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10k Bootstrap Challenge: Launch of hnalerts.com

38 points| TamDenholm | 13 years ago |hnalerts.com | reply

29 comments

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[+] robfitz|13 years ago|reply
And guess how I found out this had been posted here? ;) Thanks!
[+] TamDenholm|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] phenom|13 years ago|reply
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...

[+] mikkel|13 years ago|reply
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 :)

[+] duck|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] robfitz|13 years ago|reply
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

[+] modarts|13 years ago|reply
This is one of the coolest services i've seen on this site in quite some time. Thanks for sharing!
[+] prezjordan|13 years ago|reply
Wow, thanks for showing me this. This is a beautiful product.
[+] pumblechook|13 years ago|reply
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? :)
[+] lem72|13 years ago|reply
Can you use an email address instead of a phone number? I don't use a cell anymore.
[+] robfitz|13 years ago|reply
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!
[+] blantonl|13 years ago|reply
Great idea. Now, how do I unsubscribe or disable alerts in the future?
[+] robfitz|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] Killswitch|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] Alan01252|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] MiguelHudnandez|13 years ago|reply
Should "monopolise" be "monetize?" :)

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

[+] dovyski|13 years ago|reply
That's really cool! I've signed up and will hopefully wait for the sms message :D
[+] robfitz|13 years ago|reply
It's super fun when they arrive unexpectedly. Here's to hoping you don't have long to wait! ;)
[+] yashchandra|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] robfitz|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] GDH|13 years ago|reply

[deleted]

[+] sparknlaunch|13 years ago|reply
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?

[+] robfitz|13 years ago|reply
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