Some feedback from someone who is also working on a subscription service based on cloud computing magic:
- Realistically, charging $20 - $40 a month means you'll need a lot of customers to signup to make anything significant in revenue.
- Acquiring new customers might be difficult for this type of service because direct sales would be too costly to make a profit. You would definitely need to run ads to gain a large customer base.
- If you run ads you'd have to position it as an up-time monitoring service since the volume around searches for automated headless browser testing solutions isn't going to be high. The cost of acquisition through marketing will be pricey especially since you offer a free plan that offers what most people would need.
- The Chrome extension is super cool and very impressive, but I think the average small business owner might be intimidated by all the javascripty things you throw at them on the landing page. A good tagline might be along the lines of "Know when something breaks on your site"
- You will spend a lot of time answering support emails.
- I can see this service really taking off if you find a way to bundle it with an eCommerce shopping cart. Maybe create a Magento plugin or Shopify app?
Sorry, not yet, but I will. I got you bookmarked because I noticed the brouhaha earlier with that other search site. It sounds interesting, though.
It's been almost an hour and you only have my 1 upvote, so to be honest your submission really doesn't look like it's going anywhere.
I'd resubmit tomorrow at around 7:30 to 8:30am EST, and I'd do it as a "Show HN: A Search Engine for Developers, Marketers, Web Designers, and Hackers", but don't put put your url in the "url" field - put it in the "text" box, along with your "Hey HackerNews!..." copy. Posts submitted that way will be much more likely to get upvotes, and you'll linger in the "Ask" section (see the link at the top nav. bar) for about a week or so.
Update: I was recommending that you kill this submission, but scratch that. You're on the home page now, so maybe it'll take off. If not, just resubmit next week the way I mention above.
Whoops, ignore my comment to delete this submission. You're at 5 points and on the home page. If you don't get any more pickup than this, consider resubmitting next week the way I recommended.
The layouts don't really look anything alike and I think they may be using an off-the-shelf theme for their landing page. Also their site works... have you launched yet?
I apologize for my previous comment, I was reacting out of anger.
This is the page they copied http://nerdydata.com/home2.php. It was our wait list for the last 2 months while we developed our site, which now has a new homepage we put up last week. http://nerdydata.com
But no hard feelings, maybe you had the idea independently and happened to use the same exact theme and messaging.
Do any SEOs put thought into the internal linking structure of their sites?
It would seem that, because PageRank is divided amongst the number of links on a page, that a page with fewer links is more effective at passing link juice then a page with many links.
