

Show HN: Backyard.io - We applied to YC (W12) and need some beta users - traviskuhl
https://the.backyard.io/hn

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ismarc
I signed up, understanding you're just looking for beta users, but the process
for requesting a beta invite is kind of misleading. The email is sent
automatically, which is nice, but the contents of the email is a request to
subscribe to a mailing list. When signing up, I wasn't requesting to be added
to a mailing list, just get in line for a beta invite. Not that large of a
deal, but perhaps adjusting the wording would scare off less people (or at
least avoid the moment of confusion and hesitation). Also, it's a bit
disorienting to have an email address to a different domain than the one
you're being subscribed to as the contact in the email. Other than
that...anxiously waiting for an invite, it's something I've been in need of
for a while but have been hesitant to start using 80 bajillion different
online services to do it.

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michaelw
Agreed. Why not post invite codes to responders here on HN?

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phzbOx
To be honest, I hate _everything in one_ solutions for a couple reasons:

    
    
      1. It never works. There's always some problems and since it's all in one package, it's really difficult to remove an item and switch it from something else. (For instance, I know it's far from being the same, but think django and mysql. You can use something else, but anyone who did it will agree with me that it's a lot of problem.)
    
      2. There are *so many* already existing solutions out there that it's hard to believe that you can make *all of them* better. For instance, Dropbox is pretty awesome, Github is awesome, IRC is awesome, Gmail is awesome. Especially for startups, these are all free or *almost* free solutions.
    
      3. It's simply impossible to fit everyone's need with a one big solution for everything. I've been in *big company* where you'd have a microsoft based solution with everything, or others thousand of dollars apps to manage authentification and email and everything, and they all truly sucked. And they sucked not because they were wrongly build, but they couldn't be the *best* for everyone. If you want to make it newbie friendly enough, power user will hate it. If you make it complex enough for power user, newbie will be lost and hate it. I know I'm making it sound trivial, but I hope you guess the point. 
    
      4. Finally, from my experience, it's extremely hard to change the way people already work. Just try to move someone out of gmail for instance. Now, try to move him/her away from *all* software he already use and appreciate. 
    

You say you want to make it easy for startups to be _like the big guys_.
That's one of the things I love about startup.. to _NOT_ be like the big guys
with all their politic craps.

Sorry to be harsh, I just wanted to give my personal opinion as a software
developer. I'm curious to know what others hackers think about it?

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fraserharris
What pain of mine are you solving? "Hosted technology that helps your startup
run" isn't speaking to me.

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koolaidavoider
FYI Chrome is flagging your site because the domain name on your SSL
certificate doesn't match. Also, the site styling is completely off in
Firefox. I don't mean to be completely negative, but fixing those things will
probably help in getting people to sign up!

~~~
traviskuhl
no worries. thanks for the the feedback. i'm not able to reproduce, though.
Chrome and Firebox both shows the SSL as valid and styles seem to be loading
as expected. which versions do you have. -travis

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martian
I have the latest Chrome on Mac and am seeing the SSL Error. Cert information
is here:

<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/122722/backyard_io_certificate.png>

~~~
koolaidavoider
Latest Chrome on Mac for me as well.

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rkalla
Looks really ambitious and look forward to seeing what you do.

A bit of a chicken and an egg problem for me. You want me to put my business
_life_ under your roof but i have no idea if you will be around ina year or
two so i am very hesitent to try it at all right now.

Worst case, i love the service, import everything i own, then funding dries up
in 18 months and now i have a monumental amount of pain on my hands migrating
away.

That is just 2 cents from the peanut gallery. I cant be the only one thinking
this though.

Figured i would share since you guys are looking for feedback.

~~~
traviskuhl
thanks for the feedback. you're not alone with that concern and it's something
we thought a lot about in designing our infrastructure. we approached the
problem in a few ways. 1) building as much of our technology on top of
existing open source software. that way if you choose to move to a new
product, your data is compatible and the transition will be much simpler. 2)
making much of the infrastructure component based, so that you don't need to
use everything all at one. you'll be able to slowly migrate data from existing
services into our infrastructure. 3) your data will always be your own and
exportable for you if you so choose. Backyard came out of our own experience
at different startups. we spent valuable early engineering cycles setting up
infrastructure, much of the time just recreating something that many other
people had already built. so we understand the concerns about entrusting core
pieces of a technology stack to a thrid-party. we plan on working closely with
our users to help adress those concerns.

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tomblomfield
I think I'm probably your target market (startup founder) and I've spent 90
seconds reading your front page, but I'm still not clear on what you actually
do.

What's the one big problem that you solve for me?

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jvandenbroeck
I don't know if it's just me, but I think you might need to rethink your
market/angle. I've worked with a few startups and the last thing on our mind
was "centralized employee authentication" and "infrastructure dashboards".

~~~
jlees
i'd cut it down to a few core services and make those awesome. what do your
users need most?

~~~
traviskuhl
definitely good advice. part of the reason we decided to post today was to try
to get a larger user base and figure out what services they're most interested
in. we plan on keeping our initial beta groups small, so we can work closely
with our users to figure out what services they love, what they don't really
need and what we can add that would improve their experience.

~~~
yakto
I'd recommend "Atlassian suite (Jira, etc.), except simple and un-sucky" as a
positioning statement that would pique my interest.

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inmygarage
Who would you say are your major competitors?

~~~
traviskuhl
i think Github and similar hosted SCM providers are potential competitors.
Atlassian’s line of enterprise products are also similar to our offerings.
Github is definitely the company we fear (and have a crazy amount of respect
and admiration for). At their core though I think Github and Backyard have
different focus’. Github is focused on (and in my opinion succeeding at) being
the best-in-breed Source Control platform, which means things like centralized
authentication, deployment, continuous integration, internal communication,
etc are not (currently) their focus. Backyard’s focus will be providing a
complete integrated infrastructure platform. So while SCM will be an important
component, it wont be the sole focus of our company.

~~~
pbreit
I would try to find a way to complement GitHub, not compete with it.

~~~
traviskuhl
we currently offer only a hosted git & svn option for scm. we definitely plan
to offer integrations with GitHub in the future, because we think their
service is awesome and we understand that a lot of businesses have already
chosen them as their scm provider.

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teyc
I'm sorry, you are a startup. If you shutdown in 12 month's time, if we used
your services for critical functionality like authentication, we'd be up s __t
creek, wouldn't we?

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fizzfur
look intresting, but seconding the "why" posts...

what advantage am i getting for having these all under one roof? how are the
integrations going to help me?

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pallinder
Signed up, looks interesting enough.

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mahcode
Signed up, no problems.

