top | item 13021971

Show HN: A DigitalOcean-like support community for your website in 3 minutes

165 points| maliman | 9 years ago |haash.io | reply

97 comments

order
[+] samsolomon|9 years ago|reply
I'd suggest allowing people to signup via email.

Many people don't want to attach their social accounts to business functions.

[+] amdavidson|9 years ago|reply
Many people would not be permitted to attach their social accounts. My workplace requires that we associate our accounts strictly through things they will be able to access after employees leave (IE a company email address).
[+] gressquel|9 years ago|reply
yep, as soon as I saw facebook integration I quit.
[+] neom|9 years ago|reply
This is epic. As a former-digitaloceaner I know how much work went into building the community (the community director at DigitalOcean is incredibly good at her job) and how well it as served the business. If you have the ability and time to build a community around your product, I highly recommend it, brand evangelists are something you simply cannot buy.
[+] afarrell|9 years ago|reply
However, if you can pay people to write high-quality documentation, you can use money to attract brand evangelists.
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Thanks neom for the great feedback!
[+] _b8r0|9 years ago|reply
I like it. In fact I have a project in mind for which I might use it next year.

I think your pricing model might need a bit of work though. I think you're offering too much in the free tier (particularly given that I can run a free community with unlimited entries but have to pay $94/month for 50000 on the other plan), and pricing per registered community user might be worth looking into.

Other than that I'll definitely come back in the new year when I'm ready to give it a try.

[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Thank you, we'll definitely fine tune as we learn.
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
A DigitalOcean like support community for your website in 3 minutes Hi, Soufian from Haash here, i've always found DigitalOcean support community https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions smart and fascinating. A clever way to deliver support and manage knowledge. One of the reasons they came from nothing and became rapidly popular.

Haash is basically getting the same community support hosted space in few seconds. Just signup, create, tweak it to match your website feel and start using it.

Would be happy to answer any questions

[+] yalooze|9 years ago|reply
Small piece of feedback but I would increase the contrast of your fonts to make it a bit easier to read (it's far from the worst I've seen but if you compare it to the DO community you link to, theirs is easier to read).

Also, the home view eg. https://slack.haash.io/ feels quite wide and is hard to look across to see the 'Date' and 'Views' which are all the way to the right. When you click into a question eg. https://slack.haash.io/151/how-can-remove-files-that-deactiv... this width seems good and is easier to scan.

Overall I like the clean and simple approach. Very little noise to distract you which is nice.

[+] satysin|9 years ago|reply
Are you in any way associated with Dropbox? If not your site feels a little too familiar.
[+] mbenjaminsmith|9 years ago|reply
Would this be a viable replacement for a support / community forum? I'm a DO customer but never have questions so I'm not sure what their support setup looks like.
[+] martinald|9 years ago|reply
Nice idea, I like it. Not sure about the name at all. Sounds like marijuana distribution as as service :).
[+] atmosx|9 years ago|reply
Well that would be profitable from day one...
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Hahahah, Illegal Substances as a Service aka ISAS. It's a metaphor from Haashs on ruby, a collection of data :)
[+] freehunter|9 years ago|reply
How do you get marijuana from haash? I know the word "hash" in marijuana terms, but I associate the word more with hashing a password (or maybe hash browns) than with drugs.
[+] akuji1993|9 years ago|reply
I second thinking about the name, again.
[+] abreu|9 years ago|reply
Always start with email signup first. Not the other way around. You just lost a ton of potential beta-testers and users on your HN moment.
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Got it, We though Twitter & Facebook are a good way to get people easily onboarded and their details filled in effortlessly.

PS: For those afraid of any privacy issues, the permissions are very basic, we do only get your email, avatar and short bio.

[+] akuji1993|9 years ago|reply
The UI of your site needs to be a little reworked. I don't want to click on every single FAQ question and get taken to another site, for example. Also, being able to only login with FB or Twitter is not acceptable. There absolutely need to be free accounts, as well as Google Account Logins.

A nice idea, needs some remodel and some smoothing out edges.

[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Thank you feedback noted. We'll add email login and fine tune the UI soon
[+] marktangotango|9 years ago|reply
Is there a 'whitelabel' capability with this service? Ie, could I point community.mysite.com at your servers with a cname record? Does anyone else care about this?
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Yes you can use your own domain name with a CNAME. Email me at malih.soufian at gmail.com once you create your Haash and we'll make the config for you
[+] i__believe|9 years ago|reply
One thing you may consider is having private or invite only communities. Almost all the offerings out there are for public communities, which leaves in house self help an untapped market.
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Yes that's a good way to go to. Although you might hack Haash right now to not show questions and answers to the public, we might consider a sophisticated version of that.
[+] _puk|9 years ago|reply
Tried to read the terms and conditions.. got an error [0]

Whilst you are there, the terms and conditions aren't obviously clickable.

Also, would love to be able to sign up with email, but only get Facebook / Twitter auth options. Ironically the tab is titled "Log in with email | Haash"

That aside, I can see this being useful, really like the setup.

0: https://s12.postimg.org/z1cuq8lzh/Screenshot_2016_11_23_14_3...

[+] _puk|9 years ago|reply
Same error on haash creation terms too.
[+] smoyer|9 years ago|reply
To create an account, you have to agree to the terms of service:

"By signing up you indicate that you have read and agree to the Terms of the service"

Being a conscientious user, I click through to read what I'm agreeing to and find:

"You do not have permission to perform this operation"

IANAL but I'm pretty sure this won't be legally binding.

[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Sorry about that, it seems like we misspelled the link
[+] scosman|9 years ago|reply
$5 a month for the FAQ product? Charge waaaaay more for a product targeted at businesses.
[+] mrwebmaster|9 years ago|reply
I'm using http://www.question2answer.org/ , how does it compares to it?

Q2A doesn't have: - instant search - Intercom integration - Single Sign-on

[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
In addition One-click setup, Realtime notification, Custom URLs FAQs Tutorials management

And other cool stuff we'll be shipping soon

[+] kowdermeister|9 years ago|reply
I don't get this. Is this different than installing a modern OS forum engine?
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
It's a Q&A which is different from a forum, i will quote Adam Lear [1] from this answer [2] on Stackoverfolw to point out the differences(Stackoverflow being a Q&A)

[quote]

Stack Overflow is not a forum. Forums are largely discussion-based and tend to follow less strict rules about what posts can be like.

On Stack Overflow (and Stack Exchange in general), we require every new thread to be started with a question and every response to that question to be an attempt at answering it.

For example, on a forum you might ask how to run a game in windowed mode. You will get several responses, some of which will be nothing but "oh, I love that game!" or "I haven't played that in a while, wow." You'll be lucky if you get a relevant response. By contrast, on Stack Exchange you'd get practical responses that are 100% relevant to your question.

[end quote]

This model (meaning the Q&A) has been proven to be extremely efficient in managing community driven support. DigitalOcean community https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions is one successful example.

Alongside with the Q&A, DigitalOcean introduced Tutorials crowdsourcing which also proved to be a smart and cost efficient vector of educating customers and sharing knowledge.

What Haash does is letting you create a similar support infrastructure at very low price and in just 3 minutes.

[1] http://meta.stackexchange.com/users/155160/adam-lear [2] http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/92107/is-stack-overf...

[+] adim86|9 years ago|reply
I love the branding on this product, very light and fun, also friendly and catchy. It reminds me of dropbox. Great work, maybe when you make some money you can get a good logo to go with it. Good stuff!
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Awesome, glad you liked the design
[+] lai|9 years ago|reply
Cool idea but I would highly suggest that you fix all the misspelled words.
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Ok we'll so sorry about that
[+] onion2k|9 years ago|reply
Isn't the good thing about community support the people who help rather than the tool that's used to run it? You can't build a community of helpful, interested people in 3 minutes.
[+] michaelbuckbee|9 years ago|reply
Yes, but tools matter.

Seems like a great service to help guide users into helping one another (at least more so than just having a separate support email and maybe a knowledge base).

[+] corobo|9 years ago|reply
Call it a lack of coffee but I also clicked out of intrigue as to how they were going to slot your site into a community of willing volunteers.
[+] poorman|9 years ago|reply
Not sure what's up with the A/B testing though. Plus pricing seems to change between a slider starting at $29/mo and a flat $5/mo fee.
[+] maliman|9 years ago|reply
Oups! sorry about that. Alongside with the support community, we have a FAQs module. The two makes a smart help center (FAQs and community). You ended up on the main help center landing page where there are two pricing schemes . One if you use only FAQs $5/mo and the other if you use both (FAQs and community) starting at $29/mo.