

Show HN: I'm a single founder. Please review my bootstrapped startup - kt9
http://www.distelli.com

======
chaddeshon
You just have a signup for beta button that you are using to collect email
address instead of a full pricing page. I understand why people tend to do
their for their first version. You're scared that not everything works yet,
and you don't want to take the time to setup the payment system if no one even
wants it.

However, this does a disservice to you and to me.

 _To you:_ You don't really know if people want to buy your product or not.
Collecting email addresses is way easier that collecting money. It's also not
nearly as exciting. Don't remove the option for me to just give you just my
email address, but also let me give you money.

You'll know I really want your product that way. Also, initial customers are
probably more forgiving that you imagine. Worst case scenario, you can just
refund the money.

 _To me:_ Without the pricing page, I can't really tell what your product
does. For all the description and "how it works" pages in the world, nothing
really tells me what you are selling like your pricing page.

Companies tend to charge where they are adding value. If I can see what you
are charging for, I can see where you are going to add value to my company.
Are you charging per server, per deploy, per employee, per user? Without the
pricing page, I don't understand what I'm buying.

~~~
kt9
You're right and all your points are on target. We have a working platform
right now (and infact we're using it to deploy our own code and services to
EC2).

Our pricing is still TBD, but its going to be a low price per server per month
sort of model.

We'll update the site with a pricing page soon! Please email me and I can
answer more of your questions in detail.

~~~
shyn3
Please don't do yourself a disservice by accomodating low price for high
value. If your product is going to derive lots of value charging a high price
isn't absurd.

~~~
kt9
Thats a good point. We're still trying to figure out the price point, but our
goal is to go for adoption and volume. Your thoughts on this would be welcome
and help us figure out our strategy.

~~~
sturadnidge
Admittedly OT, but how many of 'you' are there? You're answering with a lot of
collectives for someone on their own :)

~~~
kt9
Yes. I am a single founder. I have a mentor who is advising me and the "we" is
because I'm practicing to sound like a big company when I talk to enterprise
customers. They don't like hearing "I". I'm also working on growing the team
and getting additional people to join me.

edit: Also see my comment about this below.

~~~
saturdayplace
It's probably your first reaction to try and sound like a big company, but
personally I'd would avoid that if I could. Especially if it comes off
unnaturally (which it appears to have done at least in this instance). In some
cases you can play your small size as an advantage, at least for your first
customers. Just as a single example, a small company can offer much more
personalized customer service. For more about this, see the "Delight" section
of pg's most recent essay:
[http://paulgraham.com/ds.html](http://paulgraham.com/ds.html)

~~~
thaumaturgy
Customers in this case may be more worried about low bus factor.

------
nate
Congrats on getting a project shipped and taking this step to get more people
using it. It's something most people never even accomplish.

The thing I noticed that I would improve upon is simply the blog. It's all
about your product and its latest features, but it could be such a better
channel for you to reach users and customers.

Open these posts up to all sorts of topics you know something about that your
audience is probably also going through. How do I get better at: server
monitoring, security, downtime, status communication, setting up DNS, mail,
etc.?

Don't neglect helping me get better at being a system admin. If you help me
get awesome, you'll have a fan for a long time. I'll be happy to check out
products you're selling.

Kathy Sierra has even more on this topic. And it's brilliant:

[http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/07/building-the-
minimum-b...](http://businessofsoftware.org/2013/07/building-the-minimum-bad-
ass-user-some-unfinished-business-kathy-sierra-at-business-of-software-
conference-2013/)

~~~
kt9
Thanks for the kind words and encouragement. It means a lot! You're right
about the blog. Its still new and I will work on opening it up with more
topics or even trying to get a guest blogger or two.

------
drewcrawford
Source: I run a few production backend services in Python. Mostly to Debian
boxes.

No matter what your product anticipates, it doesn't anticipate all the things
I do, in fairly boring applications. I compile my own Python. I install
postfix for some applications. I install a kernel module that increases the
Linux entropy pool. You have not anticipated my set of problems.

What this means is that no matter how much great stuff your product brings to
the table, I bring just as much, if not more, configuring your product and
designing a deployment solution around it for my application.

If your product isn't open-source, that's a non-starter for me. Because now
I'm worried that I could spend a lot of time configuring the product, and not
being able to add that one feature that I need. I'm not sure if you can run a
business with an open-source deployment product, but I know that I won't ever
use a closed-source one.

Do a better job of explaining how these apps run. I took a look at your sample
manifest files, and it wasn't clear to me if you are installing nginx or
something? Or if you intend the apps to be daemon-like? So create a page that
explains, in words, how to deploy a daemon-like app and how to deploy a
webapp, and who is responsible for installing the web server and editing its
configuration file(s) (do you clobber them?) and what web server it is
supposed to be.

Finally, add a docker.io example. It's not production ready, but it looks like
it's designed for people like me who have deployments involving heterogeneous
payloads. I'm going to move to it eventually, so if I was to switch deployment
stacks I would want good support for it.

~~~
nawitus
>If your product isn't open-source, that's a non-starter for me. Because now
I'm worried that I could spend a lot of time configuring the product, and not
being able to add that one feature that I need. I'm not sure if you can run a
business with an open-source deployment product, but I know that I won't ever
use a closed-source one.

One can certainly provide an open source software which is not free software
and illegal to redistribute. I can't see how that's detrimental to business.
E.g. you can download the source code but you can share it to anyone.

~~~
jarofgreen
Not really. Well, you can of course do that but you can't really call that
"open source". "open source" has a set meaning that a lot of people spent a
lot of time building the reputation of. [http://opensource.org/osd-
annotated](http://opensource.org/osd-annotated)

I'm not just being pedantic; this matters because if Distelli advertised
itself as "open source" and I invested time into it then I found out that they
didn't allow me to redistribute my amazing changes or to see my friends
brilliant changes I'd be really pissed off. It would mean there was no scope
for building up an alternative ecosystem that wasn't under the control of
Distelli and thus I'd have no real freedom.

For what it's worth (ie. not much, I'm probably not your target market), I
agree with drewcrawford - If I'm looking at this kind of tool freedom is
important to me and I'll check the open source options before checking the
closed source ones.

~~~
nawitus
I actually thought of that when I wrote my comment, but I wasn't sure if open
source only meant the open source definition by the open source initiative.
Apparently there's no "access to the source code" meaning if we are to believe
Wikipedia.

Therefore there's three possible cateogories: closed source, open source and
'access to the source code but no free license'.

~~~
jarofgreen
> open source only meant the open source definition by the open source
> initiative

Some people will argue about that point and say it ain't so, but you've seen
what I think about that :-)

> 'access to the source code but no free license'.

I've never seen a good term for that but some big names do it - Atlassian used
to do it with JIRA and Confluence (don't know if they still do). It's not a
bad thing to do - it's just not Open Source.

I guess this confusion is why Richard Stallman wrote this:
[http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-
point.h...](http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html)

------
kt9
Founder here. Would love feedback from HN. If you'd like to try out the
platform, please email me - rsingh@distelli.com - and I'll set you up with an
account.

~~~
grosskur
It would be great if your blog had an RSS or Atom feed.

~~~
kt9
Yes. Great idea. I'm going to add that.

------
maslam
I'm moving one of my revenue-positive apps to Distelli. Rahul is a great guy,
and the platform is awesome to develop on.

~~~
kt9
Thank you Bilal for your endorsement and kind words!! I appreciate it.
Building a company as a single founder is hard and every bit of encouragement
helps.

------
slajax
This might be the second time I've said this in two days but...

So it's a git post-receive hook that parses a YML and starts your app?

In all seriousness though there have been a lot of businesses that are
evolving out of this relatively easy to do push-to-deploy mentality. The
ability spin up new servers on demand is kind of nice but ultimately doesn't
save me much in the way of overhead when I can already set up a new AMI with
the push-to-deploy mechanisms already built into it with just a few clicks.
Why should I use your product when I can set up the same thing manually in
under 10 minutes?

I applaud your effort and I also think you've done a bang up job at packaging
it and I really like that you support so many hosting environments (that is
your key differentiator here) but I hate to see too many people dump a lot of
time into heroku-style deployments. This was a solved problem even before
heroku came around and it seems many of these new variations are just
saturating the market which drives down the value.

Although having said that, I'll be honest, I'm very jaded on this topic. Also
I'm not your target customer at the end of the day because I have a decent
understanding of how this works behind the scenes having built similar
deployment mechanisms into just about every project I've worked on in the last
4 years manually.

My advice is that you need to differentiate yourself with up front feature
based value. Your compatibility with many hosting providers is a really nice
feature, but all it gives me up front is the confidence to know I can move to
a cheaper competitor if I don't like how it's going. Focus on some upfront
feature based value differentials and I think you'll do pretty well in this
market if you focus on private enterprise.

~~~
slajax
As a follow up thought around this market perhaps the saturation is a good
thing in the long run. Heroku definitely over charges, so having thought about
it a little more I'll say I hope more of these come out and do a really
cohesive job like this one is. It'll normalize the price over time and give
more affordable options to the masses.

------
RyanZAG
So I load up my services that I need to run on multiple Linux servers into a
package, and then distelli will deploy, run and manage those packages.

You're selling a service though - I'm guessing your service will connect into
the Linux servers directly (root access?) and manage everything directly.
Obviously, that gives your service full access to both the package contents
and to the servers themselves. That feels a bit risky - am I correct here?

~~~
kt9
The service does not connect to the linux server directly. The server runs an
agent that connects to the service. You do not run the agent as root. You can
give the agent sudoers access but only if you want to do deployments where
sudo is required. Most apps do not require sudo so you don't have to give the
agent sudo access.

You also do not give distelli access to your code or package . Your code is
uploaded to your S3 bucket directly from your laptop or dev machine and the
service merely gets a bucket name and s3 key which it passes to the agent.

~~~
RyanZAG
Ah excellent, thanks for clearing that up. I didn't see that information on
the website - if it's there, you should make it more obvious.

------
jasondemeuse
I realize this isn't a direct review of your product, but there are a couple
front-end things you might want to take a look at.

Concatenating/minifying/compressing your JS files on the home page would speed
things up a _lot_. If you have web inspector open, you'll see 55+ HTTP
requests just for the landing page. If anyone is trying to view your site over
a mobile network, especially those that pay for data or time, that could
really hurt.

Also, unless there is a specific reason you're doing it that I'm not seeing, I
would really recommend getting rid of the @imports in your CSS in favor of
just adding more <link> tags; or better yet, go with my last suggestion and
compress them. You could even just copy and paste the code into a tool like
this[1].

Congratulations on shipping! I'm working on my own bootstrapped, single
founder project right now and it's inspiring to see others releasing their
products.

[1] [http://refresh-sf.com/yui/](http://refresh-sf.com/yui/)

------
JacksonGariety
Good job! If you've bootstrapped this and you're asking the community for
feedback you most likely have your head screwed on straight.

~~~
kt9
Thank you! I appreciate your kind words!

------
IanDrake
System requirements? This is always one of the first things I look for.

Mostly because marketing speak is often far more grandiose than reality...

"Easily Deploy your Code to Any Server".

Really? Any server? There are a lot of operating systems in this world.

~~~
kt9
The system requirements are only that you be running linux and python 2.4 or
greater on your server.

I agree that it sounds too grandiose but I would love the opportunity to have
you as a beta users and demonstrate that are claims are not marketing speak
and smoke and mirrors.

I'm a developer myself and I don't like marketing speak.

~~~
yaepu2Ie
Is Python 3.3 ok?

~~~
kt9
Unfortunately no. Its python 2.x only. Python 3 is on the roadmap.

------
svec
I'm not a web dev, so I'm no help on that side, but I noticed something
odd/wrong(?) about your main page:

When I scroll all the way to the bottom your footer bar appears (with your
Facebook and Twitter icon/links). The footer then disappears if I don't move
the cursor for a second or two. This happens on Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on
my Mac.

It's kind of jarring for the footer to disappear when I didn't knowingly do
anything to make it disappear because:

1\. it disappeared

2\. the rest of the page moves when the footer disappears.

Good luck!

~~~
kt9
Yes. I just saw that! Weird. I think its got something to do with the
Javascript that I wrote to make the subtext on the tagline fade out.

I agree its super annoying and jarring. I'll debug it and fix it. I'll let you
know how it goes.

~~~
jbinney
I think you want visibility:hidden instead of display:none

------
mjhea0
Nice job! I think it's great that you've got a MVP up and are seeking
_objective_ feedback. I signed up for the beta (michael (at) mherman (dot)
org. Your product looks promising. You're solving a big problem. The teams
feature looks very cool.

Your design could use a bit of work, but nothing to worry about right now.

If you need help with dev or design in the future, I'd gladly put some time in
to a project like this. I can help in other areas as well. Contact me.

~~~
kt9
I would love to connect and get your feedback and help. I'll send you an email
later tonight.

------
anuragramdasan
Firstly, I like the idea. Its a great application.

At first glance I got a feeling that the website design is incomplete. The
hovering on the menu seems a bit too sharp. I am no designer so I am not sure
what the exact terms to be used are. I just think you should maybe put some
work into the interface and it would look much more appealing.(I am just
talking about the look and not the app itself). Good Luck.

~~~
kt9
Thanks for your feedback. We have a lot of work to do and we'll iterate on the
site design! Your feedback and detailed thoughts would be welcome
(rsingh@distelli.com)

~~~
joshmlewis
You said 'we' but I thought you were working on this alone?

~~~
kt9
Sorry I say we because I'm practicing to talk like we're a big company but
you're right, that right now I'm working alone. I'm looking for a biz dev /
sales /marketing type person to join though

------
FreshCode
Nice and simple. Slow down the fading text. Consider a carousel. I know
they're cliched, but people understand them.

Edit: Too much text. Show some screenshots. What are the benefits? Weird logo.
My brain spent too long trying to piece it together, which bothers me from a
design perspective. Having the logos of your integrations (like AWS) is great!

~~~
crgt
[http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/](http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)

------
tehwebguy
I'd love to - just signed up for beta

~~~
tehwebguy
P.S. This is a hint, I signed up yesterday but haven't received access yet.
Here's hoping I get the beta email today and not in a month.

When I sign up I'm attempting to test it out now, on "my time". When access is
delayed by a month testing it is on "whenever I get to it time" and generally
just falls by the wayside. Hopefully this is meaningful feedback in and of
itself.

~~~
kt9
Sorry about the delay. We're working through a backlog of requests. I'll send
you an email shortly.

------
rallison
Just a minor styling note - the black background on hover behind the twitter
button is not attractive - at least to me. And, from a consistency standpoint,
is not the same height as the rest of the menu options. If you keep it, at
least make it consistent.

~~~
kt9
Thanks for the feedback. I'll iterate on the design.

------
johnnyg
I like the idea of getting off Heroku and moving to something more like this.

How would sidekiq/delayed jobs worker instances be deployed using a setup like
this? I glanced through the docs section and didn't see that.

~~~
kt9
We have a customer that is running a delayed job. I'll write up an example and
post it on the blog soon.

In a nutshell you'd run it just like you'd run any ruby or rails app.

~~~
johnnyg
Cool, looking forward to that doc.

------
thoughtpalette
From a IA point of view, I believe blog should be after How it Works.

Sign Up|How it Works|Documentation|Blog

And the Twitter follow button in the main navigation is really confusing.

Digging the concept!

~~~
kt9
I didn't think of that. Now that I do, I agree you're right. I'll move that
link over to the end.

------
healthenclave
Hey Rahul,

Congrats on bootstrapping your product.. It looks very cool and promising. And
certainly will help dev's focus more on the coding part.

Would love to test out your product...

Cheers!

~~~
kt9
Hi, Can you send me an email at rsingh@distelli.com and I'll set you up with
an account. We have a large backlog of requests and I'm unable to connect your
HN username to your email address.

------
emingo
Very cool.

The only thing I really have to say is beware of carousels... I didn't even
notice you had carousels until reaching the bottom of your 'how it works'
page.

~~~
kt9
Yes I agree. I struggled with how to display the details for different apps in
a small amount of space and used carousels. I'll keep iterating on it.

------
jnankin
How does your product differ from RightScale, Scalr, or OpDemand?

~~~
kt9
Our biggest differentiator is that we do not run your servers like a PaaS
would. You start and run your own server and distelli enables you to deploy
your application and code to that server. We do not access, login or control
your server.

edit: Also Distelli works with any server whether its a cloud server (AWS,
Rackspace, Digital Ocean) or a private server (private datacenter, under your
desk etc) and lastly distelli does not need your cloud credentials if you do
run a cloud server

------
guiambros
Your text animation doesn't work well on mobile (iOS Safari). When you scroll
down, the text keeps bouncing up and down, due to the resize of the text (1
vs. 2 lines).

~~~
kt9
Yikes! Thanks for letting me know! I'll fix it.

------
iancarroll
DigitalOcean support will sell it for me. Instantly. Seriously.

~~~
kt9
We do have digital ocean support. [http://www.distelli.com/docs/digital-ocean-
setup.html](http://www.distelli.com/docs/digital-ocean-setup.html)

I'll send you details later tonight with details on how to get set up.

------
gbrits
Love the idea of being able to deploy on bare metal and to the cloud with the
same config scripts. At least that's what I'm understanding from it. Correct?

~~~
kt9
You're absolutely right.

------
chaddeshon
I think you should spend some time to talk about the pain you are fixing.
There's no hook. What problem am I having now that you are going to make go
away?

~~~
kt9
Excellent point! The pain is around making it easier for developers to deploy
to multiple servers and clouds but also to help you keep track of whats
deployed and running and where is it running.

Also the teams features make it easy to collaborate and see who change what
and when.

~~~
chaddeshon
So what process am I using now that you are going to replace? I must be doing
something because my code gets deployed.

Give point by point details about how what I am doing right now sucks. It make
me hate my job, keeps me up at night, turns away customers, and loses me
money.

Then, after you have convinced me that my current process sucks (and
epiphanized with me that it was the best I could do at the time), go back
though every point and tell me how you have fixed them.

------
cik
Love the concept. I think the main area with the white rects is too busy. You
want to have fewer hooks, that users can dig in to. Signed up for the beta!

------
OWaz
I signed up for beta and will provide feedback once I can spend a bit more
time looking a it. And you should be proud of yourself for getting this far.

~~~
kt9
Thanks for the encouragement. I'll send you an email later tonight with
details on how to get setup with an account. Looking forward to your feedback.

------
cabalamat
Instead of having text that disappears while I'm in the middle of reading it,
I suggest you just display all your points statically.

------
Supermighty
I think your website looks very professional. However I think the logo looks
awkward. It needs work. Good luck.

~~~
kt9
Thanks for your feedback and the kind word! We'll work on the logo for sure.

~~~
cvg
Site looks great and service too.

One tiny nit on the logo, you should use hexagons instead of pentagons. Lots
of hexagons fit together nicely. Pentagons, not so much.

~~~
egze
While we're at it :) Make retina graphics

------
phektus
You got 9 features on the landing page which looked like a wall of text.
Distill it to 3 perhaps?

~~~
kt9
Good point. Also might add some screenshots.

------
nsxwolf
Is distelli deployed with distelli?

~~~
kt9
yes. it definitely is.

------
jaimefjorge
Love this. Would want to use it right away. Signed up. Congrats!

~~~
kt9
Thanks for the positive words. We're working through the requests right now.
I'll send you an invite shortly.

------
adambom
Seems promising. Kind of like a more flexible Heroku.

~~~
kt9
Please contact me - rsingh@distelli.com - and I can set you up with an
account.

------
talhof8
Best of luck!

------
tucaz
Linux Apps/Environments only?

~~~
kt9
Linux and MacOS only right now. We have windows on the roadmap.

------
maslam
Love it!

------
OGC
Pay someone for a decent logo

------
sublimit
Remember when a "bootstrapped startup" was simply called a "company"?

~~~
pbreit
Or just a "service"?

