

 Review my startup / help beta test BreezyPrint for iOS - jaredhansen
http://www.breezyprint.com

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jaredhansen
BreezyPrint (<http://www.breezyprint.com>) is a service that lets you print
from mobile devices. It's easy to set up (~2 minutes), incredibly easy to use
(printing takes ~10 seconds), works with practically every printer ever made
and supports nearly 500 different kinds of attachments. You can watch an
introductory video here if you like:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBENYGv9rj4>

We launched in April on BlackBerry only, and have just crossed the 1000-user
mark. We offer a 14-day free trial, and so far, about 30% of users seem to be
converting to paid once their trial ends.

Everyone's first question: "When's the iphone app coming?" It's coming very
soon. If you want to participate in the beta (hopefully launching late next
week), click here: <http://www.breezyprint.com/iosbeta> (redirects to a google
docs form).

Everyone's second question: "How does it work?" BreezyPrint consists of a
mobile app, our server in the cloud, and a small piece of client software the
user installs on his PC (Mac client yet to come). Through the PC client, the
user selects printers to use with BreezyPrint, and the list is uploaded to our
server. When the user initiates a print job from his mobile device, the device
queries the server for the list of printers and displays it to the user. The
user selects the printer he wants, and the document is encrypted and sent to
our server, where it awaits download/decryption/printing by the PC client
associated with the selected printer.

I'm very aware of the various competitors in the market and have some
(proprietary) plans for beating them, but I would love to hear any feedback
from the HN community on what we can improve.

In particular: 1) Any suggestions on how to make the use process clearer,
without adding a ton of extra pages to the site?

2) Is there anything on the site that just doesn't make any sense to you?

3) We're pricing at 4.95/mo or 29.95/year, and the fee is for the service, not
any one app itself (it's a per-user, not per-machine, license fee - so if you
switch devices, somehow lose everything, etc., it doesn't cost you anything).
Any thoughts on this?

4) Any other suggestions? What question(s) should I have asked, that I missed?

Thanks very much in advance for any feedback. I've been lurking on HN for
probably about six months now, and have learned a ton. Looking forward to
hearing what you all think.

------
exline
I was taken back a bit by the monthly fee. I was thinking it was a one time
purchase kind of app. $29.95 a year is not to expensive but still it seems
like a tough sell. Obviously you are not having an issue if you are having a
30% conversion rate.

What I was looking for and didn't see right away was how did it work. I think
a diagram would be worth a 1000 words in this case. In order for this to work,
your computer has to be on that is running the client software. How often is
it checking in with the cloud server to know something is ready to print? It
has to be alot in order to be able to 'print in 15 seconds' as you claim. I'd
have an issue with that, but I'm protective over what is running on my
machine.

~~~
jaredhansen
Thanks for the feedback.

On the fee: because the software checks in, we have fixed monthly per-user
costs, so I am very hesitant about offering a one-time price. Obviously
there's quite a bit of margin in the offering right now, but that's why it's
not once-and-done.

On the architecture: definitely agree that we should put up a "how it works"
diagram. And to answer your question: right now, it checks with the server
once per minute. We do it that way, as opposed to having the server ping your
machine whenever there's something waiting for it, in order to make it easier
to deal with firewalls and the like -- setup is a one-click process.

As a result, the act of printing a doc takes less than 15 seconds, really
(usually something like 8), but it can take up to 1 minute for the doc to
arrive at the printer.

