
Show HN: Find journalists, bloggers and webmasters covering your niche - ohsik
https://postbag.co/
======
orthecreedence
Some feedback: the signup process is difficult. I signed up, 32-char password,
but it doesn't have a special character, so I had to regen. Ok fine, whatever.
Then a captcha. At least it's not one of the ones that shows a new picture
each time you click so you're endlessly clicking buses or manhole covers for
45 seconds. But I get captcha, whatever.

Ok, so I sign up, and now I have to confirm my email. But...it's not a link I
can just click, it's a code. So I switch back to the postbag tab, log in
again, and it asks me for the code. I switch to email tab, copy the code,
switch back to the postbag tab, put in the code. All a bit obstuse, but ok
whatever...I'm done, right?

Nope, now I have to log in _again_ after my account is verified.

That said, this looks really interesting and I'm excited to try it out. Thanks
for posting!

~~~
systematical
Agreed, I didn't use a capitalized letter on the password and the sign up
failed. The error window appears outside of my viewport so I kept clicking the
button and almost bounced.

I would generally do a page refresh on signup/error, that would avoid this as
I'd know something happened rather than clicking submit 10 times. But that
style of web development is no longer cool, so...

\- I would smooth scroll the user up to where the error box is.

\- A red border around the input that failed.

~~~
sanjasarin
Hi all, I'm one of the makers of Postbag. I just saw this thread. We agree
with your comments about a bit convulted signup flow. Users already pointed
that out to us and we will fix it next week. Thanks for using Postbag :)

------
gnicholas
I did a search on the word dyslexia (my product is heavily used by people with
dyslexia), and most of the top results were based on articles that did not use
that word at all. They were more likely to be about autism, ADHD, or deafness.
In fact, out of the 234 results, the word "dyslexia" only appeared 4 times.

Unless there is something magic going on that I don't understand, this seems
like a pretty critical failing. I could do a google news search for "dyslexia"
and I would likely get more relevant results (albeit without the authors'
email addresses nicely formatted — I'd have to hunt that down on Twitter).

~~~
sanjasarin
Thanks for testing beta version of Postbag. We'll check that particular query
to see what went wrong.

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skilled
Aren't services like this one of the reasons that publishers gets dozens of
spam emails every day?

E.g. "I read your article [link] and thought this [link] would be a great
addition!"

I still get around 100 emails every month to a 6 year old address that I used
for publishing purposes.

~~~
sanjasarin
Thanks for checking out Postbag. As we have replied to the other user as well,
if you don't want to be included in the Postbag search, you can just email us
with a list of sites you want to exclude. Or, alternatively, by disallowing
PostbagBot in your site's robots.txt.

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dawnerd
How do I block my sites from appearing on your lists? I’m already spamming a
lot with product and movie pitches and last thing I want is even more.

~~~
postbag
We aren’t going to let you do that as that would defeat the benefit.

~~~
dawnerd
So you're going to willingly spam me despite someone else over there saying I
can block? Well now we definitely are going to have a problem.

~~~
sanjasarin
This postbag account posting here above is spam. I am the maker and as I said
you can just email us with a list of sites you want to exclude. Or,
alternatively, by disallowing PostbagBot in your site's robots.txt.

~~~
sanjasarin
Btw dawnerd, do you know how to flag a an account here? I tried and couldn't
find it. Someone obviously registered with postbag handle to troll about
Postbag as you've seen in the previous comment. I understand your frustration
when you read such a comment. Rest assured that we would never refuse to
exclude any site ever.

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victor9000
But I don't wanna sign up. This is competing with web search no? Because
that's the UX I have in mind when I'm looking for new content.

------
gnicholas
The buttons at the top are not super obvious, but there are no tooltips to
tell you what they are. So I clicked on several and got a sense of what most
do, but I didn't want to click the last one (which appears to be log out).
Please offer tooltips! (And consider icons that are easier to discern.)

~~~
sanjasarin
Multiple users pointed out the tooltip issue and we completely agree with you.
It's something we'll fix next week.

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chrismorgan
I tried two queries: “audiobook” and “rust programming language”.

“audiobook” produced passable results.

“rust programming language” produced 100% garbage: in its 167 Tier1 matches (I
didn’t look further) not one was in any way related to Rust or even to
programming; and only a few were related to languages. From the titles, most
matches were probably derived from the word “rust”, though not many past the
first dozen or so were _about_ rust in any way—it was more commonly “yeah, I
can imagine that rust might be mentioned once in that article”. The rest I
have _no_ idea where they came from, I can’t see how any of the keywords would
have matched.

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skmurphy
No pricing for a service that cannot remain free. This never ends well.

~~~
sanjasarin
We didn't publish pricing as we're in beta mode now. But it's no secret the
service will be paid, of course. It will be something in the under a hunded
per month range.

~~~
skmurphy
If it's no secret pick a price.

~~~
skmurphy
[https://postbag.co/pricing/](https://postbag.co/pricing/) is now up with
pricing. Freemium model with first paid tier at $99/month.

------
noizejoy
The discovery part might be interesting to compare to something like SparkToro
[0].

[0] [https://sparktoro.com/](https://sparktoro.com/)

------
Neff
Man.. From the title I was hoping this would be a way to find people doing
long form writing on niche topics.

For the site - Your primary color/white combo used for your CTAs and links
doesn't meet WCAG contrast ratios. You are running the risk of hindering users
by reducing their ability to read text.

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nyxtom
Great idea! Would love to see a pricing model implemented as this is something
I can see paying for.

~~~
sanjasarin
Thanks. As we replied to the other user as well, we didn't publish pricing as
we're in beta mode now. But it's no secret the service will be paid, of
course. It will be something in the under a hunded per month range.

------
samcrawford
I like the concept, and signed up to give it a try. I searched for "running
route builder", and after about 15 minutes it just showed "Error". I'm keen to
actually give it a try though if this can be corrected!

~~~
sanjasarin
Sorry about that. We've been dealing with a lot of traffic for the last two
days and some errors were happening due to high load. We're looking into
fixing these issues.

------
instaheat
My friend is an Investigative Journalist, I'll share the link with him! Great
idea.

~~~
sanjasarin
Thank you so much.

------
vishwa306
Great job with Postbag. However, the signup process can be vastly simplified.

Coming to the lists - it's a good start. I got a few decent leads for my
space. What would be great is info on their social handles, blogs, LinkedIn
etc.

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guiporto
I've got a "Can not load stored data from the server." message when I click to
open the generated list.

my user id: 67a13535-58a9-4d4a-b8bf-3dcd91b46e8f

I couldn't find any support channel in the app itself.

~~~
postbag
Please use contact@postbag.co to get in touch.

------
Spacemolte
It's not clear what the icons in the top does? Tooltips or simply buttons with
text when the screen is wide enough to support it would be great.

------
sanjasarin
Thanks for all the support during Postbag beta launch and all of your
suggestions! Interest was a lot greater than expected and we got over 800
users in 48 hours which was amazing. We described our experience at
[https://bit.ly/2BgxFC0](https://bit.ly/2BgxFC0)

------
newsbinator
> Your password must contain at least one character out of: ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & [
> ] . * |

------
apankrat
OK, gave it a try.

1\. Sign-up process has too many pointless hurdles.

If you have restrictions on the password format, mention them upfront rather
than revealing them one at a time after each failed attempt. Better yet, just
don't enforce any password restriction at all, until they decide to become a
paying customer or there's something else on a record worthy of protection.

Error reporting on the sign-up form is badly positioned. As others already
pointed out, it's just not visible because it ends up being above the page
edge.

Once signed up, the page shows the "log in" link. Click on that, enter email,
password, enter - it asks for confirmation, BUT again asks for email address.
Ok, retyped that, copied the confirmation code, enter - Yay, confirmed - now
log in afresh. This is as brain-dead flow as it gets. Instead, when trying to
log into an unconfirmed account it should just verify the password and ask for
a confirmation code. Enter that - get in.

This is however peanuts compared to...

2\. The quality of the results.

Here are first 10 items for a "file backups" query, the News section:

    
    
        Kanbox Looks To Become The Internet File System And Storage ...
        Another 74,000 file first-time unemployment claims in Illinois
        Forever 21 officially files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
        Another 108K Marylanders file for unemployment as virus spreads
        Intelsat files for bankruptcy protection
        Model Out of Work? Here's How to File for Unemployment
        Basketball referees, Section V file grievance over work conditions
      * Western Digital Proposes Zonefs File-System For Linux 5.6 
        How to delete your Dropbox account in 5 simple steps
        Apple Card Now Supports Exporting Transactions in OFX File Format
    

7 are _completely_ unrelated, 2 are just keyword match and 1 is roughly in the
right area, but still not useful.

The Blog/Web section is similarly way off:

    
    
        Coppermine: File Move Tutorial
        How to generate EBCIDC file include header and ...
        It looks like we don't support this file format. How to repair your photo?
        How to Make a File Upload Form in WordPress?
        How To Copy a File to the User's Current Profile using Powershell
        File Folder technique cards Video tutorial
        How to Import the SWMM 5 Report File as a Layer in infoSWMM
        How to Merge Mails to PDF File
        Best Free Online File Storage for Sharing Files on Blogs and Websites
        Monitoring Folders Files With SCOM OpsMgr How To Manage Devices
    

Not to point out the obvious, but this is not very good at all :-(

On the plus side, the JournoRequests part looks interesting, but I can't
readily judge if the results are relevant and actionable. That said, I don't
think Pitchbox had this back when we (fairly unsuccessfully) used it few years
ago.

~~~
sanjasarin
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We'll get someone to check what is
going on with that particular search query.

------
boffinism
What's a 'webmaster' these days?

------
eps
ohsik, how does PostBag compare to PitchBox, which has been doing literally
the exact same thing for a while now?

~~~
sanjasarin
Based on our testing the difference is in quality of matched contacts, number
of matched contacts and number of opportunities per search. Also, continuous
outreach with monthly web crawls is a feature we're especially proud of.

------
k__
How can I sign up as blogger?

------
l1ghthouse
How can I delete my account?

~~~
sanjasarin
You can email Postbag support. The email is on the contact page on the
website.

