

Tell HN: Meet Cloudomatic, an easy way to discover SaaS apps. (StartupWeekend) - jasonlbaptiste
http://cloudomatic.com/

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sachinag
This is beautiful and navigable. Well done. A few product suggestions:

* Accounting is really important; Meetings less so. Think about your main headers. * Make it clearer what the order is you're listing the apps: alphabetical, by rating, newest, etc. and let users toggle between them * Have curated lists of apps for various startups and small businesses: freelancers, web apps, consulting firms, bakeries, dentists, etc. * Have "you might also like" or "consider these" apps on any particular app's page

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jasonlbaptiste
Myself, Andres(cofounder grooveshark), and many others made it as part of
startup weekend here in Miami, so its a very very rough first version. The
startups listed are there due to the generosity of everyone on HN yesterday,
so thank you thank you thank you. We're planning some pretty cool things to
make discovery better for end users and most importantly solve a big problem I
used to have: improve customer acquisition for SaaS startups. Looking forward
to feedback, which we'll implement over the next week.

ps- another thank you to the people that have been pushing me to get off my
ass and do this since I brought it up here on HN last August.

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kirse
Interesting how a similar service just announced their launch a day earlier on
HN also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207187>

Looks like we have ourselves a nice little competition!

~~~
petercooper
<http://www.kingapi.com/> for anyone who wants to go direct.

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kneath
I'm curious, how does this differentiate from the armies of spam directory
sites that already exist to game search engines?

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ochiba
I guess we have to look at the vision for this project:

<http://jasonlbaptiste.com/misc/my-next-startup/> (see #6)

which is to become the defacto platform for SaaS application marketing and
distribution, including a billing system (partnering with a company in this
space like Braintree or Aria Systems might work well?) and [I'm guessing]
sharing data, single sign-on across applications (NEC ApplicationsNet does
some of this: <http://www.applicationsnet.com/>)

Congratulations on pursuing this idea, Jason. I've been watching this space
eagerly since your excellent discussion and subsequent post on "disruption and
my next startup"

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stretchwithme
Cloudomatic looks great.

startup weekend with multiple teams seems so much better and more productive
than the original version, which was simply chaos the first time in sf. there
were literally dozens of developers all going their own way and one thing
produced was absolute crap implementation of a crap idea

Turns out the democratic process fails when creating useful applications.

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puns
Looks good. One problem: it was very difficult to actually find a link to each
app's website. The little "Go to app" doesn't even look like a link. I suggest
making the site link much more prominent, underlined, and perhaps use the URL
of the site to make it even easier to see.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
I agree. We were playing with different styles earlier. It's in the to-do list
on basecamp, but I'm not sure where it is on the queue (ie- next hour or next
day).

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swombat
Wait, BitBucket is on there but Github isn't?

.......

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
thou ask and thou shall receive:
<http://cloudomatic.com/collaboration/github/>

(stupid oversight on my part. there's a LOT more for us to add. we tried
focusing on the obscure over the obvious fan favorites for day 0)

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officemedium
SUBMISSIONS DON'T WORK: =======

This webpage has a redirect loop.

The webpage at
[http://socialatomgroup.wufoo.com/embed/m7x3k1/def/embedKey=m...](http://socialatomgroup.wufoo.com/embed/m7x3k1/def/embedKey=m7x3k1690705&secure=false/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/index.php/?type=form#public)
has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or
allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a
server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
hmm, works for me. when does it redirect upon load OR upon clicking submit?
browser details?

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torrenegra
Congratulations. Very impressive work keeping in mind it was developed over
just one weekend. How did you populate the site in such a short time?

How are you planning on getting business owners or managers to use your site?
I am a business owner myself, and I don't see why I would like to go to your
site other than to read reviews of the applications.

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antony31
Your site is vulnerable to XSS attacks.

[http://cloudomatic.com/?s=<script>alert(1);</scr...](http://cloudomatic.com/?s=<script>alert\(1\);</script>);

(Tested on Firefox 3.6)

Please fix it.

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oneplusone
The categories right now is very limited. You should add the option for people
to enter a new category when they submit their app.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Trying to figure out the balance between categories and tags. If you get too
many categories then they themselves become sparse. Any specific example? I
agree with you as a whole, we do need to add some more categories. WE might
change the submit from a dropdown to a just plain text field. We can
categorize there after.

~~~
oneplusone
I added my startup Guestlist (<http://www.guestlistapp.com>) which is event
registration. I added it to meeting, but that is really not what it is at all.

I guess my point is that categories are a bad idea. You put MailChimp in
sales, but it should be in marketing. Then again, what is the difference
between marketing and sales? Productivity is really a subcategory of all the
others. You could have a productivity app that focuses entirely on client
management, but then that would be called a CRM.

Don't really have a solution, just found it confusing as it currently is.

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lambdom
Suggestion: I would make the "Go to app" link bigger because it took me some
time to find a way to access the app I wanted.

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ACorp
Great work Andres and the team. Did you built all of the webapp during one
weekend?

~~~
andreshb
Thanks Alejandro, we built it over the span of 54 hours

