

Show HN: GetNotified – describe an event and get alerted when it happens - smailq
http://www.getnotifiedapp.com/

======
krammer
Disclaimer: I'm cofounder of Hooks (gethooksapp.com), an alerts-for-everything
ios app. We went public beta 2 weeks ago.

Talking about MVPs, I hate myself for not having started with something like
this. Instead of creating an web form where you can ask the users what they
want (and giving the service, if not its not mvp!), we waited until we had an
stable good looking ios app (with 35 different types of alerts, dynamic forms
etc etc) -4 months of hard work.

FYI, we used surveys (we did ~1000) for validating the idea and getting new
alert ideas but that's nothing compared with real users feedback. That's
something you can't get until you launch something that looks real (like
getnotifiedapp.com does). In two weeks we've learnt more about our app than
ever before, including surveys, private testflights and so. Lesson learned
(and this is something we cannot say noone told us, its at every modern
startup book)

Good luck with this project!

~~~
tectonic
what do you use as your data back end?

~~~
krammer
Mongo for storing notifications. MySQL for non intensive things. We developed
the backend on our own.

ps. I'm a BIG fan of huginn and your work. We studied it and had a very
interesting discussion on moving everything to your platform, but we already
had a mature version of our backend when we found it and we are not rubyists.
I can remember writing on twitter something like "We have hit the open source
jackpot". Said that, we will try sooner than later to, at least, connect your
agents to our platform.

~~~
tectonic
Awesome! It might be useful for you. Send me a note if you have any questions.

~~~
krammer
Thanks! I'll be in touch

------
jawns
There are tons of notification services out there, but most of them focus on
one particular niche (such as stock prices, social mentions, monitoring news
sites, etc.)

On the one hand, I like how broad this is. It purports to handle a bunch of
different types of events, and all you have to do is describe what you want in
plain English.

On the other hand, I'm skeptical about how well a service can execute when it
has to handle such a broad range of alert types.

I've written a lot of notification-type stuff (e.g. monitor a Twitter feed for
when my book titles are mentioned, monitor a bank account for unusual
activity, monitor a blog without an RSS feed for new posts), and it's
definitely not a one-size-fits-all type of service. If GetNotified has to
write new code for each monitoring request, I would imagine the subscriptions
would have to run for a good long while before they make a profit.

P.S.: A little free copy editing help: There's a typo in "If you are in doubt,
just submit the request and will let you know if it can be done or not."

~~~
smailq
Few ways we handle the notifications :

1\. Find existing service that handles the job - integrate it, or just let the
user know, or subscribe to it on behalf of the user.

2\. Write code - automate it, script it if possible

3\. Virtual assistance - let our VAs handle the monitoring if there is no
other way

Hope this answers :)

Thanks for the fix!

~~~
damian2000
By VA you mean something like TaskRabbit?

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free2rhyme214
Is this an MVP or does it actually work automatically?

I noticed the part where it says it has to be reviewed by a human and then I
thought it would be way easier to get notified by text instead of email.

Boom! Feature request ha!

~~~
codexon
_If you are in doubt, just submit the request and will let you know if it can
be done or not._

It sounds like they are manually writing scrapers for each request.

------
ThomPete
Love this.

Submitted "Notify me when someone in the open source community is looking for
design help"

Need this for finding open source projects to weekendhackers newsletter.

~~~
sciurus
How do you expect them to fulfill this request?

~~~
ThomPete
Have no idea. What I have done so far is search for small project on ex.
twitter. and then go through them to see what makes sense or not.

------
tectonic
If you're interested in a self-hosted solution, much of this can be
accomplished with Huginn.
[https://github.com/cantino/huginn](https://github.com/cantino/huginn)

------
grimtrigger
This is a great way to find ideas for a niche project. Awesome.

------
egfx
any ideas to make a public feed API of completed notifications? That would be
really great!

