

10k Bootstrap Challenge: Launch of hnalerts.com - TamDenholm
http://hnalerts.com/

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robfitz
And guess how I found out this had been posted here? ;) Thanks!

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TamDenholm
I figured you'd notice that, been following your blog since i saw you started,
figured you'd be happy to see a text altering you that it was submitted. :)
Carry on, you're doing awesome.

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phenom
Painting is called Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mehmed IV of
the Ottoman Empire, by the way [0]...

Original reply was: Thou art a turkish imp, the damned devil's brother and
friend, and a secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight art
thou that cannot slay a hedgehog with your naked ass? The devil shits, and
your army eats. Thou son of a bitch wilt not ever make subjects of Christian
sons; we have no fear of your army, by land and by sea we will battle with
thee, fuck thy mother. )))

[0]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossacks)

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mikkel
This is a really cool concept - all the social monitoring tools I've seen
focus on social networks (fb, twitter, that sort of stuff), which is great for
some companies with an existing fanbase - not so much for startups.

I've signed up :)

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duck
It is nice to know when your site hits HN, but for me <http://ifttt.com/>
works fine in addition to doing a lot more.

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robfitz
ifttt is pretty much my favourite service at the moment. It saves me hours a
day and everyone should use it!

edit: Well, let's say it saves me _hour_ per day. Hours plural is probably
stretching it

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lem72
Can I ask how it is saving you hours per day... I like the idea, I just can't
think of cool ways to use it.

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robfitz
For example, I do a little video blog where I film a 1 minute video about my
startup progress most days[1]

I make the video on socialcam, which sends it to youtube. ifttt then picks up
the youtube video once it's uploaded and turns it into a wordpress post, then
picks up the wordpress post and tweets about it. It turns a 5-step process
(full of annoying upload delays) into a 1-step process with no delays.

I haven't found any consumption use cases for it, but I love it for tying
together all the places I create stuff at.

[1] <http://bootstrapchallenge.com>

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lem72
Wow very cool - I had no idea. Thanks for the reply :)

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pumblechook
Just wanted to say that this is a terrific project (and experiment).
Inspirational for those of us who need a kick in the ass to shut up and get to
work on that MVP. Maybe the next product is a $10k bootstrap challenge
everyone can take? :)

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lem72
Can you use an email address instead of a phone number? I don't use a cell
anymore.

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robfitz
Enough people have asked about it that I'll add it asap -- I only check my
email about once a day so it didn't even occur to me as a relevant use case!

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yashchandra
also FYI. Most people in the US do not have free SMS/text messaging plans like
other countries. Text messaging is unfortunately expensive here. That is
another reason to add email which is readily available these days with
smartphones. I know it is weird but most carriers in US charge you extra on
top of minutes and data plan.

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blantonl
Great idea. Now, how do I unsubscribe or disable alerts in the future?

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robfitz
If you reply to the text message, it will cancel all alerts going to that
number.

So if you are signed up to get alerts on 3 domains and only want to cancel
one, you'll have to send one unsubscribe (which will cancel all 3) and then
re-add the ones you still want to be active.

Not ideal in that edge case, I know, but I wanted to make sure unsubscribing
was easy in case someone got cheeky and starting signing other people up.

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Killswitch
Nice work, I had this idea a while ago and actually owned (not sure if expired
right now or still in my posession) hnalerts.com to do the same thing.

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Alan01252
How much is just hosting this service costing you? I can't see any method of
payment, do you have plans to monetize it?

Great MVP by the way.

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MiguelHudnandez
Should "monopolise" be "monetize?" :)

I suppose we should all dream big, though...

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Alan01252
Yes, yes it should. ;) thanks!

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dovyski
That's really cool! I've signed up and will hopefully wait for the sms message
:D

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robfitz
It's super fun when they arrive unexpectedly. Here's to hoping you don't have
long to wait! ;)

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yashchandra
I checked it out. If you input is not good (for example, I entered letters in
the phone number field), it breaks the app and exposes the entire Django
stacktrace since it seems ilke DEBUG is set to True. I guess this is a small
side project of course but thought to point it out.

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robfitz
Right you are. Glad I had the thing hooked up to notify me about this
potential trainwreck! Big thanks for the heads up.

It's fixed & off debug mode now. It will fail silently, which still isn't
exactly ideal, but at least it doesn't reveal its innards any more. Thanks
again.

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yashchandra
no problem. Are you using Django form validation ? It should take care of this
then.

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sparknlaunch
Looks good.

How does it work? What tool is being used to send the text message? And why
text message over email or other online notification?

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robfitz
It's just twilio for texts plus django and a cronjob. Text messages are the
use case I wanted most for myself, so I just did that first. I'll add
email/twitter/etc if the simple version gets a good enough response to warrant
it

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hiddenfeatures
Yeah, email would be cool for a lot of international "customers" as text
messaging doesn't work in a bunch of European countries with twilio.

