
Show HN: AppFaqs.co - msencenb
https://appfaqs.co
======
jakobegger
I don't get the value proposition. Why would I use this instead of just using
a web view that shows a page from my website?

The only reason for using a service like that is for quick low budget iPhone
apps, where I want to give clients an easy way to update the FAQ. But your
landing page doesn't show what the admin interface looks like.

Also, I believe that monthly pricing won't fly for your audience. This is only
interesting for low budget projects, and you usually don't have an ongoing
budget to pay for stuff like this. You'll have to make it a pay-up-front
solution.

I think this would work better as a component on one of those component
marketplaces, and with instructions how to host the FAQ on your own server.

~~~
msencenb
Thanks for the tough feedback, I'll definitely mull it over. One of the
reasons I made this was because I have multiple iOS apps in the App Store that
are really just fun apps that I don't have time to support. Since they don't
have websites or server side components, something dead simple like this makes
a lot of sense.

~~~
samfpetersen
I think the "Developer" tier has the most promise as a selling point. For apps
you just want to get out there, I think some developers would be willing to
pay 4.99 to quickly slap on a FAQ section. The reasoning might be "I'll do
this for now, and implement my own solution later". Being able to update the
FAQ instantly would be very important at first and is definitely worth 5
bucks. Very cool stuff!

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1arity
Design feedback :

1) Great name.

2) Font, image quality look good.

3) Looks okay on mobile. iOS Chrome the hamburger overlay font color is too
faint, background bleeds through the overlay too much and distracts and
obscures readability.

4) YOU NEED to have a FAQ menu in the top bar there. C'mon.

Cost benefit thoughts :

1) When I saw 499 I immediately thought the following :

A) Typical "enterprise" price point.

B) A single free instance on GCE/GAE can do 2 million static views a month.
Why would I pay 15 USD a day to do that ?

2) Contrary to the detractors, "of course" this is worth the benefit, so long
as you make the cost low enough. How low is low enough -- well, if you say pay
2c per view ( 499 ), sure I get that it makes sense from the model of :

\-- Customer acquisition < 10 USD

\-- Custom support, on ramp costs, < 10 USD

\-- 2c per view to cut onboarding costs, FTW!

However, for developers, your main audience, 2c per view doesn't work from the
following model:

\-- 5 million views per month ( say 2 paid GAE instances )

\-- 10 GB outgoing traffic

\-- 730 GB memcache

\-- 2 GB doc storage

Total GCE Calculated Estimate : ~ 60 USD a month.

Estimates at :
[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=341a6f6c-8a...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=341a6f6c-8a16-41a5-a8e5-521f99e39468)

Why would I pay you 8x that ?

Developers think like this.

Finally if you feel the work load for you of serving 2M views per month is
going to justify 500 / month per customer, it works to have a more efficiently
scalable workflow, or a lower personal burn, or higher growth ambitions, or
all three!

~~~
msencenb
Thank you for the extremely detailed feedback, much appreciated. I'll admit
that I haven't really thought about the 'enterprise' portion of the offering,
instead featuring on the small time developer. This is a great breakdown of
what might happen in an enterprise developer's head, I'll need to mull this
over as well.

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wise_young_man
This is a great project Matt. We're working on similar things at UserDeck [1]
and I think mobile support is going to be huge. I think you're getting a lot
of feedback that may be a demotivating as HN has a lot of developers, but not
many business minded people which is what I've found is who you sell and the
developers implement it based on the needs of the business.

For example on the build vs hosted service there are many things a developer
would not want to build such as WYSIWYG, analytics (figure out what is
working, what isn't), ratings (up/down), easy changes (no app store
deployment), translation across devices (iOS/android), ticketing (contact form
for help). When I had initially thought of similar ideas, Zendesk hadn't moved
an inch, but here lately they started getting into mobile support [2] so if
anything I find it validation to the market that will just continue to grow.
There simply is no reason every developer should build all of that out
reinventing the wheel when there can be a service to provide that
functionality and focus development resources in other areas.

If you want to chat more, my email is in my profile.

[1]: [http://userdeck.com](http://userdeck.com)

[2]:
[https://developer.zendesk.com/embeddables](https://developer.zendesk.com/embeddables)

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msencenb
Side project I've been working on for a while. Would love feedback from a
design stand point (landing page) and a 'do you see enough benefit to use
this' perspective.

~~~
joelrunyon
I found FAQs are typically a symptom of a poor design or UX layout.

Do you find a lot of people are going through and trying to read FAQs in app?

(looks good, just curious about how many end-users would use it).

~~~
msencenb
I tend to agree for most questions, but feature requests and longer
explanations are still useful IMO.

For example, I have an app that allows you to send postcards from your iPhone
in which I get several emails a month asking if things can be shipped
internationally. It's fairly explicit in the UI since it's for US style
addresses, but I also plan on adding international shipping soon.

I have another app that lets you lookup the name associated with a phone
number. I get 5ish emails a month asking what 'No results' means. The FAQ is
helpful in explaining why this might be the case (skype numbers, burners, etc)
that is hard to do in a constrained UI.

Just some examples of how I use the side project myself. Easier to try to
answer the questions up front, while I keep refining the UX, than put in an
hour a month on support.

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squiggy22
Think you may need to add a bit more about the technology involved..how easy
to integrate, that sort of thing. Is this a component for iOS, or..?

~~~
msencenb
Good point!

At the moment it's iOS only
([https://github.com/msencenb/AppFaqsiOS](https://github.com/msencenb/AppFaqsiOS))
with Android support in the works.

