

Show HN: Taurus.io - Create a product tour for your web app in 15 minutes - ebzlo
http://taurus.io/

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therealarmen
Cool product! Congrats on launching. I can think of several companies off the
top of my head who should implement this yesterday. But I have to take issue
with the price point. $3 a month? If you're doing it for fun, make it free.
Otherwise, the price should be 10x if not 100x your current rate. Trust me, if
someone is going to go through the effort of setting up your product, they'll
be willing to pay more than $3 a month. At that price point you'd need 1,000
customers just to be ramen profitable!

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks!

The problem with being 10x or 100x the current rate is that we can't actually
justify that cost for the value we provide. When we set the price point, we
basically asked ourselves how much we'd actually pay for the same thing.

~~~
runako
What others have said, plus: I don't trust you to stay in business at $3/mo.
You may deliver an awesome product, but I simply don't believe the economics
will work at all for $3/month. At best, you'll cut corners and your service
will start to suck. This makes me much less likely to put you in the critical
path of my business. So charge more and make everybody happy!

Suggestion: segment on the complexity of the product tour? Maybe by the # of
steps included? Or (better) allow me to add audio/video to my tours and charge
me more for that.

~~~
ebzlo
Great suggestions! # of steps included is something we haven't thought to
implement, will do!

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kposehn
Ok, so a lot of people are commenting you are charging too little and your
general reply was you felt you didn't deliver the value to justify a higher
price.

In that case, I think you need to search for value. What can you do to make a
higher price worthwhile?

Here are my thoughts:

\- Analytics! What are people viewing? Plug it in and tell me what is working
and getting mouse time or clicks (or conversions)

\- Split testing! I'd love to test out two tours to see which converts better.

You could make the current version free, to a certain point of traffic and
make all the new features points of value to charge a better price.

~~~
ebzlo
Split testing sounds like a really neat idea! We'll talk about working that in
later down the line. :)

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eranation
Feature request that will make this much more valuable - relative adjustment,
if you can create a tooltip that will stay near a selector (regardless of
browser resizes) and will be responsive (e.g. size and font will adapt based
on size) then you'll have something worth not 3$ but 30$ a month easily.

I like that you demo the usage of the tool rather than the end result, but for
some people it might be too cumbersome, at least make the demo login automatic

By the way, a solution to both issues - use your own product to tour your own
product.

~~~
ebzlo
This was originally in our plan for beta launch, but we yanked it to get
something out faster. It's definitely in the pipeline. :)

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davidtyleryork
Looks like Kera.io, great project. I'd love to hear how you guys differ btw :)

~~~
ebzlo
This is pretty cool. We're less intensive than this, but we try to make the
whole product tour setup very WYSIWYG. From what I saw, they do a neat job of
delivery the full product-tour-package, but at the cost of engineering effort.

~~~
camwest
Cameron from Kera here. You're right about you guys being wysiwyg and I think
that's awesome. It's super important and I think you're on to something!

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Jarshwah
Looks really great, congratulations.

A few things I picked up on though:

1\. Couldn't toggle Absolute/Relative after I had placed a tooltip.

2\. If you position your tooltip then click the "Display Next Button", the
arrow moves, but the positioning stays the same (with a side arrow). Just a UI
bug.

3\. Instructions on the syntax to use for javascript event field.

4\. Binding to an element would be nice.

5\. Having the "Next" button move on to the next tooltip, hiding the old, and
displaying the next. I think I'd like to use that flow rather than seeing all
the tips at once.

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks! We'll look into those issues; additionally, we'll be adding a bind to
element feature in the future.

------
knes
what's the different with using Bootstrap tour (
<https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap-tour> ) or Joyride (
[http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-
tour-p...](http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-plugin)
) for example?

~~~
ebzlo
When we worked on a previous project, bootstrap was something we based our
product tour off. Joyride, similarly, accomplishes the same deal with a little
more fluff. However, there were a few things that were tedious.

\- Keeping track of who has seen what tooltip, when they should show up,
backend type stuff.

\- When things moved around, layouts modified slightly, they were a pain to
update. Granted it wasn't always the case, but it was enough that we decided
we ought to build a front end to handle it. And thus, Taurus was born.

We realized that while engineering the product tour isn't hard, it takes time
to make and maintain, and that we could help solve that.

~~~
knes
Thanks for the reply. You should put that on your website because from what I
saw it wasn't really clear that there's a backend to manage my tours and to
see some metrics.

~~~
ebzlo
No problem! Will do. :)

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vineet
Looks cool. I think I would find it more useful if I could see a demo (not of
the authoring, but of the result).

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks! If you create some tooltips on the page and refresh the page, you kind
of get a feel of what it would be like for a visitor (though "Hide" won't
permanently hide the tooltips in that state).

~~~
hsuresh
This is not evident from your demo. Can you include the tooltips to show up by
default in your demo page? I am guessing most people would first want to see
how the tooltips come up, before they get interested in editing/authoring
them.

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gokhan
I signed up to be notified. But... Please include a quick summary of the app
in the notification mail to make us remember what it was, when the time comes.

~~~
ebzlo
Will do. :)

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nedwin
Beautiful site. Have seen a few of these on HN but your implementation looks
the best so far. We need this - looking forward to launch.

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks for the kind words. :)

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rchiba
This would certainly be useful for a lot of the other Show HN's. Can't wait to
see this in production.

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jordanthoms
Keen to get this setup, we need a product tour but didn't have a good way of
building it quickly.

~~~
ebzlo
Send me an email, I'll be sure something comes your way when we launch.

ebzlo@ebzlo.com

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donebizkit
It's not working for me. It just says [object Object] Firefox 16.0.1 on MAC OS
X

~~~
ebzlo
Ah shoot. Haven't heavily tested outside of Chrome. I'll check it out, thanks!

Edit: Fixed the issue. Looks like just a small problem with the bookmarklet.
Pushing it up now. :)

~~~
donebizkit
I see the admin panel now. I'll keep playing with it.

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CT100
I think the product is pretty cool. I also really like the design of the site.

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks!

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TheMakeA
This looks pretty sweet. Good job.

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Kmanicka
Neat tool.

~~~
ebzlo
Thanks!

