

Show HN: Depot - ryanmitchell
https://www.depothq.com

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swombat
Nice site, but I'm always puzzled by this idea that a business can be managed
entirely with a cookie-cutter product. Surely if your business _can_ run on
something like that, it has zero competitive advantage, right?

In practice, I find that supporting all the edge cases inherent in my business
made it very worthwhile to build my own such tool. But then, I guess there are
many other entrepreneurs out there who don't have the tech skills to roll
their own version of this... this is probably for them rather than for me, and
it certainly beats spreadsheets hands down.

~~~
gettingreal
You are running a business and you have the time to create your own version of
this app?

That's excellent. For me however, there is hardly time to comment on Hacker
News :), let alone code my own CRM when I can get one for $30/month/user (at
least for now).

Cost/Benefit I guess. Its not worth my time to code this up myself, but in
your business, It might be.

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netnichols
This has nothing to do with the actual product, which may be great, but... I
am _so_ ready for the trend of hyper-animated websites to start dying down.

I scrolled through the whole website, and while it looked great, by the time I
got to the end I still had no idea what the product actually offered because
my eyes were too busy watching all the little animations to pay attention to
the content.

~~~
iaskwhy
Also that yellow hurts.

~~~
binocarlos
that yellow just burned a hole in the back of my eyes

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morganwilde
I don't agree with the comments that the site looks bad. For one, the font is
amazing! The layout is extremely clear and functional, a lot of carefully
crafted details make this site very polished. Thumbs up!

~~~
bshimmin
Totally agree. Of course it has the standard trendy animations-as-you-scroll,
but they aren't actively annoying, and once you get past the landing page
everything is extremely clearly presented. I think this product looks
terrific.

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gettingreal
I love your pricing. Or what I initially thought it was

One plan every feature - (correctly) gives me the impression that if I pay
$30/month, I'll get everything your app has to offer.

Extend your reach for less(or Need Less, Pay Less) - I initially thought that
this was a feature-limited lower priced tier of your app (for small startups
or freelancers for example)

This made it seem as though your "One Plan" was cleverly pushing the plan you
want most people to join, whilst still making lesser plans available for those
who cant afford the "one plan".

This is a great because it makes me feel comfortable paying for the "one plan"
(the most expensive plan) without feeling as if I'm paying too much or missing
out on any key features (by choosing the lower plan). I feel you are charging
me fairly for what I'll use.

And because you have your needs-based up-sells, you left room to increase
revenue from heavy users.

This is excellent and I will definitely split-test this in my business against
the traditional pricing grid.

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rtpg
slightly off-topic but is there a term for the sort of syncing between the
vertical scrolling and the animations? Is there some canonical thing everyone
is using to implement this?

Really like the art style, dunno how much bigger companies will want to pay
their bills (i.e. invoices you send) via Paypal though, 2.x% of 5 digits is a
decent amount of cash

~~~
ryanmitchell
We call it parallax scrolling, but I'm not sure thats the correct industry
term.

Anyway we used a version of Skrollr for the animations:
[https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr](https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr)

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latitude
The site looks great. Not sure how it performs against your target audience,
but it _looks_ great. A couple of nitpicks though -

1\. "Sign up for free 30..." button at the bottom of the home page should
really be white/on/blue to match "Try depot for free" button styling in the
main section.

2\. "Keep up to date" is too dark and doesn't look like a hint, more like a
message. Also "Submit" button is 4-5 px taller than the input field (Firefox),
so altogether it looks sloppy. And it should too be white-on-blue.

PS. Tungsten doesn't look all that great on Windows and even on Mac it has
this seriously wobbly baseline. Just look at the "Ingeniously simple ..." at
the top of the page and focus on the bottom of it. It works against the look
and feel that you are after.

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krmmalik
Does this support an ability to set up project templates or do any kind of
business process/workflow management?

I have a specific business proces/structure that I need projects to run
through with various roles intersecting at various stages. Each delegate needs
to know what their role is and when they need to perform it.

Can this handle something like that?

Also do you have any integrations available for Zapier? (Or Xero?) -- I'd like
to send the invoices to Xero, but also, i'd like to integrate with other apps
so i can send data back and forth.

If anyone from depothq.com is reading this; I'd love some more info and if
possible even a skype call.

Thanks.

~~~
ryanmitchell
Hey - do you want to drop me an email ryan at depothq dot com with your use
case and we'll see if the product fits your needs?

~~~
krmmalik
sent

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tempestn
FYI, the styling of the Features page (and possibly others) has some problems
in Firefox, at least for me. While the inspector claims the font is Tungsten
4r, what I'm seeing actually looks a lot like Times New Roman. Looks like that
difference is causing a bunch of headings to be pushed under the icons and
such things.

Edit: Hmm, restarting with add-ons disabled fixed it, so presumably the
problem is on my end. Will see if I can track down the culprit.

~~~
ryanmitchell
Thanks for the feedback - what version/platform of Firefox are you using?

~~~
tempestn
Firefox 30.0 on Windows 7. I found the culprit though - it's HTTPS Everywhere.
Not sure why since your site and font files appear to use SSL either way, but
I've confirmed that iff I disable HTTPS Everywhere the fonts work properly.

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daniel_friis
Love the idea of centralizing the workflow of a project from lead to invoice
in one tool. Don't like design for this use case, though - way too fancy and
distracting.

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fiatjaf
Isn't it strange that for common data structures these companies still need a
custom application like Depot? In the past people could survive with a
spreadsheet, why isn't a spreadsheet-like tool that support small
processing/linkage of data and a small editable manner of presenting that
data? Wouldn't that be a universal solution, like the spreadsheet?

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KhalPanda
Is it just me, or is the password field (on the signup form) just a regular
text field, rather than type='password'?

~~~
paukiatwee
Conform from my side, it is text field. Not sure how they forgot to use
password type...

~~~
ryanmitchell
It was intentional - to avoid having to use a confirm...

~~~
will_work4tears
I gotta be honest, if I were the target audience, this would be a turn off for
me. A confirmation re-type is no big deal and is kind of expected, as it's the
norm. Also it's just not secure. I don't know about you, but I often have to
type in my password in front of people. Or during presentations. Maybe you'll
say the login field using type=password (I admit I didn't look), but I'd say
that it is still concerning.

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diasks2
Generally speaking I think you did a great job with the design. My feedback
would be that it is difficult to tell the buttons apart from the form fields
(specifically in the footer). The gray form field for the email address is
basically the same design format as the buttons.

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kmfrk
The "Learn More" section is ... well not a place where I learned more.

A tour of some sort would be great for a brief explanation of the product.

Fabulous webdesign, though, and bonus points for SSL.

~~~
ryanmitchell
Thanks for the feedback - we'll definitely follow up on that.

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huhtenberg
You should consider self-hosting your webfonts -
[http://i.imgur.com/R6TsOW4.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/R6TsOW4.jpg)

~~~
latitude
I don't know why you are in gray, but that's a valid point. I too had to
switch to IE to get fonts.net to release the font files.

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dan_bk
My question mark is:

Would you outsource all this sensitive data about your business like this?
(Personally, I'd be too scared to do it.)

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Naushad
The screenshots are low res, need to really stress to understand each, maybe
you could just post magnified shots.

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dueprocess
Beautiful mobile site. The typesetting, colors, the way everything pops - just
gorgeous.

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NKCSS
This is the most sexy web app I've seen this year; I LOVE that design!

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ilanco
fonts are off on firefox/linux (debian)
[http://i.imgur.com/rvTUKNE.png](http://i.imgur.com/rvTUKNE.png)

~~~
ryanmitchell
Thanks for the feedback - what version of Firefox so we can look into it?

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adaam2
Very cool site!

