

Show HN: Easy interactive product tours with Bootstrap theme support - mds101
https://www.easyproducttours.com

======
pajju
Great product and neat work. Fair pricing, unlike others who are charging a
lot more.

I would definitely use your service for my next client projects.

Feedback:

1\. __Do whatever so that users will know your app exists in the first place.

First get known to lot of potential users. Let them know your app exists in
the first place, then think of Bmodels. Charge little to none!

This kind of app needs more visibility and recognition across the web. Then
everyone will recommend and refer your app over-time. It should only get
better over time. So don't charge more. Give it at a throw-away price. Reach
all top blogs, top/newly launched products and give them to use free, with
your branding. ( Your product is the easiest to get known, because of the
nature of the app)

2\. Long-term: Build a branding around.

When someone thinks of product tours your app name should be synonymous with
tours. Always think this way, and do whatever to achieve this. ;)

3\. Add a referral service.

If someone recommends and links back, give them 1 month extra? Don't pay back
anyone for referring, but let them use your product more and spread the good
message.

* And do reach me out, if you need any kind of help. :)

~~~
mds101
Thanks for your comments.

1\. Yes, we are planning on writing a few blogs emphasising the need for
product tours, which we will be including in our 'cold call' sales emails to
newly launched apps.

2\. Branding: we chose 'Easy Product Tours' for easy remembrance and google-
ability. We think we can build a decent brand around that name.

3\. Sounds good. We'll give some thought to how we can implement a refferal
program.

------
paulwithap
What makes this worth paying for versus something free like Joyride:
[http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-
tour-p...](http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-plugin)
?

~~~
mds101
Differences as such are:

1\. User-tracking: we track which users have seen which tours and this data is
persisted at our backend. So people are mot repeatedly shown the same tours
and distracted from using your app.

2\. Apart from including the tour player script you dont have to make any
changes to your existing page.

3\. We support using your aites own custom Bootstrap themes out of the box, so
you dont need to spend time customiZing the look of your tours.

~~~
paulwithap
1\. Joyride has support for cookies.

2\. It seems that if you were building a page to be a product tour, you could
build the page to be a product tour.

3\. What exactly does that mean? What properties does your product inherit
from the Bootstrap theme?

~~~
mds101
1\. What if your user switches between computers? Cookies are no longer
available, and they will be shown the tour again.

2\. The difference is there would be a separation of concerns. The tour
functionality should not be part of your app. It should be a separate layer.

3\. The tour tooltips will take over the CSS styles of the bootstrap theme you
are using. So all the fonts, colors, button styles etc. will be similar to
those you are already using on your site.

------
maxharris
This is a good idea, and it looks like you've done good work.

But the design choices are a little baffling to me. Why are all the corners so
sharp on everything? And what's up with the bright blue colors? I know that
this is mostly because you're trying to not just use the Bootstrap defaults,
but the result is inferior to the default theme. As soon as you can, try to
get a designer on board.

~~~
mds101
Actually, the tour tooltips take on the styles from whatever bootstrap theme
that you are using on the site. Since we are using the cosmo theme, all the
corners are sharp, and the blue colour is applied.

If you are not using bootstrap, or if you are using the default bootstrap
theme on your site, then the colours and corners would be as defined in that
theme.

We made it like this so that you dont have to waste time getting your tours to
match the look of your site.

