
Show HN: Convert Web app into a Desktop app in 2 minutes - Biba
https://www.todesktop.com
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yodon
Nice web page. $600/year to npm run electron around a web page seems a bit
steep but if people will pay you for it more power to you, at least until
someone else makes a site to do it for $45/mo, and then someone else for
$39/mo, and then ...

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quickthrower2
Except it doesn't work like that. Businesses will prefer to go for the most
well known or branded. The $600 a year is nothing to them. Segment being a
case in point.

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yodon
There are zero barriers to entry here. If this becomes anything past ramen
profitable it will have a ton of competitors all with equally professional
websites and enough of those competitors will attempt to use lower pricing as
a means of capturing market share to guarantee rapid downward pricing.

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quickthrower2
If that is the case then there are "zero" barriers to entry for many simple
SaaS models though. Wufoo, Dropbox etc. With AWS/Azure etc you can spin
services like this up pretty easily. So why hasn't someone outdone Dropbox
with a $5/a month offering?

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yodon
> why hasn't someone outdone Dropbox with a $5/a month offering?

Because Dropbox and Wufoo have huge barriers to entry that new competitors
must overcome in order to succeed.

Dropbox is a collaboration tool. The benefit to users of a collaboration tool
is generally described as the square of the number of users. Even if you have
a bigger constant multiplier out front, that n^2 factor is a barrier to entry
you will have a very hard time overcoming as a competitor of Dropbox. Electron
as a service has no such n^2 multiplier, so it's competitors will be able to
threaten them long after launch.

Wufoo lacks the n^2 in number of users multiplier that Dropbox has but it
still has a multiplier that is at least linear, maybe higher, in the number of
3rd party integrations of their product (if the typical Wufoo user wants to
integrate it with one app or technology, it's linear, if the typical Wufoo
user wants to integrate with two or three other apps or technologies it's n^2
or n^3 in number of integrations, my guess is the actual number is something
like n^1.5). Wufoo is big enough that there are many thousands of products and
blog posts that integrate with it, making one click integration possible in
many cases and "follow this step by step tutorial" integrations possible in
countless others. Any new competitor will have a very hard time unseating
Wufoo because of the difficulty in overcoming these network effects. Again,
Electron as a service has no such network effects, at least as marketed today.

When people talk about "barriers to entry," network effects like these (having
to do with either number of users or number of integrations) are generally the
main things they are talking about.

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NikkiA
Everything old is new again....
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Prism)

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throw03172019
ProductHunt has a bit more conversation than here.

[https://www.producthunt.com/posts/todesktop](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/todesktop)

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quickthrower2
Just like Slack!

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zubairq
I just tried it but says invalid cert

