

Notifo (YC W10) Is A Simple Mobile Notifications Platform For Anything - jazzychad
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/18/notifo/

======
jackowayed
This looks really awesome. I like push notifications as an idea, but I'm not
wild about Apple's implementation, especially since there's nowhere you can go
to get a list of notifications you've gotten, so if you get one, then you get
another before seeing the first one, it's just gone. (A few of Apple's
decisions, like not putting a simple "Notifications" listing app, baffle me.)

One thing about the app/site: the workflow for getting started sucks. I have
to go to your website, make an account, and then go to the app to put that
info in. To add to the effect, the only signup link on the homepage is all the
way at the bottom, and creating my account doesn't automatically log me in.

Plenty of apps give you the option to register an account right in the app,
and yours should be one of them. Make the start as frictionless as possible.

~~~
jazzychad
Yes, agreed. The next version of the app will have registration possible in
the app. Having the unpredictability of the app approval process meant I had
to basically submit a minimum viable client as soon as I could to make sure it
was in the app store at launch. This is super high priority.

~~~
jackowayed
Alright, that's reasonable. Yet another reason I might get a Nexus One soon
(especially if I no longer have to worry about being push-less!).

How will the other mobile apps work? Will they just always be running and
frequently checking for notifications? Can you do some sort of long-polling
over cell networks that sometimes lose service? How will you make sure you
don't kill people's battery life?

~~~
ryanhuff
Are you a mobile app company or an internet messaging company?

------
icco
I am curious about the answer to Jeff Lindsay's comment. Why do we need
another app in this space when there is a powerful free open-source framework
for doing this (<http://notify.io>)?

~~~
patio11
Notifo has a shipping product which does notifications on a phone. notify.io
has describes telephone clients as something which may possible be available
eventually.

Existing is a fairly useful feature.

~~~
abi
I started notify.io with Jeff and you're misunderstanding what notify.io is.
We have clients not just for the iPhone, but also for the Mac, Windows, Ubuntu
and Android. You should check it out before describing it as "telephone
clients".

~~~
patio11
Here's how I came to my apparently mistaken impression that you do not have
shipping clients for phones and thus bear no resemblance to this product:

1) I went to notify.io and looked for a list of supported platforms, and saw
prominent notices that your problem is described as "Get desktop notifications
from web applications" and that the quickstart suggestions presume use of a
Mac client.

2) I looked at _every_ top-level navigation element for a list of supported
platforms, and failed to find it.

3) I dug around a bit for the development blog via Google, and found a roadmap
post from January, which included: "Outlets repesent the other major feature
of Notify.io. They’re ways you can get a notification. ... Currently supported
Outlets besides Desktop Notifier are Email, Jabber IM, and Webhooks. Outlets
to _look forward to_ are SMS, Twitter, IRC, and _perhaps telephone._ "

Now, as one OSS developer to another, let me say this as gently as I possibly
can: if you want people to think of you when someone says "mobile
notifications", you should probably note somewhere fairly conspicuous that you
actually support mobile notifications.

~~~
progrium
I agree with all these points. Some of them are out of practicality since it's
not fulltime.

Btw, telephone means actually calling you via telephony, not mobile. However,
an iPhone client is planned.

Obviously marketing something like this is hard. Notifo starts with a niche so
it's easy. We did too: desktop notifications. But hey hey, we also do a lot
more.

Anyway, we are a lot more badass, address some problems Notifo doesn't, but we
just don't have a mobile client yet. Womp womp. We'll see who can be the
better platform though...

~~~
indiejade
You're exactly right: marketing something like this is hard. But writing the
code is harder. Making it open source was risky, but brave. Oh, the perpetual
downfall of open platforms.

You're handling this extremely well, btw. I've had my work ripped off before,
and it is beyond upsetting.

------
pg
When I was integrating this into HN last night I was thinking: practically
every web app is going to want this.

~~~
patio11
A permission marketing channel in the pocket of your users? Yes, please. It is
like lifecycle emails on steroids without the spammed-to-death problem. (Well,
not yet anyhow.)

This solves a real, pressing need for many sites: maintaining user engagement
after they're off your website. The number of people who register and never
come back is depressing -- many of them might be enticed to come back, if you
only had a way of getting in touch. That is pure profit for the company, since
you've already spent whatever form of resources it took to acquire them as a
signup in the first place.

~~~
jacquesm
> The number of people who register and never come back is depressing

I think that says something about the content as well as about the user.

> many of them might be enticed to come back, if you only had a way of getting
> in touch.

Or you might push them away even further.

I try to keep notifications down to an absolute minimum on my sites, and to
give people genuine reasons to come back in the future.

My feeling is that you need to get a user to invest a bit of time in to your
site on the first visit, that's the best predictor they'll be back, especially
if you leave them 'wanting more'.

~~~
patio11
_you might push them away_ -> This is a testable claim about empirical
reality.

 _My feeling is that you need to get a user to invest a bit of time_ -> This
is also a testable claim about empirical reality. I actually come down totally
differently on this one: I think getting a user to "success" quickly trumps
all other considerations for retention, even if getting them to "success"
quickly causes their first use of your service to be much shorter on average
than it would otherwise have been.

But, hey, what is the point about making testable claims about empirical
reality if you don't actually _test_ the suckers. So I'm going to dig into my
data this weekend and figure out which one of us is right, at least for my
app/users, and blog about it. Please mock me mercilessly if I don't have this
done by Sunday.

~~~
jacquesm
> Please mock me mercilessly if I don't have this done by Sunday.

It might not be so quick a thing to test, so no mockery from me.

It took me years to figure out how to increase retention on my sites, little
by little tuning it so that the 'pipeline' from users just visiting to users
signing up did not get disturbed.

So, yes, they're all testable claims. For me tuning this worked well, it was -
at some point - the difference between $5,000 / month and $ 50,000 / month so
the pay-off of the time invested can be immense.

I'm conservative by nature though, and it took me a long time to clue in to
a/b testing (this was back in 2000 or so), which didn't help at all.

Best of luck with that, I'm curious about the results.

Btw, I agree that getting your users to go from 0 to the breaking point
quickly can make you some money, but on the other hand there is no such thing
as a 'bad' user, and if you can somehow engage them to generate some buzz for
you that's a pay-off as well.

It may not be such a simple relationship between the two, the sales curve
might lag quite a bit behind the 'buzz' curve. It's about 'mind share', and
that's one of the hardest to quantify variables.

------
mgrouchy
Alternatively, not quite the same thing at all, but a local startup here in
Ottawa has a service and Restful API for Sending Push Notifications. Its
called AppNotify ( <http://appnotify.com/> ).

~~~
davidu
It's similar. And most have never heard of it. Perhaps some value of being YC
vs. not-YC. TC coverage and all.

~~~
khangtoh
Not that similar, I think appnotify falls under the class of APSN
infrastructure service provider which brings to mind, UrbanAirship -
<http://urbanairship.com/> iLime - <https://www.ilime.com/>

------
brezina
Guys, this is an awesome service. I can see a lot of other startups building
on this platform.

Did you guys build push.ly yourselves? If so, the smart thing here is building
and marketing a great free little demo app is a great way to get your platform
out in front of potential platform customers. Also, it will provide access to
some end users, so you can see for yourself what other capabilities the end
users are craving. smart stuff.

~~~
jazzychad
yes, built push.ly myself and also the march madness alerts and stock alerts
bulit into the notifo site. i was thinking it would be nice to have
promotional services to get users straight out of the gate.

------
vadbabab
Check your HN account page, there's a new notifo field.

~~~
pg
Explained here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1203104>

------
tlrobinson
What's stopping someone malicious from entering my username in a random
account on a random site? I see I can block it, but what if I actually want to
use the site with my real account?

Seems like you should use a random token, or something slightly more secure.

Alternatively, make it even easier for users by using the email address they
used to sign up for the service, like Gravatar for notifications. The user
usually has to verify the email address anyway.

 _edit: ah, I see that it asks for confirmation_

------
chime
Very clever. I don't get text msgs and would love to use a web-monitoring
service use this to notify me if a server goes down.

~~~
jazzychad
I would love for CloudKick to integrate with Notifo :)

~~~
troyk
+1 for new relic as well!

------
Qz
Is there already something for generalized push to regular computers as
opposed to phones? Forgive my ignorance.

------
notmyname
just set up an account on the website, then downloaded the iphone app. It
doesn't seem to integrate too well with 1Password. I generated a password for
the website, but the phone app wouldn't accept it until I made it simpler. The
website and phone app should have the same password requirements.

------
jasonkester
So what does it actually do? The techcrunch article used the term "push" a
half dozen times, but never defined it. The screenshots made it look like it's
just a twitter client.

Anybody care to explain why I would want to use this?

~~~
paul9290
If you use Boxcar ... that is an iPhone push notification app that when you
receive an email or a comment left on your Facebook a pop up notification
appears similar to what you see when you get a text message. This app allows
for any 3rd party(publisher) to integrate this into their service so users can
choose to get pop up notifications on their device from their favorite
services(updates, news, discounts, etc).

Nice!!!

------
s3graham
Aha, I tried to do this a couple years ago when I registered a domain name I
liked (pipinghot.info) and the tried to come up with an app to go with it. :)

I tried to do too much of the scraping work myself which got me into a mess.
If you can get people to offer data rather than try to pull it yourself you
might have better luck.

RSS, Alerts, etc. stuff handles a lot in tech, do you expect to try to get
more casual things like live sports data, current events, etc?

------
phr
Nice. Just registered. Various glitches on the website where you fill out a
form (received via https), hit submit, and get the API error page saying https
required.

~~~
jazzychad
yes... fixing that now.

~~~
by
and a minor typo 'Notfio' on the FAQ page.

------
ErrantX
Hmm, anyone else actually installed this?

The concept is great but I am assuming the app is just "get it in the appstore
quick". It's a little frustrating to use because:

a) it "loads" almost every screen (for a few seconds)

b) the push notifications dont go into the app automatically, they have to be
loaded again when it opens. Which on 3G is a bit slow... :D

But cool concept anyway!

~~~
jazzychad
regarding b: this is how all push notification apps work currently.
Notifications can't talk to the apps on the phone when they arrive, so they
must be reloaded from the server when the app opens.

Maybe if there are background apps in the future this will be solved more
cleanly.

~~~
ErrantX
bah, that's annoying then - I hope Apple "fixes" it at some point.

Im quite enjoying it as an app actually - I generally dont have many apps on
my iPhone (because I never use them..) but this might be a keeper :D

------
padmanabhan01
Touching 'create account' doesn't do anything. bug?

I initially had notifications off and turned it on later. for whoever's info.

------
maxklein
The idea is great, but the iPhone client is pretty poor, no offense intended.
I had to restart it after every step, and when you initially install it, it's
very use unfriendly. It says "create notifo account", but does not tell you
how or where to create this account.

It's a great idea with a real need, but it's a bit poorly implemented.

~~~
jazzychad
I agree completely (I wrote the app). The next version will be much more user
friendly in the install/signup stage. Timing the app approval/launch was the
issue that prevented it at initial release.

~~~
maxklein
There is like a big list of minor annoyances. For example I get multiple
notifications, but when I start the app there is nothing shown in the
notification center till you pull the top down and release it. That's a bit
counter-intuitive. If I were you I'd get someone on odesk for $30 an hour to
rework the client while you focus on marketing your business and developing
the backend.

~~~
jazzychad
notifications are auto-fetched when you open the app, they just have to load
from the server (all iphone apps must abide by this for now, until background
apps are allowed). the "pull down to refresh" is there for obsessive people
who feel like they must constantly refresh to get info.

I know there are a bunch of unpolished aspects, but that is part of the
"release early" mentality. This app will get tons of iteration.

------
shafqat
Is this free for publishers? How long will it be free?

Twilio has a super simple API to push SMSes out to users, but it costs money.
No one seems to have mentioned them in this comment thread, but what are your
thoughts on the competition? Do you see them as competition?

------
jbm
Was looking exactly for this for a web app that I'm working on. Going to give
it a try and see how it goes :-)

------
franck
Could you please give any details about how the iPhone app is actually
receiving these notifications ?

~~~
jackowayed
It just uses push notifications. But each site you're getting notifications
from doesn't have to make you install their app. You just have to have Notifo
installed. You also can actually see a list of all of the notifications you've
gotten.

~~~
jonhohle
It seems pretty similar to Howl (<http://howlapp.com>, mine) or Prowl (which
also offers an API). What's new here?

~~~
jackowayed
It looks like notifo is trying to be a universal notification system. It's not
going to be an easy way to do iPhone push notifications; it's going to be a
single API to push to _any_ smartphone.

They're starting just with iPhone because it's easier (since push is builtin)
and widespread and they wanted to get something out there as fast as possible,
but they say Android and Blackberry are coming soon, and I bet WebOS (and
Windows?) won't be far behind.

