

 Ask HN: Review my startup, IORAD - create instructions for your app - sunpatel
http://www.iorad.com

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revorad
Wow this is beautiful, guys! I'm definitely using this to create some demos
and tutorials for my startup's product.

So far, the only feedback I can think of is that perhaps you should think of a
better name, just to make it easy to recommend to people. I don't know how to
even say Iorad (I'm guessing it's an anagram of radio).

How much are you charging for this?

~~~
sunpatel
Hey thanks. The name is pronounced i-o-rad....like biorad minus the b:)

Once out of beta, we will do freemium. Maybe charge between $20-$40/month to
download doc, ppt, web version and customize logo.

PDF instruction and hosted course (with iorad logo) will be free

~~~
petervandijck
Here's the problem with that: most people will use this (I assume) only once
or twice, to, say, create instructions for their web app (like commented
above), and would be happy to pay 20/40/60$ for the software, but there's no
reason for them to buy a subscription. Unless you're aiming at an audience
that creates instructions multiple times a month?

~~~
subbu
You obviously haven't heard of e-learning industry. These kind of tools are
used very regularly by e-learning professionals, and instructors. Sometimes
everyday. (How do I know this? I was doing e-learning for a few years.) But
this tool faces a stiff competition from established and more sophisticated
tools like Adobe Captivate, Camtasia, <http://www.sameshow.com/>

~~~
sunpatel
Yes camtasia is a brilliant tool....but we are concentrating on the printable
portion...not screencasts.

Captivate is great for power users but we are looking for domain guys that
want to create robust instructions without copy/pasting screenshots.

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aaronblohowiak
You need to have an indicator that I have reached the end. I clicked on the
right arrow about 10 times =/

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moconnor
This sounds and looks like a great idea, I can imagine using it to show
individual users how to do something in response to a support ticket, and then
having it as an online reference to send to others with the same questions.

One question I had that the site didn't answer: can you only record from
windows computers? Or OS/X and Linux too? It looks a bit like an air
application, so if you can do it on any platform that's worth shouting about
somewhere too.

~~~
moconnor
Having signed up I can see the UI but the Capture button is simply greyed out
with no explanation in Firefox on Linux...

~~~
sunpatel
We have not tested on Linux. If the capture button is greyed out, it means the
applet hasnt loaded. Hopefully in the near future we add linux support.

------
jswinghammer
This is excellent. I've been thinking about making demos like this for my
application lately.

Some comments:

* The textboxes to create a project should clear the text when I click on them or have nothing in them. Having to clear them myself was frustrating.

* The workflow needs to drop you on the next step. After I created my project I wasn't sure why I wasn't already seeing options to get going.

* It wasn't easy to clear out slides from my project. I ended up just deleting it and starting over on every mistake.

* Sharing didn't seem to require a password when I entered one.

* It wasn't really clear how to create the nice demo you made or just make the demo play automatically. The slide concept is interesting but if it just auto-played that might be better.

* I wasn't really sure what the first option I was presented with meant after I clicked edit.

* The screen could probably stand to be taller.

A very nice start and a good recording product. Well done. Keep it up.

~~~
sunpatel
great feedback, much appreciated!

------
misterbwong
Looks like a pretty cool system. One nitpick on the landing page: put some
text or something below the video so that people have something to see while
the video is loading. It's disconcerting arriving at a page and seeing nothing
but the loader and navigation at the top.

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jtheory
This looks very cool; I signed up for an account. It freaked me out a bit to
notice that you're programmatically editing my Java configuration (to disable
DirectDraw).

How serious is the bug that you're working around with that?

I'm glad I was watching the console and noticed that change, because I really
do _not_ want that changed on my system. My own website uses Java applets with
some animation involved, and tweaking my Java config like that means that if
my users have a problem with DirectDraw, I wouldn't be able to reproduce it
(nor would notice it in testing). If I hadn't noticed the log comments I'm not
sure I would have ever figured out that the config file had been secretly
altered by a signed applet.

------
samratjp
For sharing - add YouTube support!

You might as well offer both pricing models - there's nothing wrong with one-
time payee users and subscription users co-existing.There's nothing wrong with
that.

While the free users are using the product, don't show them premium features,
show them that this _dim_ icon can be unlocked with a premium account or
whatever (see RescueTime's mouseovers). Of course you should charge more for
adding their logos. This looks like something _I_ would sell to the university
crowd - trust me, there's plenty of need there from what I've seen!

For marketing, get some hotshot instructor to use your stuff. Hmm, you should
pitch to Michael Hartl to use your product for RailsCasts!

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gabewb
I used to work as a quantitative analyst, and this would've been great for
"Knowledge Transfer." Most of what analysts do (at least at my old employer)
is create and manage reports. Teaching another analyst the various
Excel/Matlab/Python processes that need to be run and what steps need to be
performed is time consuming but really important. The bosses like people to
document their tasks, but that usually involves making a quickly outdated Word
doc w/ screenshots & text.

If I'd been able to record what I was doing as I did it, and add a little
annotation, that would've saved a lot of time and effort.

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petervandijck
UI wording nitpick: "publish" is a much friendlier word than "deploy" :)

Question: is this aimed at desktop apps (it looks like it)? In a world where
everything is moving in the browser, do you think that's a good market?

~~~
sunpatel
it is a browser based app:-)

yes i liked publish as well...but we liked the "ds"...dash, design, develop &
deploy....maybe we will change it based on usage

~~~
christonog
How about "distribute?"

~~~
sunpatel
love that one...thanks

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luxative
Congratulations. I signed up for an account and played around a bit. I can
certainly see myself using this pretty soon. As a couple of people mentioned,
instruction creation is a pretty infrequent activity - so a pay per month
pricing scheme may not work best. VerticalResponse.com comes to mind (not
associated in any way; I don't even use them) - in a market where monthly fees
are the norm, they have a pay as you go plan that's tied to distribution
(numbers). On another minor point: maybe it's me, but the 'appliance' bit had
me expecting a device; I was happy to see there was none.

------
SandB0x
Nice! There's a typo on the first slide though - "Interective Simulation",
should be "Interactive" :)

You should try hard to market this to enterprise users - eg financial software
houses and consultancies who knock out apps in Excel. Here you have a) the
least intuitive software known to man and b) big budgets. This would be a huge
step up from most of the business to business user guides I've seen.

EDIT: After another read, your site seems to be somewhat aimed at this market.
But anyway, best of luck.

~~~
duck
If you are aimed at the enterprise user, I think a less web 2.0 name might be
better. It seems like some companies I have worked with will just pass based
on that (which is a shame, but that is how it is).

------
julian37
Hi, I've tried this on my Mac with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, all recent
versions, and the Capture button worked in neither. In another comment you
mention that you don't have Linux support. Does that mean this is Windows
only? If so, why doesn't your page say so? I must say this was a somewhat
frustrating experience.

This looks neat and I would really love to use it. Is there a timeline for Mac
or Linux support?

~~~
sunpatel
We haven't had a chance to fully test on the mac. But to get the capture
dialog to work, try the following:

Enabling Accessibility API

1\. Open System Preferences dialog

2\. In opened dialog open "Universal Access" settings

3\. In the "Universal Access" settings dialog check the "Enable access for
assistive devices" option

And then restart the browser and iorad.com

Definitely let me know if this helped the issue and if you are experiencing
anything else. You can contact me at spatel iorad.com.

~~~
julian37
I've sent you a mail but it bounced with a connection timeout. Any idea what
might have gone wrong, or got another address?

~~~
sunpatel
Try agin spatel @ iorad.com Or my username at gmail

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shrikant
Very VERY nice! Gave it a spin for one of our internal webapps and it seems
super slick.

Small things I noticed btw:

1\. Susrut Mishra's Twitter link in your About page points to Satyajit
Behera's Twitter page :)

2\. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your ToS don't seem to have been defined yet?
The link on your signup merely toggles the checkbox.

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brianmwang
This is fantastic! I am definitely going to try this out. My employer sells
enterprise software that, in its current iteration, is horrifically complex
from a UX standpoint and we're forced to take a gazillion number of
screenshots for training materials. This seems like it will definitely save
time.

Any plans for screencasting down the line?

~~~
sunpatel
There are plenty of screencasting tools out there ie screentoaster.com that do
an awesome job.

Our differentiator is in the printable user guide and making tutorials
interactive vs watching a mouse move on the screen.

But you are exactly right about the use case, enterprise UX is very complex
with tons of different types of "transactions", and copy/pasting screenshots
is so painful, thats why everybody avoids it like the plague.

~~~
moconnor
"Are u sure u want to delete the selected slide?"

If you're going for the enterprise market u might want to sed s/\ u\ /\ you\
/g that...

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cammil
Looks good.

I would have liked to see some of your selling points and services displayed
to me without having to click on the video/tutorial. That's really a minor
though. I thought it was pretty good.

------
jeffepp
ummm wow! After 17 takes to get my demo 'perfected' I can't sign up for this
fast enough. This is great.

