

How I took my web-app to market in 3 days thanks to common services in the cloud - Tawheed
http://www.tawheedkader.com/p=210

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bphogan
A lot of the comments here are kudos to the dev for his app - which is
awesome. But what people are missing is how powerful services like Heroku can
be for devs. I have students that I mentor building projects with Heroku and
Rails, and it's amazing to see what they can do. Yes, prices go up when you
need to scale out, but getting an idea out in front of people and seeing if
people will _use_ the product is so important. Spending weeks implementing a
difficult payment gateway and setting up a scalable infrustructure only to
find out that nobody cares about what you built is so costly compared to
banging something out in a weekend.

In 3 days you can prove it. I built <http://rendera.heroku.com> in 1 day and
launched it. People liked it enough to convince me to add all sorts of fun
things to it. It still runs on the free plan, but if nobody liked it, I could
have found that out and moved on to something else.

To the OP, nice job!

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CamperBob
That's pretty darned neat.

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jamesshamenski
I really like it but outlook has templates and Gmail has canned responses.
Email tracking is nice but it's commonly used by your customers and it's a
flawed metric as images are not always displayed (and counted).

It's a nice piece of work. Please update us after a month with how it's going.

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Tawheed
The beauty of this is a) I get what I need for my primary business because
Outlook and Gmail wasn't good enough and b) even if NO ONE else likes this,
I've only lost 3 days, which I'm OK with.

I'll do a reflection on this in about a month or so.

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10ren
Inspiring! A question: How much did it cost (in dollars, not sweat) to get
these services started, and how much is it monthly?

I'm surely off-base, but I _feel_ like it "should" all be free for something
getting started (ie with very little traffic), because it would be a great way
for all these services to get many initial users, some of which will become
paying.

 _EDIT_ answers:

Heroku: free for dev, $15/month for production (it seems?)
<http://heroku.com/pricing#blossom-1-0>

Sendgrid: free for 200 emails/day <http://sendgrid.com/pricing.html>

Charify: free for 50 customers <http://chargify.com/pricing-and-signup/>

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hasanove
Quick feedback - it was quite hard to spot a price without registering. I
usually go to "sign up" page to see all of the packages, yet in this case the
only place to find a price is to scroll down the front page and find it buried
there after a few screens of text.

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peregrine
Nice copy on your site. It appears you are a good marketer :).

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Tawheed
Thanks, but I actually consider myself to be a TERRIBLE marketer. However,
I've been doing a lot of reading and learning around this and even tried to
distill what I've learned into principles around effective landing pages:
[http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/03/9-principles-behind-
an-e...](http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/03/9-principles-behind-an-effective-
landing-page/)

Your positive feedback is encouraging, thanks!

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xox
Maybe with a longer development time you could have built something that would
incur lower overhead over the long term. Heroku and Chargify become quite
expensive if your business grows to any significant degree. Instead, building
directly on top of the Paypal API and deploying to a hosting provider that
will not bankrupt you as you scale would be a more optimal approach -- you
won't get your site up in 3 days but with higher margins you will likely have
fewer regrets down the road.

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Retric
You can always reduce overhead after you gain some traction.

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listic
The principle is good. But is it really painless to change payment API and
hosting platform?

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aaronblohowiak
That is a "good pain to have" as it were, and the reduced friction gets you
iterating more quickly.

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MicahWedemeyer
I call those "Maserati Problems", as in, "I'll think about how to deal with
that as I drive around in my Maserati."

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zackattack
Eric Ries calls it Technical Debt

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aaronblohowiak
Technical Debt is different. Technical Debt slows future velocity for feature
development / changing to fit customer needs. That you are "leaving money on
the table" with these choices does not impede feature progress at all.

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zackattack
Thanks. Can you please elaborate with an example? :)

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patio11
Here's an example for you:

I use Slicehost, which is rather more costly than similar VPS options such as
Linode. This costs me something on the order of $2,000 a year -- but it works,
almost flawlessly. With sufficient time available, I could theoretically
migrate to Linode (or EC2 or wherever) and shave off ~40% of that bill, but I
don't _have_ to. There will never be a day where I say "Aww effity I wanted to
develop features or do marketing today but I can't because if I don't get off
Slicehost right the heck now I will suffer angst-inducing downtime."

Technical debt, on the other hand, looks something like this: the printing
code in the Java version of my software is an offense against God, and I
_cannot_ incorporate new features into it without a complete rewrite. No
kidding -- I want to be able to put a title on those bingo cards, but it
architecturally just will not support that. It is a mess of kludges and a
class hierarchy descending from FailFactoryServiceLocator, held together by
duct tape and prayers. The fact that it functions at all is a miracle.

That is technical debt: I would _like_ to incorporate new features my
customers want into that version of the program, but I just _can't_ until I
rip its rotten heart out and start over. That is, in fact, so much technical
debt that I'm probably just going to End Of Life the sucker and concentrate on
the web version and my new projects rather than deal with it.

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ccc3
Nice work!

Since you're already letting people login with google, it might make it easier
for people to pay if you accepted payment via google checkout.

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Tawheed
Sorry about that guys, I was trying to write a little script to auto-post and
it had a bug.

Correct link: [http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-
chargi...](http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-chargify-and-
sendgrid-to-take-my-web-app-to-market-in-3-days/)

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boundlessdreamz
Maybe you can you put in a redirect using mod_rewrite

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Tawheed
done!

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Timmee
After reading the blog post, I decided to hook up my little web app that I
have been working on to use SendGrid. Although I had some trouble configuring
it to work with Godaddy's Shared Hosting, I quickly took advantage of their
email api. This is a pretty neat service and having 200 emails/day for me to
use is great for testing.

Thanks for the insights and highlighting this service :)

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henryw
nicely done! this post inspires me to take action and create some of the ideas
i had, seeing that they can be done so quickly.

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Judson
For some reason, the link is here: [http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-
used-heroku-chargi...](http://www.tawheedkader.com/2010/04/how-i-used-heroku-
chargify-and-sendgrid-to-take-my-web-app-to-market-in-3-days/)

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aw3c2
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

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hello_moto
Not trying to be a jerk but your logo is quite similar to Socialwok.com

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Tawheed
dude... my "logo" is two pieces of text because I was too lazy to create a
real logo

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natrius
He's talking about the BrainTrust.io logo in the sidebar. They do look quite
similar, though it's not relevant to this thread at all.

