
Show HN: A DigitalOcean-like support community for your website in 3 minutes - maliman
https://haash.io/support-communities.html
======
samsolomon
I'd suggest allowing people to signup via email.

Many people don't want to attach their social accounts to business functions.

~~~
amdavidson
Many people would not be permitted to attach their social accounts. My
workplace requires that we associate our accounts strictly through things they
will be able to access after employees leave (IE a company email address).

~~~
maliman
Sorry about that, we'll add email signup very soon

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neom
This is epic. As a former-digitaloceaner I know how much work went into
building the community (the community director at DigitalOcean is incredibly
good at her job) and how well it as served the business. If you have the
ability and time to build a community around your product, I highly recommend
it, brand evangelists are something you simply cannot buy.

~~~
afarrell
However, if you can pay people to write high-quality documentation, you can
use money to attract brand evangelists.

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maliman
For those frustrated that there's no email signup, please fill in this form
[https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI](https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI)
. We'll notify you once we add it very soon. Thank you!

------
iuguy
I like it. In fact I have a project in mind for which I might use it next
year.

I think your pricing model might need a bit of work though. I think you're
offering too much in the free tier (particularly given that I can run a free
community with unlimited entries but have to pay $94/month for 50000 on the
other plan), and pricing per registered community user might be worth looking
into.

Other than that I'll definitely come back in the new year when I'm ready to
give it a try.

~~~
maliman
Thank you, we'll definitely fine tune as we learn.

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maliman
A DigitalOcean like support community for your website in 3 minutes Hi,
Soufian from Haash here, i've always found DigitalOcean support community
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions)
smart and fascinating. A clever way to deliver support and manage knowledge.
One of the reasons they came from nothing and became rapidly popular.

Haash is basically getting the same community support hosted space in few
seconds. Just signup, create, tweak it to match your website feel and start
using it.

Would be happy to answer any questions

~~~
yalooze
Small piece of feedback but I would increase the contrast of your fonts to
make it a bit easier to read (it's far from the worst I've seen but if you
compare it to the DO community you link to, theirs is easier to read).

Also, the home view eg. [https://slack.haash.io/](https://slack.haash.io/)
feels quite wide and is hard to look across to see the 'Date' and 'Views'
which are all the way to the right. When you click into a question eg.
[https://slack.haash.io/151/how-can-remove-files-that-
deactiv...](https://slack.haash.io/151/how-can-remove-files-that-deactivated-
members-have-uploaded) this width seems good and is easier to scan.

Overall I like the clean and simple approach. Very little noise to distract
you which is nice.

~~~
cabalamat
> I would increase the contrast of your fonts to make it a bit easier to read

Changing it from 300 weight Lato to 400 weight of the same font would also
help.

~~~
maliman
Got it, we'll revise it sure,

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martinald
Nice idea, I like it. Not sure about the name at all. Sounds like marijuana
distribution as as service :).

~~~
atmosx
Well that would be profitable from day one...

~~~
maliman
Guaranteed!

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abreu
Always start with email signup first. Not the other way around. You just lost
a ton of potential beta-testers and users on your HN moment.

~~~
maliman
Got it, We though Twitter & Facebook are a good way to get people easily
onboarded and their details filled in effortlessly.

PS: For those afraid of any privacy issues, the permissions are very basic, we
do only get your email, avatar and short bio.

~~~
morgante
Social accounts are fine for consumer products but many people justifiably
don't want to use them for business products. Keeping them separate is a key
part of business hygiene.

For me, it's _not_ about the privacy issues. It's that accounts tied to my
personal social networks are much harder to transfer/remove/control.

~~~
maliman
We've put up this form
[https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI](https://haaash.typeform.com/to/IOrUUI)
for those who exclusively want to sign up with email. We'll add email sign up
very soon and let you know. Thank you!

------
akuji1993
The UI of your site needs to be a little reworked. I don't want to click on
every single FAQ question and get taken to another site, for example. Also,
being able to only login with FB or Twitter is not acceptable. There
absolutely need to be free accounts, as well as Google Account Logins.

A nice idea, needs some remodel and some smoothing out edges.

~~~
maliman
Thank you feedback noted. We'll add email login and fine tune the UI soon

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marktangotango
Is there a 'whitelabel' capability with this service? Ie, could I point
community.mysite.com at your servers with a cname record? Does anyone else
care about this?

~~~
maliman
Yes you can use your own domain name with a CNAME. Email me at malih.soufian
at gmail.com once you create your Haash and we'll make the config for you

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i__believe
One thing you may consider is having private or invite only communities.
Almost all the offerings out there are for public communities, which leaves in
house self help an untapped market.

~~~
maliman
Yes that's a good way to go to. Although you might hack Haash right now to not
show questions and answers to the public, we might consider a sophisticated
version of that.

------
_puk
Tried to read the terms and conditions.. got an error [0]

Whilst you are there, the terms and conditions aren't obviously clickable.

Also, would love to be able to sign up with email, but only get Facebook /
Twitter auth options. Ironically the tab is titled "Log in with email | Haash"

That aside, I can see this being useful, really like the setup.

0:
[https://s12.postimg.org/z1cuq8lzh/Screenshot_2016_11_23_14_3...](https://s12.postimg.org/z1cuq8lzh/Screenshot_2016_11_23_14_32_07.png)

~~~
_puk
Same error on haash creation terms too.

~~~
maliman
Thanks for catching that we'll dig into that

~~~
maliman
Can you retry now?

~~~
_puk
Thanks for following up. Still seeing the error.

email is in my profile if you want help troubleshooting.

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smoyer
To create an account, you have to agree to the terms of service:

"By signing up you indicate that you have read and agree to the Terms of the
service"

Being a conscientious user, I click through to read what I'm agreeing to and
find:

"You do not have permission to perform this operation"

IANAL but I'm pretty sure this won't be legally binding.

~~~
maliman
Sorry about that, it seems like we misspelled the link

~~~
smoyer
No need to apologize ... I just thought you'd want to know.

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scosman
$5 a month for the FAQ product? Charge waaaaay more for a product targeted at
businesses.

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mrwebmaster
I'm using [http://www.question2answer.org/](http://www.question2answer.org/) ,
how does it compares to it?

Q2A doesn't have: \- instant search \- Intercom integration \- Single Sign-on

~~~
maliman
In addition One-click setup, Realtime notification, Custom URLs FAQs Tutorials
management

And other cool stuff we'll be shipping soon

------
kowdermeister
I don't get this. Is this different than installing a modern OS forum engine?

~~~
maliman
It's a Q&A which is different from a forum, i will quote Adam Lear [1] from
this answer [2] on Stackoverfolw to point out the differences(Stackoverflow
being a Q&A)

[quote]

Stack Overflow is not a forum. Forums are largely discussion-based and tend to
follow less strict rules about what posts can be like.

On Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general), we require every new thread
to be started with a question and every response to that question to be an
attempt at answering it.

For example, on a forum you might ask how to run a game in windowed mode. You
will get several responses, some of which will be nothing but "oh, I love that
game!" or "I haven't played that in a while, wow." You'll be lucky if you get
a relevant response. By contrast, on Stack Exchange you'd get practical
responses that are 100% relevant to your question.

[end quote]

This model (meaning the Q&A) has been proven to be extremely efficient in
managing community driven support. DigitalOcean community
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions)
is one successful example.

Alongside with the Q&A, DigitalOcean introduced Tutorials crowdsourcing which
also proved to be a smart and cost efficient vector of educating customers and
sharing knowledge.

What Haash does is letting you create a similar support infrastructure at very
low price and in just 3 minutes.

[1] [http://meta.stackexchange.com/users/155160/adam-
lear](http://meta.stackexchange.com/users/155160/adam-lear) [2]
[http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/is-stack-
overf...](http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/is-stack-overflow-a-
forum)

~~~
kowdermeister
Do you provide the community pool as well? I have this confusing feeling but
that would sound too good :)

~~~
maliman
Do you mean the stuff to take care of it? We wish we could :) For now it's
only the tool

------
jakegry
[https://buffer.com/](https://buffer.com/) ->
[https://haash.io/](https://haash.io/)

~~~
andruby
What do you mean? They are both very different tools, no?

------
adim86
I love the branding on this product, very light and fun, also friendly and
catchy. It reminds me of dropbox. Great work, maybe when you make some money
you can get a good logo to go with it. Good stuff!

~~~
maliman
Awesome, glad you liked the design

------
lai
Cool idea but I would highly suggest that you fix all the misspelled words.

~~~
maliman
Ok we'll so sorry about that

------
onion2k
Isn't the good thing about community support the people who help rather than
the tool that's used to run it? You can't build a community of helpful,
interested people in 3 minutes.

~~~
corobo
Call it a lack of coffee but I also clicked out of intrigue as to how they
were going to slot your site into a community of willing volunteers.

~~~
maliman
Very funny lol

------
poorman
Not sure what's up with the A/B testing though. Plus pricing seems to change
between a slider starting at $29/mo and a flat $5/mo fee.

~~~
maliman
Oups! sorry about that. Alongside with the support community, we have a FAQs
module. The two makes a smart help center (FAQs and community). You ended up
on the main help center landing page where there are two pricing schemes . One
if you use only FAQs $5/mo and the other if you use both (FAQs and community)
starting at $29/mo.

------
dutchbrit
Looks really nice!

Searching is a tad slow but I have seen slower. Maybe implementing
ElasticSearch might be a nice idea. Would also result in better search
results.

------
nkkollaw
maliman, I found this: "Can I control who can ask and answer on Haash\'s
support community?".

It looks like you're not escaping things correctly.

------
ricardobeat
Communities don't seem to work on mobile at all.

~~~
maliman
Sorry about, we're digging into that

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sakopov
Not a DigitalOcean user here but this looks like StackExhange clone for small
online businesses. Is this correct? Very nice and clean.

~~~
maliman
Yes, the Q&A is Stackoverflow like but the overall support community is
DigitalOcean like
[https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions)

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brilliantcode
YES! I was looking for exactly this last year. I'm so glad somebody found the
time to make a product out of it.

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openclosed
Error on your homepage: "our's" should be "ours". :)

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willow9886
Typo in the "A built-in Q&A engine for community support" section..

publicaly -> publicly.

~~~
maliman
Thanks for catching it

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lllorddino
Digital Ocean tutorials are probably the best and simplest ones to follow.
Neat idea.

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poorman
This is actually nicely done.

~~~
maliman
Thank you!

------
estrabd
You had me until I had to use pedo twitter or Fakebook. No thanks.

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fiatjaf
I don't like DigitalOcean community.

~~~
skewart
What don't you like about it? (Just curious, I don't have much experience with
it myself)

~~~
fiatjaf
I don't know. Too much duplicated content and unanswered threads. I have to
sign in to participate.

~~~
maliman
All the communities have to deal with that at some point, but that doesn't
prevent good value from happening. One thing we did at Haash is letting
members know of existing questions while they're typing a new one.

------
sideproject
For those who are interested in creating a more full featured online
community, I run HelloBox

[https://www.hellobox.co](https://www.hellobox.co)

Haash.io looks simple and nice. HelloBox would be for those looking for other
bells and whistles.

