

4) I like the bullet points, but just stick with the first set (no animation).
I would also remove the last one, "A cost effective solution!", as it sounds
like you made up a 5th item to round out the list. I would also make the copy
more active.

5) The upgrade IE6 message is inappropriate for a business website, especially
when trying to sell a web service to web developers. You're trying to convince
me that I can trust your library to handle all the nuanced use cases that
would take me weeks to discover. Remember, I'm a developer so I'm looking for
a reason to write my own library - don't give me one.

So if I see "function showUnsupportedBrowserAlert()" in your Javascript it
says 2 things to me:

\- Your site doesn't render correctly in IE6

\- You don't care enough to fix it

That's doesn't give me confidence in your messaging library, which is far more
complex than HTML/CSS.

Also, suppose someone does come to the site with IE6, or a browser incorrectly
identified as IE6. You're effectively turning them away, is that really what
you want to do? What exactly is broken in IE6 and what would it take to fix
it?

6) The video on the homepage doesn't perform well as a sales tool (I'm not
sure if it was meant to).

I'd make a video that starts with you typing a message into an example app and
clicking send. Then your AIM, Twitter, and GTalk alert new messages while your
phone rings to play the message back with surprisingly high fidelity. Then
show me the 2 lines of code it took (but don't show the install process or
have me watch you type out code).

7) Pricing - I'd switch away from using different prices for
Email/GChat/AIM/Twitter. Even if I'm a current customer it makes them too
tempting to replace one by one. If I'm already integrating with your web
service whats so hard about integrating with theirs?

If its feasible I would include a ton of free credits for those services in a
monthly subscription, and make your money charging for SMS and speech-to-text
over the phone. SMS is a traditionally expensive technology, and both it and
phone are much harder to implement than a web service.

I might also change from 1 cent per message to $1 for 100 messages. To me it
sounds cheaper, even though it isn't.

I'd also provide a way for your website to call me with a message I've typed
in to showcase your text-to-speech accuracy.

That's about all I've got. Best of luck with the service!

~~~
luccastera
Great detailed feedback! I really appreciate this. Thanks.

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simonista
Didn't see this mentioned already, but I really don't like the auto-changing
text on the home page. I was in the middle of reading a section when it
disappeared and I couldn't figure out how to get it back except to just wait,
which I did not do.

~~~
luccastera
Thanks. We've added a mini-menu so that you can control which one of the views
you want to see. In addition, once you click on one view, it will stop the
auto-changing all together.

~~~
hollerith
Sorry, but not good enough for this particular hater of "dynamic content". If
a reader wants the content to stay still, he is not going to think to click on
it because clicking usually has the opposite effect: to get something static
to change.

------
staunch
* You're doing things that are (or seem) trivial to do oneself. I'm not convinced this stuff is really hard to do myself, so why would I pay to make it easier? Maybe you can remind me how hard it actually is. There are lots of nasty little problems with these things that memory masks.

* It's not particularly cheap (vs doing it yourself which is effectively free for most delivery methods). Maybe you could compare yourself with other options. Maybe you're better in some ways, so it justifies being more expensive.

* I think a lot of people may only need one or two of the delivery methods. Maybe you can convince me I should be utilizing other delivery mechanisms to reach my users. How would it help me to do so?

~~~
wensing
If this isn't your core business, it's not just about technical difficulty.
It's also about time, maintenance, and ROI on the implementation.

Are you saying that DIY is a clear win in terms of those costs as well?

~~~
mrtron
What I took from his post was that he was pointing out that DIY is an option
for most potential customers of this service. Explaining why this service is a
win in the terms you mention such as time/maintenance/ROI for DIY is necessary
to convince users to purchase.

~~~
wensing
Point taken; I see how our resource contraints make us an easier sale, but
others may be more able to devote development time to this.

------
jwilliams
Hi. This is interesting.

You theoretically could offer snail mail as well - there are services that
translate from email to letters for you.

A left field comment -- Right now, this is a developer-orientated service. You
could market it to consumers - e.g. This is my messagepub address, send your
messages there. Then the consumer as a _receiver_ gets to decide on how
messages get routed to them.

A more difficult play, but it would be interesting to see. The revenue part
might be more difficult, but perhaps there are ways around this.

It would also have the advantage that applications don't need to know and
maintain everything about you (e.g email, phone, cell, twitter, etc, etc).
Even in this model it looks like every app is responsible for maintaining all
the required info.

The consumer could just maintain it in one place... Sort of like a Grand
Central for the Web.

~~~
luccastera
Thanks for the feedback. It's interesting that you mentioned that. We also
have a consumer oriented service called ShareMeme: <http://sharememe.com>

We built messagepub after a lot of ShareMeme users asked us for an API.

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minalecs
although the concept is quite good.. the pricing is a deal killer. At any
scale that is quite expensive.

~~~
tannerburson
I agree. I'm soon to be in the market for exactly this kind of service, and
seeing email and twitter don't come for free, was an immediate turn off. If I
were to use this service (or one like it) I'd be forced to implement email and
twitter myself, and just pass through for text messages.

If it connected with Twitter and Email for free, and SMS, phone and even IM
were pay to play, I'd be a lot more interested.

------
markessien
I think your pricing model is not good at all. It's expensive, there is no
level service, and you are using a 'credit' system instead of simply pricing
in known currencies.

Also, how are you going to contact users on IM services? Don't the users have
to add you as a friend first?

------
cabalamat
It's a nice idea. When I play poker, some people prefer to be contacted by
email and some by text message, so I can see a use for this.

Some suggestions I would make:

1\. drop the charges for sending emails and other forms of communication that
don't cost anything, at least for people who make a small number every month.
This will help build your user base and encourage open-source
applications/libraries around your product

2\. include UK SMS and phone messaging; the service is useless to me without
it

3\. I note you also have sharememe, an "intelligent outbox"; this needs to be
more tightly linked with messagepub. How about an "intelligent inbox" too?

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YuriNiyazov
Can you get responses back by SMS? How does the user differentiate between my
app running on messagepub and someone else's app? Does the user have to enter
extra keywords to direct the SMS to one vs. another app?

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oomkiller
The first time I tried to send a phone message, it rang my phone but never
read anything back. The second time, I noticed the low-quality TTS. If you're
going to charge for this, at least use something good like Cepstral.
Interesting concept though, might save a lot of development time for people.

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decadentcactus
On the point about pricing, I took a sec to figure it out, because I have no
idea what a penny is. Maybe just change it to cent?

~~~
c3o
Yeah, a "penny" is also GBP 0.01 or AUD 0.01 or CAD 0.01 -- I was confused as
well.

------
steveplace
Somehow meshing this in with salesforce or other CRM could be a great value
add.

------
bk
Overall, good idea for a service.

My criticism/questions:

\- Price is way off: $10-100 CPM for simple message delivery? Does it come
with delivery guarantees/retries? In fairness: What's the use case with which
you would justify this pricing?

\- (How) Do you ensure that email sent via your service is not marked as spam?
Reliable mass email delivery is hard these days.

------
ovi256
With a bit of curl hacking I managed to abuse their demo API to send arbitrary
messages.

Just try this : curl -v -d
"channel=email&address=EMAIL_HERE&commit=Submit&message=messagepub%20sucks%20I%20JustHackedTheirDemoAPItoSendArbitraryMessagesUsingCURLlolSpam&authenticity_token=1f52274baf9904dd33b012c1a4c1548afd197438"
-b
_trunk_session=BAh7BzoMY3NyZl9pZCIlM2JmZDg3ZDhlYTZjN2U3MzFkNmMyMWMyNGYxYmQ4YTQiCmZsYXNoSUM6J0FjdGlvbkNvbnRyb2xsZXI6OkZsYXNoOjpGbGFzaEhhc2h7AAY6CkB1c2VkewA%3D
--2e9b47678c68095440f03ce3b7558712b4fba37a <http://messagepub.com/demo/create>

You'll have to grab the cookie and authenticity_token from a preceding GET
request, as the cookie seems to change from time to time. The authenticity
token does not change among successive posts.

Hello spam!

Guys, please fix your security.

~~~
_pius
Wow, that's so l33t!

Though if you really want to brag effectively about finding an exploit here,
you should probably just shoot an e-mail to the developers first and _then_ ,
if you feel the need, mention publicly that you found something.

That way you look more like a white hat and less like a script kiddie or a
troll.

~~~
ovi256
I did send an email afterwards - forgot at first - hey, I'm new at this.

Ok, it was a 5 min exploit, but I still lolled for most of the evening.

------
khangtoh
It's an interesting service but I feel that certain services, for example
Twitter, should be free and here's the reason - hook people in free offerings
and get them to pay for the other services. Market it in a way that if they
don't throw in the paid services to their notification, it just doesn't make
sense.

------
DavidPP
And do you have plan for ppl who would like not only to push information but
also receive information ?

* EDIT : I saw after posting that it was already possible. Maybe you should do a replace for send by send/receive and also, change the image to have two-way arrows. This way, it would be more obvious.

------
sh1mmer
Your sign-up page doesn't mention an email verification step. It took me a
while to figure it out. I finally did figure it out because after I'd tried to
login a couple of time (without a good error message), and tried to register
the second time I was told my email address was in use. Then I used the
password reminder link, which finally lead me to my spam folder.

In my spam folder was not only the password reminder but also the account
verification. Not such a good user experience.

On a side note, the fact that your emails to me go immediately in my spam (on
my @yahoo.com account) doesn't give me confidence in using your email service.

------
comatose_kid
I like the idea. The visual design is really nice - I like the logo, color
scheme, and fonts.

The video is a nice intro for devs. You might consider preceding it with a
less technical 'overview' video that shows your service in action.

------
jakecarpenter
Overall, I like the idea. I won't dwell on the price thing for too long, other
than to say I agree that it is too expensive and that I'd much rather pay a
monthly fee for an appropriate level of service than pay per message.
Something I don't see mentioned a lot (here, and at messagepub.com) is the
escalation feature. It is really cool to be able to call your api once and
know that one way or another my user will get the message. Also, I was pretty
annoyed that signing up resulted in 2 emails in my inbox.

------
cte
Built something very similar and showed it to HN:
<http://news.ycombinator.net/item?id=362906>

Its tough for a startup to attract big players to use their messaging platform
or service because it is difficult to guarantee uptime, reliable service, etc.
Might be perfect for mashups and hackers, but they won't pay.

Cool stuff though; I had a lot of fun playing with it.

------
michaelbuckbee
I'd echo the other comments about pricing. It seems quite expensive given what
you are providing.

For example, I looked up the Google App Engine pricing for sending emails and
it's $0.0001 for each email.

Additionally, it's unclear to me how your system handles things like bad
emails, twitter being down, etc. From a custom standpoint, handling the
messaging exceptions is nearly as important as actually sending the messages.

------
wensing
Thank you for tackling a hairy problem for the rest of us.

------
mrihani
The API looks very simple to use (and I love the logo!) :)

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smokey_the_bear
I was just looking for an easy way to set up my website monitoring to call me
when it's down. This may be it. It does seem a little expensive though, and I
don't like credit systems, they just seem slimey for some reason.

------
seren6ipity
"Ability to send through email, SMS, phone, Twitter, AIM, and Google Chat
(more soon)"

Is this sentence missing "message" after send?

BTW, I love the logo!

------
noodle
very nice. this is actually something i was looking for. i might make use of
this service.

how does pricing scale with volume?

~~~
luccastera
Depending on your volume, we can work out something. Send us an email
info@messagepub.com with estimates of your volume and we'll get in touch with
you.

------
tomjen
To bad the SMS is US only. I have for the longest time been looking for a way
to send SMS from a computer.

~~~
trapper
clickatell.com

We use it and it's awesome. Pricing isn't too bad either.

------
fizx
Seems a little expensive. Cool idea. I'd also like to receive via the same
platform, expecially sms.

------
oconnor0
I get a banner at the top saying I should use a newer browser like IE7 when
I'm using IE7.

~~~
luccastera
Thanks for pointing this out. You should only see the banner on IE6. We'll fix
that.

~~~
moe
Bonus points for blocking IE6. Good luck with your product! Anyone blocking
IE6 has a place in my heart for that reason alone.

~~~
trevelyan
Bonus points?

Stupid move. If it's irrelevant to the business they should take it down. Only
has the potential to turn away customers with no upside.

~~~
moe
Well, the business upside is that they can work on features instead of
debugging a broken browser.

A more esoteric upside would be that a company that speaks out visibly against
IE gives me, a technical minded customer, this warm tingly feeling inside. It
suggests that someone in the company is like-minded with me. Which in turn
suggests that their product and direction might appeal to me, too.

It'd obviously be a different story if this was a product aiming for joe
sixpack and the mass-market. But since messaging APIs are a hard sell in the
joe-sixpack market in first place I can only applaud their move; focus your
resources on the product, not on the latest IE bug.

------
rokhayakebe
Nice application, but I think you should only charge for SMS.

~~~
noodle
or at least scale the clearly cheaper stuff back a bit later on once you have
a solid user base?

~~~
chrismetcalf
I agree. Anything that I can do for free in 5 lines of code or less (email,
Twitter) should be sub-one-cent or less. I'd gladly pay for services like
phone and SMS, although it seems odd to me that SMS is more expensive than a
phone call.

~~~
rokhayakebe
One minute of phone call would probably cost him/her 2.5-3 cents while one SMS
will cost him 5 cents. The cost to send/receive SMS will not go down unless
you buy hundreds of thousands at the same time.

------
jammer99
A nice focused service

------
wensing
Who else does this?

~~~
wastedbrains
it seem to be a little similar to Ping.fm but that is mostly focused on
twitter like services.

------
sarvesh
Nice Idea. How are you going to handle blacklisting (email?). I believe
expanding on the interaction part like replies to say something like surveys
would greatly increase the value.

