Tell HN: Meet Cloudomatic, an easy way to discover SaaS apps. (StartupWeekend)

[sachinag]

This is beautiful and navigable. Well done. A few product suggestions:

* Accounting is really important; Meetings less so. Think about your main headers. * Make it clearer what the order is you're listing the apps: alphabetical, by rating, newest, etc. and let users toggle between them * Have curated lists of apps for various startups and small businesses: freelancers, web apps, consulting firms, bakeries, dentists, etc. * Have "you might also like" or "consider these" apps on any particular app's page

[jasonlbaptiste]

Myself, Andres(cofounder grooveshark), and many others made it as part of startup weekend here in Miami, so its a very very rough first version. The startups listed are there due to the generosity of everyone on HN yesterday, so thank you thank you thank you. We're planning some pretty cool things to make discovery better for end users and most importantly solve a big problem I used to have: improve customer acquisition for SaaS startups. Looking forward to feedback, which we'll implement over the next week.

ps- another thank you to the people that have been pushing me to get off my ass and do this since I brought it up here on HN last August.

[kirse]

Interesting how a similar service just announced their launch a day earlier on HN also:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1207187

Looks like we have ourselves a nice little competition!

[petercooper]

http://www.kingapi.com/ for anyone who wants to go direct.

[kneath]

I'm curious, how does this differentiate from the armies of spam directory sites that already exist to game search engines?

[ochiba]

I guess we have to look at the vision for this project:

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/misc/my-next-startup/ (see #6)

which is to become the defacto platform for SaaS application marketing and distribution, including a billing system (partnering with a company in this space like Braintree or Aria Systems might work well?) and [I'm guessing] sharing data, single sign-on across applications (NEC ApplicationsNet does some of this: http://www.applicationsnet.com/)

Congratulations on pursuing this idea, Jason. I've been watching this space eagerly since your excellent discussion and subsequent post on "disruption and my next startup"

[jasonlbaptiste]

Will update this answer in 30 minutes, but this is the equivalent of what could be done in ~48 hours with a much larger long term vision. What we're launching next weekend as the second part will give a very good insight into that vision. HTH.

[stretchwithme]

Cloudomatic looks great.

startup weekend with multiple teams seems so much better and more productive than the original version, which was simply chaos the first time in sf. there were literally dozens of developers all going their own way and one thing produced was absolute crap implementation of a crap idea

Turns out the democratic process fails when creating useful applications.

[puns]

Looks good. One problem: it was very difficult to actually find a link to each app's website. The little "Go to app" doesn't even look like a link. I suggest making the site link much more prominent, underlined, and perhaps use the URL of the site to make it even easier to see.

[jasonlbaptiste]

I agree. We were playing with different styles earlier. It's in the to-do list on basecamp, but I'm not sure where it is on the queue (ie- next hour or next day).

[swombat]

Wait, BitBucket is on there but Github isn't?

.......

[jasonlbaptiste]

thou ask and thou shall receive: http://cloudomatic.com/collaboration/github/

(stupid oversight on my part. there's a LOT more for us to add. we tried focusing on the obscure over the obvious fan favorites for day 0)

[officemedium]

SUBMISSIONS DON'T WORK: =======

This webpage has a redirect loop.

The webpage at http://socialatomgroup.wufoo.com/embed/m7x3k1/def/embedKey=m... has resulted in too many redirects. Clearing your cookies for this site or allowing third-party cookies may fix the problem. If not, it is possibly a server configuration issue and not a problem with your computer.

[jasonlbaptiste]

hmm, works for me. when does it redirect upon load OR upon clicking submit? browser details?

[torrenegra]

Congratulations. Very impressive work keeping in mind it was developed over just one weekend. How did you populate the site in such a short time?

How are you planning on getting business owners or managers to use your site? I am a business owner myself, and I don't see why I would like to go to your site other than to read reviews of the applications.

[antony31]

Your site is vulnerable to XSS attacks.

http://cloudomatic.com/?s=<script>alert(1);</scr...;

(Tested on Firefox 3.6)

Please fix it.

[oneplusone]

The categories right now is very limited. You should add the option for people to enter a new category when they submit their app.

[jasonlbaptiste]

Trying to figure out the balance between categories and tags. If you get too many categories then they themselves become sparse. Any specific example? I agree with you as a whole, we do need to add some more categories. WE might change the submit from a dropdown to a just plain text field. We can categorize there after.

[lambdom]

Suggestion: I would make the "Go to app" link bigger because it took me some time to find a way to access the app I wanted.

[ACorp]

Great work Andres and the team. Did you built all of the webapp during one weekend?

[andreshb]

Thanks Alejandro, we built it over the span of 54 hours