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Show HN: Taurus.io - Create a product tour for your web app in 15 minutes

87 points| ebzlo | 13 years ago |taurus.io

55 comments

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[+] therealarmen|13 years ago|reply
Cool product! Congrats on launching. I can think of several companies off the top of my head who should implement this yesterday. But I have to take issue with the price point. $3 a month? If you're doing it for fun, make it free. Otherwise, the price should be 10x if not 100x your current rate. Trust me, if someone is going to go through the effort of setting up your product, they'll be willing to pay more than $3 a month. At that price point you'd need 1,000 customers just to be ramen profitable!
[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
Thanks!

The problem with being 10x or 100x the current rate is that we can't actually justify that cost for the value we provide. When we set the price point, we basically asked ourselves how much we'd actually pay for the same thing.

[+] hendi_|13 years ago|reply
Great idea! But 3$ is really way to cheap, even at the current 9$/month I'd just have signed up without thinking twice! Why? Because I know how much value a tour provides my app/my revenue!

I already have a simple tour in Bunker App but it is really a PITA so I've postponed doing improvements to it. I have hopes that your software helps me, and if it does, it's totally worth some money for me!

I've just signed up for your mailing list, I hope I'll get into beta to test it soon. My app is a JS-heavy, single HTML page app so I'm curious to see how Taurus works with my app.

[+] redguava|13 years ago|reply
$9/month at the cheapest.
[+] kposehn|13 years ago|reply
Ok, so a lot of people are commenting you are charging too little and your general reply was you felt you didn't deliver the value to justify a higher price.

In that case, I think you need to search for value. What can you do to make a higher price worthwhile?

Here are my thoughts:

- Analytics! What are people viewing? Plug it in and tell me what is working and getting mouse time or clicks (or conversions)

- Split testing! I'd love to test out two tours to see which converts better.

You could make the current version free, to a certain point of traffic and make all the new features points of value to charge a better price.

[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
Split testing sounds like a really neat idea! We'll talk about working that in later down the line. :)
[+] eranation|13 years ago|reply
Feature request that will make this much more valuable - relative adjustment, if you can create a tooltip that will stay near a selector (regardless of browser resizes) and will be responsive (e.g. size and font will adapt based on size) then you'll have something worth not 3$ but 30$ a month easily.

I like that you demo the usage of the tool rather than the end result, but for some people it might be too cumbersome, at least make the demo login automatic

By the way, a solution to both issues - use your own product to tour your own product.

[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
This was originally in our plan for beta launch, but we yanked it to get something out faster. It's definitely in the pipeline. :)
[+] davidtyleryork|13 years ago|reply
Looks like Kera.io, great project. I'd love to hear how you guys differ btw :)
[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
This is pretty cool. We're less intensive than this, but we try to make the whole product tour setup very WYSIWYG. From what I saw, they do a neat job of delivery the full product-tour-package, but at the cost of engineering effort.
[+] Jarshwah|13 years ago|reply
Looks really great, congratulations.

A few things I picked up on though:

1. Couldn't toggle Absolute/Relative after I had placed a tooltip.

2. If you position your tooltip then click the "Display Next Button", the arrow moves, but the positioning stays the same (with a side arrow). Just a UI bug.

3. Instructions on the syntax to use for javascript event field.

4. Binding to an element would be nice.

5. Having the "Next" button move on to the next tooltip, hiding the old, and displaying the next. I think I'd like to use that flow rather than seeing all the tips at once.

[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
Thanks! We'll look into those issues; additionally, we'll be adding a bind to element feature in the future.
[+] knes|13 years ago|reply
what's the different with using Bootstrap tour ( https://github.com/sorich87/bootstrap-tour ) or Joyride ( http://www.zurb.com/playground/jquery-joyride-feature-tour-p... ) for example?
[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
When we worked on a previous project, bootstrap was something we based our product tour off. Joyride, similarly, accomplishes the same deal with a little more fluff. However, there were a few things that were tedious.

- Keeping track of who has seen what tooltip, when they should show up, backend type stuff.

- When things moved around, layouts modified slightly, they were a pain to update. Granted it wasn't always the case, but it was enough that we decided we ought to build a front end to handle it. And thus, Taurus was born.

We realized that while engineering the product tour isn't hard, it takes time to make and maintain, and that we could help solve that.

[+] vineet|13 years ago|reply
Looks cool. I think I would find it more useful if I could see a demo (not of the authoring, but of the result).
[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
Thanks! If you create some tooltips on the page and refresh the page, you kind of get a feel of what it would be like for a visitor (though "Hide" won't permanently hide the tooltips in that state).
[+] gokhan|13 years ago|reply
I signed up to be notified. But... Please include a quick summary of the app in the notification mail to make us remember what it was, when the time comes.
[+] nedwin|13 years ago|reply
Beautiful site. Have seen a few of these on HN but your implementation looks the best so far. We need this - looking forward to launch.
[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
Thanks for the kind words. :)
[+] rchiba|13 years ago|reply
This would certainly be useful for a lot of the other Show HN's. Can't wait to see this in production.
[+] jordanthoms|13 years ago|reply
Keen to get this setup, we need a product tour but didn't have a good way of building it quickly.
[+] donebizkit|13 years ago|reply
It's not working for me. It just says [object Object] Firefox 16.0.1 on MAC OS X
[+] ebzlo|13 years ago|reply
Ah shoot. Haven't heavily tested outside of Chrome. I'll check it out, thanks!

Edit: Fixed the issue. Looks like just a small problem with the bookmarklet. Pushing it up now. :)

[+] CT100|13 years ago|reply
I think the product is pretty cool. I also really like the design of the site.
[+] TheMakeA|13 years ago|reply
This looks pretty sweet. Good job.